Keynote
Bilal Riaz
Senior Director of Product Line Management and Head of Interconnect Strategy, Ciena
Title: The Future of AI Interconnects: Open Approaches to High‑Performance AI Infrastructure
Abstract: As AI training and inference workloads continue to expand in both scale and complexity, the traditional definitions of scale‑up, scale‑out, and scale‑across architectures are increasingly blurring. Modern “scale‑across” approaches distribute high‑capacity computation across multiple sites, intensifying familiar interconnect challenges such as jitter, burstiness, congestion, and long‑tail latency. At the same time, the historical segmentation between IMDD and coherent optics is blending - mirroring the way electrical‑versus‑optical boundaries are disappearing within the rack itself. As AI workloads push unprecedented compute density and interconnect bandwidth, existing scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across architectures are all evolving to meet new performance and connectivity demands. This talk will explore how technologies across these various scaling domains are converging to meet the evolving needs of next‑generation customer applications.
Biography:
Bilal Riaz is Senior Director of Product Line Management at Ciena. With a strong focus on driving innovation in the field of high-speed connectivity, Bilal is responsible for leading the development of next-generation optical modems, including pluggables.
With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, Bilal's role allows him to be at the forefront of the rapidly evolving landscape of high-bandwidth electro-optics and packaging technologies. His extensive experience and deep understanding of the industry contribute to Ciena's position as a global leader in high-speed connectivity.
Prior to his current position, Bilal spent nearly 15 years within Ciena’s Digital Signal Processing and NPI organizations, where he was instrumental in architecting multiple generations of coherent ASICs. He also led the NPI Optical Team, directing the development and deployment of high‑volume manufacturing test processes across successive coherent technology platforms.
Bilal holds Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees in Electrical Engineering from McGill University.