Light Reading's Upskill University Adds AT&T as Curriculum Advisor

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jul 26, 2016) - Today, Light Reading's Upskill University, a free online forum that focuses on delivering must-have education on the overall business transformation occurring in the telecommunications industry, welcomed AT&T's Chris Rice, Vice President, Advanced Technologies& Architecture, AT&T Labs, as a Curriculum Advisor. In this role, Rice provides Upskill University editors with insight into and guidance on the educational needs of leading global service providers as they move to upskill their workforce during this time of intense industry change.

Upskill U is a unique online community hosted by Light Reading in association with Cisco Systems Inc., where service provider and enterprise decision-makers can crowdsource the mission-critical intelligence they need to formulate business technology strategies and gain the know-how required to architect and monetize next-generation, all-IP networks.

Each Upskill U course is a free 45-minute session where students can ask questions, interact with other students with similar business and technological challenges and expertise and download a wealth of additional learning materials. Courses are archived, and online educational discussions take place 24 hours a day.

"Retraining, educating and upskilling are vital to staying ahead of the latest technology changes happening in the communications industry," said Chris Rice. "I'm looking forward to sharing my knowledge and experiences with the Upskill U team so they can continue to generate exciting and useful content for the Upskill U student body.

"We welcome Rice as a Curriculum Advisor to Upskill U and are excited to work with him to plan our upcoming Upskill U courses," said Stephen Saunders, Founder and CEO, Light Reading. "Already, thousands of Upskill U students have benefitted from the essential knowledge provided by our lecturers from leading service providers, analyst firms and academic institutions. By working with Rice, our team of university editors will be able to tap into his insight and help shape Upskill U's content and direction so that it's relevant across the industry and beyond."

Currently, Rice leads the research and advanced development for a software-defined network. He oversees advancements in networking and IP network management; network virtualization; big data; speech and multimedia technologies; information systems and visualization; algorithms and optimization; and scalable, reliable software systems.

Previously, he was responsible for platform and services incubation where his areas of research included broadband wireless network architectures, IMS service platforms research, network performance and measurement research, application management research and New IP services research. He has helped successfully launch three services into the marketplace based on his team's research. Chris has more than 30 patents in his name, and in 2005, he received the AT&T Distinguished Scientist Award.

Weekly Upskill U courses highlight some of the biggest names in the industry. Register for our upcoming courses on video, data center transformation, open source and more and upskill yourself today.

For the complete Upskill U schedule, visit our website: www.lightreading.com/upskillu.

About Light Reading
Light Reading (www.lightreading.com) combines its research-led online communities and targeted events portfolio to help those in the global communications industry make informed decisions. Lightreading.com is the ultimate source for telecom analysis for more than 400,000 subscribers each month, leading the media sector in terms of traffic, content and reputation. Light Reading produces targeted communications events and focused one-day conferences each year for cable, mobile and wireline executives across five continents.