Ken Stewart

Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Stewart is an internationally recognized expert on advanced mobile communications systems, media systems and artificial intelligence. He is currently President of Thistle Cybernetics LLC, an engineering innovation and consulting company partnering with corporate R&D, venture capital and intellectual property organizations.During an industry career spanning more than 30 years, Stewart has been a fundamental driver of innovation and industry research and development of air interface, radio access and core network design for mobile wireless systems. Dr. Stewart’s contributions to mobile communications have ranged from 2G to 5G, from GSM to 4G LTE-Advanced and 5G NR, and from edge system engineering to machine learning and artificial intelligence for communications. At Motorola, Dr. Stewart played a fundamental role in the conceptualization and design of 3G WCDMA and 4G LTE. At Intel, as Senior Fellow, Dr. Stewart led the technical definition of 5G NR concept, trial and prototype system-on-chip and transceiver architectures. He has conceived and designed multiple experimental and commercial designs for next-generation mobile systems and has created and led teams to execute network and mobile device designs for those systems. Over time, he has progressed from discrete DSP implementations to full ASIC SoC designs for baseband processors and wideband RF transceiver solutions executed on contemporary process nodes for 5G NR. Most recently, Dr. Stewart has driven innovation at the intersection of 5G, advanced media and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Stewart joined Intel after serving as CTO and CEO for TE Connectivity’s wireless division, where he was responsible for innovation and product development for advanced small cell and digital optical distributed antenna systems, including wavelength division multiplexed fiber distributed radio access networks. Prior to that, Stewart was Vice President of Standards and Research and Fellow at Motorola, where he was responsible for international standards and research work in areas ranging from radio access networks, through multimedia systems to mobile applications and services. Stewart held the position of Motorola Dan Noble Fellow and served on Motorola’s Science Advisory Board.

Dr. Stewart holds more than 100 issued patents, with multiple patents pending. He is a graduate of the Institute for Communications and Signal Processing at the University of Strathclyde, where he has served as Visiting Professor.