Professor Ran Giladi received a B.A. in physics and an M.Sc. in biomedical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and a LL.B. in law and a Ph.D. in information systems from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He founded and then headed the Department of Communication Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Ran also taught at the Business School and at the Electrical Engineering Department of Tel-Aviv University, and at the Communications and Networking Department in Aalto University. He is the author of a book entitled"Network Processors: Architecture, Programming, and Implementation" published by Morgan Kaufmann (Elsevier) in 2008. Ran founded the Israeli Consortia for research on network management systems (NMS) and served as the Chairman of the Consortia Board of Directors. He also founded several startups, headed them, and served as a director and chairman in some of these companies, some of them became public companies (TASE and NASDAQ). Ran is a Venture Partner with TFV II, DFJ-TF III, and TLVPartners, and in his free time he is a pilot and a skipper.

Following several decades of academic and industrial experience in Computer related Science and Engineering, a top-down perspective of interdisciplinary engineering programs is presented, with an emphasis on Communication Systems Engineering. Various stakeholders' criteria for the program evaluation are presented, and questions regarding the yield and future of such programs are discussed. The key question in this discussion is whether Communication System Engineering, or other interdisciplinary computer related programs for this matter, are "horizontal" or "vertical", professions or specializations. Some insights of how to improve these interdisciplinary programs are offered.