Tim Berners-Lee is a graduate of Oxford University, England, and now holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential.

With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first version of HTML, as well as the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

Dr. Richard A. DeMillo is vice president and chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard Company. He is responsible for chairing HP's Technology Council, which consists of the vice president of research, the chief science officer and the chief technology officers of HP's printing and imaging and computing systems businesses. The Technology Council sets the company's technology agenda, evaluates technology standards initiatives, allocates technical resources, coordinates cross-company architecture strategies and platforms, and conducts periodic technology audits. In addition, DeMillo is helping HP build a world-class software business based on next-generation Internet technologies, e-services, open standards and architectures. abstract...  more...

Ian Foster is the Associate Division Director, Senior Scientist, and Head of the Distributed Systems Lab, Mathematics & Computer Science, Argonne National Laboratory, and is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Foster leads computer science projects developing advanced distributed computing technologies and parallel tools, and computational science efforts applying advanced computing techniques to scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling and the analysis of data from physics experiments.

Foster is a leader and innovator in Grid computing: the Globus and GriPhyN projects that he co-leads provide technologies that are at the heart of major e-science projects worldwide, and that are increasingly seeing adoption in industry. The book "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure" that he co-edited with Carl Kesselman has helped shape this field. more...

Pamela Samuelson is a McArthur Prize Winner and an international expert on Intellectual Property in the Information Age, and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management & Systems as well as in the School of Law where she is a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law and is an advisor for the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Samuelson has received accolades such as the University of Hawaii's distinguished alumni award, has been named one of the nation's 50 most influential lawyers, one of the 100 most influential people in the digital age, and one of the 25 most intriguing minds of the new economy. abstract...  more....

Dr. Alfred Z. Spector is vice president of Services and Software at IBM Research responsible for setting IBM's worldwide services and software research strategy. For the year ending August 2000, Dr. Spector was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's Computer Science Department and Senior Technical Strategist in IBM's Application and Integration Middleware (AIM) business, which has responsibility for a number of IBM software product families including CICS, WebSphere, MQSeries, and Visual Age.

Previously, Dr. Spector was the general manager of Marketing and Strategy for IBM's AIM business, and the general manager of IBM's Transaction Systems business. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Spector received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. abstract...