Boualem Benatallah is professor in the School of Computer Science (CSE), University of New South Wales (UNSW, Sydney, Australia). His main research interests are developing fundamental concepts and techniques in Web service composition and engineering. He has published more than 130 refereed papers including 33 journal papers. Most of his papers appeared in very selective and reputable conferences and journals. He is frequently invited to give keynote talks and tutorials on service computing in international conferences. Boualem has been PC chair of three main international conferences (BPM'05, ICSOC'05, WISE'07). He is the general chair of ICSOC'08 to be held in Sydney. He has acted as a key official (tutorial chair, workshops chair, publication chair, area chair) for several international conferences. He has been guest editor of five special issues for reputable international journals including ACM TOIT. He has been a PC member of all the reputable international conferences including VLDB, ICDE, WWW, EDBT, MDM, ICSOC, ICWS and ER. He is member of the steering committee of BPM and ICSOC. He is on the editorial board of numerous international journals. He was visiting Professor at INRIA-LORIA, Claude Bernard University (France), University of Blaise Pascal (Clermont Ferrand, France), University of Trento (Italy, 2007). As chair of the CSE research committee, he was member of the team (comprising multiple university, government and industry partners) that constructed the successful bid for the new Smart Services CRC, which was awarded $30m in federal funding in 2007.

Christophe Cérin is currently a Full Time Professor of Computer Science at the University of Paris 13, France where he leads the Grid Systems Group. His current research interests are in grid computing, distributed systems, high performance computing (multicore machines and multi-treaded libraries), resource management, reliability. He works primarily at the boundary between scheduling and middleware. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Paris 11, Orsay in 1992, his "habilatation à diriger des recherches" in 2002 with the university of Paris 6, all in computer science. He is a member of the IEEE and he recently managed the french national ANR SafeScale project with the Universities of Grenoble, Rennes and Brest. He is also acting as an international expert for evaluating bi-national projects for the count of the french Ministery of Foreign Office.

Thomas Hofmann received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at MIT and at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute. From 1999 until 2004 he was Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Between 2004 and 2006, he held a position as a Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, while also serving as the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems. He is also co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Recommind Inc, a privately owned company focusing on enterprise search. Since July 2006, Thomas is a Director of Engineering at Google and one of the site leads of Google's engineering center in Zurich, Switzerland. His scientific interests are in machine learning, information retrieval, and computer vision.

Michael P. Papazoglou is a full Professor at Tilburg University where he is the Director of the European Research Institute in Service Science and the Scientific Director of the European Network of Excellence in Software Services and Systems (S-Cube). He is also an honorary professor at the University of Trento in Italy, and professorial fellow at the Universities Lyon 1 (France), Univ. of New South Wales (Australia) and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid (Spain). Prior to this he was full Professor and head of School of Information Systems at the Queensland Univ. of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia (1991-1996).

His research interests lie in the areas of service oriented computing, Web services, large scale data sharing, business processes, and federated and distributed information systems. He made pioneering contributions in these areas. He is one of the most cited researchers and internationally recognized for his research contributions in the area of service oriented computing with well over 3,000 references for his work. He has published 5 books and 5 monographs/edited books. He has also edited 11 major international conference proceedings, and well over 150 journal and conference papers. Most of his papers appeared in very selective and reputable conferences and journals.

He is the co-editor-in-charge of the new Springer-Verlag series in Services Science and the MIT Press series on Information Systems and serves-(ed) on the board of nine scientific journals. He has served as Program Chair of several high profile international conferences. His research was/is funded by the European Commission, the Australian Research Council, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and Departments of Science and Technology in Europe and Australia. He is frequently invited to give keynote talks and tutorials on service oriented computing in international conferences. He is a golden core member and a distinguished visitor of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Science section.
 

Stefan Tai is Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Director at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology (Forschungszentrum Informatik, FZI), Germany. Stefan leads the research group "eOrganization" (www.eOrganization.de), which is affiliated with the Applied Informatics Institute AIFB at KIT, the newly established Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) at KIT, and the FZI.

Stefan's research interests are in the area of Service Computing and Service Engineering, and in particular, Cloud Computing and service-oriented business value networks. Prior to his appointments in Karlsruhe, for almost nine years Stefan was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, USA. He joined IBM Research US in early 1999, having held other positions in industry research in Europe before. Stefan received his Diploma in Informatics in 1995 and his Ph.D. degree in Engineering in 1999, both from the TU Berlin (University of Technology in Berlin), Germany.
 

JY Tigli is associate professor in Software Engineering, Networks and System in the Computing Department in the Engineering School, Called "Polytech" of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and he's also, this year, delegated by his University, as INRIA researcher in Team PULSAR to pursue research on middleware for ubiquitous computing and activity recognition. He has published lot of papers in the field of Software for Robotics, and more recently, Middleware for Ubiquitous Computing. He's in the PCs of international conferences in these fields and this year the program chairman of the 6th ACM International Mobility Conference. He is also Head of the Embedded Software Engineering specialty for the MSc in Software Engineering and the last year of the Engineering degree of Polytech, having served in this role for the past 10 years. In 2008 he promoted and headed, the first french specialty at the MSc level in Software Engineering for Ubiquituous Computing (called IAM, for "Mobile and Ubiquituous Computing").

He has been primarily responsible for a large number of research projects (Region Project "Ubiquarium", ANR Project "ErgoDyn", ANR Project "Continuum", NUS collaboration project ...) in the research group "Rainbow", headed by Michel Riveill at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. His current research interests include software architectures, middleware (including service oriented and adaptive middleware) for multi-device systems, and aspect oriented approaches applied to reactive adaptation in middleware for mobile and ubiquitous systems. His research also conduct to various software licenses and industrial collaborations with numerous companies interested in M2M software environments. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, in January 1996, in which he proposed a behavioral programming model for intelligent robotic systems in collaboration with National Research Council of Canada.