Biographical sketches of authors

Michael P. Perrone   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: mpp@us.ibm.com). Dr. Perrone is a research staff member in the Pen Technologies group. He joined IBM in 1994 and has worked on statistical machine learning algorithms for machine transcription of handwritten documents, as well as statistical methods for information retrieval. His interests include all aspects of statistical optimization and econometric modeling. He has received numerous invention and technical achievement awards and has contributed to award-winning IBM products. Dr. Perrone received a B.S. degree in both mathematics and physics from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He received Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Brown University.

Gregory F. Russell   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: gfr@us.ibm.com). Dr. Russell is a research staff member at the T. J. Watson Research Center. He joined IBM in 1987, and has worked on pen-based computing systems, digitizer technology for handwriting capture, IR communications, optical subsystems, MPEG-2, and other I/O subsystems for ThinkPad^®, as well as volumetric visualization and other graphics techniques. He participated in standards committees for IrDA-2 and most recently in developing a draft standard for “Ink-XML.” He has received numerous invention and technical achievement awards, and he has contributed to award-winning products and concept prototypes. Dr. Russell received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Swarthmore College, and master's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

Aiman Ziq   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: ziq@us.ibm.com). Mr. Ziq holds a B.Sc. degree from the PSUCT university, Jordan. Before he joined IBM he participated in developing the architecture and wireless applications for cell phones and handheld devices. He joined IBM Research in 2001 and is currently working with the Pen Technologies group as a software engineer. His interests include autonomic computing and multimedia indexing and retrieval.