Biographical sketches of authors

David F. Bantz IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: bantz@watson.ibm.com). Dr. Bantz has been a research staff member since 1972, after a short stint at a startup company. He graduated from Columbia University in 1970 with an Eng.Sc.D. degree and taught there as an adjunct professor for nearly 25 years. He has 20 issued patents. His technical interests have always been in personal computing applications and technology, and he is currently working on autonomic personal computing.

Chatschik Bisdikian IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (electronic mail: bisdik@us.ibm.com). Dr. Bisdikian is a research staff member, currently working on short-range wireless networks, wireless LAN deployment, service discovery, spontaneous networking, and peer networking. He holds a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut. He has served as vice-chair of the IEEE 802.15.1 task group that developed a standard for personal area networks adapted from the Bluetooth specification. He is coauthor of the book Bluetooth Revealed: The Insider's Guide to an Open Specification for Global Wireless Communications.

David Challener IBM Personal Computing Division, 3039 Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 (electronic mail: challene@us.ibm.com). Dr. Challener received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and came to work for IBM upon graduation. Since then he has held positions in semiconductor yield analysis, substrate reliability, the technical staff to the president of the IBM PC Company, the Center for Natural Computing, PC architecture, and now the Personal Systems Institute, where he works on security and autonomic computing as a Senior Technical Staff Member.

John P. Karidis IBM Personal Computing Division, Route 100, Somers, New York 10589 (electronic mail: karidis@us.ibm.com). Dr. Karidis is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, developing hardware and software product concepts that have included the “butterfly” keyboard on the ThinkPad^® 701C, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the ThinkPad TransNote portfolio computer. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and joined the Watson Research Center in 1983.

Steve Mastrianni IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: stevemas@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mastrianni is a senior software engineer currently writing autonomic software. He joined IBM Research after running a software development and consulting company for 10 years. He has authored two books, several papers, and over 70 articles, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science. He has filed over 35 patents with six issued, and he prefers writing software to talking about it.

Ajay Mohindra IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: ajaym@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mohindra has been a research staff member at IBM since 1993. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include distributed systems and autonomic and e-utility computing.

Dennis G. Shea IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: dgshea@us.ibm.com). Dr. Shea is the senior manager of the Personal Systems and Services department. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and electrical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He started his career at IBM in Boca Raton, Florida, working on small systems. His technical interests have revolved around personal systems technology, from easier connectivity and mobile solution enablement to the recent development of a desktop management computing utility.

Michael Vanover IBM Personal Computing Division, 3039 Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 (electronic mail: vanover@us.ibm.com). Mr. Vanover has been a development engineer since 1986. He graduated from Wheaton College in 1982 with a B.S. in chemistry. He later obtained a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has nine issued patents. His technical interests have ranged from processor design to graphics and multimedia, and more recently PC manageability and security.