Biographical sketches of authors

Anil Nigam IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P. O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (anigam@us.ibm.com). Dr. Nigam is a research staff member in the Supply Chain Analysis group in the Mathematical Sciences Department. He joined the Watson Research Center in 1981 after earning a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Rochester. His research at IBM has spanned a broad range of areas, including VLSI design systems, parallel processing architectures and database machines, logic programming and databases, knowledge representation, qualitative reasoning, and operational business modeling. He has authored many journal and conference papers, has served on program committees of several conferences, and has been on the editorial board of The Journal of Advanced Engineering Informatics (formerly Artificial Intelligence In Engineering). Dr. Nigam has received a Research Division Award, a Research Commercialization Award, and an Invention Achievement Award, and he holds several patents.

Nathan S. Caswell IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P. O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (ncaswell@us.ibm.com). Dr. Caswell is a research staff member in the Supply Chain Analysis group in the Mathematical Sciences Department. He joined the Watson Research Center in 1981 after earning a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago and holding an IBM Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. His initial research at IBM focused on interacting systems with complex dynamics including multitrap kinetics in long persistence CRT phosphors, lifetime of photolithograpic CRT cathode materials, and effects of continuous trap distributions on TFT response time. His recent work has involved developing formal models of business operational behavior. Dr. Caswell has provided leadership in several projects in the health care, retail, food service, manufacturing, and business transformation area with both internal and external customers to demonstrate their practical application. He has received project-related awards, holds several patents, and has authored a number of journal articles.