Biographical sketches of authors

Melissa J. Buco IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (mjbuco@us.ibm.com). Ms. Buco is a senior software engineer in the Services and Software department at the Watson Research Center. She received a B.A. in mathematics from Northeastern University and an M.S. in computer science from Columbia University. She received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for her work on PCWARES. She has also worked in the areas of software engineering, emergency management, project management, and workflow.

Rong N. Chang IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (rong@us.ibm.com). Dr. Chang received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1990. Before joining IBM in 1993, Dr. Chang was with Bell Communications Research creating advanced personal ubiquitous application services for ATM-based broadband networks. He is now manager of Network Hosted Application Services at the Watson Research Center. He has received several awards at IBM, including an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award and a Technical Excellence Award. At IBM he is a leading contributor to: (1) the SLA management component in the IBM Universal Management Infrastructure, (2) real-time credit card processing and software download service at ibm.com, (3) the common registration infrastructure for IBM's Internet Web sites, and (4) the first hyperlink-aware search engine (named WebCat). His research interests include quality-assured on demand services, distributed computing systems, workflow-centric computing, hypermedia information management, and personal pervasive computing and communication.

Laura Z. Luan IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (luan@us.ibm.com). Dr. Luan received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Keio University in Japan. She was a scientific staff member at Nortel Research Division from 1990-1996 working on SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) network synchronization and digital transmission systems. She joined IBM in late 1996 and worked on the High-Definition Television (HDTV) Broadcast Technology Collaboration project in the area of distributed command and control for real-time high-bandwidth multimedia streaming over ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Her current research interests are in the areas of utility computing infrastructure management for on demand services, in particular, contract execution management and resource management.

Christopher Ward IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (cw1@us.ibm.com). Dr. Ward received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Florida in 1988. He joined IBM in 2000 and is most recently responsible for an extensible SLM data management framework to represent the complex relationships required for proactive SLA management. Since joining IBM he has received various achievement awards, has chaired selected standards committees, and has published several technical papers. Prior to joining IBM, Dr. Ward was Head of the Advanced Networking and Distributed Control Group and a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sarnoff Corporation. During this period he was responsible for development of distributed control and compressed bit stream splicing technologies in support of professional broadcast studios. Prior to his employment in corporate research facilities, he held academic appointments at City University of New York and Auburn University. Dr. Ward has published over 40 papers addressing a variety of computer science problems, is the author or co-author of numerous patents, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Joel L. Wolf IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (jlwolf@us.ibm.com). Dr. Wolf received his Ph.D. degree from Brown University in 1973 and his Sc.B. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, both in mathematics. He is currently a research staff member at the Watson Research Center, with interests in mathematical optimization. He has received two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, is a Master Inventor at IBM, and is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has also been an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, as well as a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff and manager at Bell Laboratories.

Philip S. Yu IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (psyu@us.ibm.com). Dr. Yu received a B.S. in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. degree from New York University. He is currently manager of the Software Tools and Techniques group at the Watson Research Center. His research interests include data mining, Internet applications and technologies, database systems, and multimedia systems. He has published more than 350 papers in refereed journals and conferences. He holds or has applied for 234 U.S. patents. Dr. Yu is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and of Knowledge and Information Systems. He has received several IBM and external honors, including Best Paper Award, two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, two IBM Research Division Awards, and the 73rd plateau of Invention Achievement Awards. Dr. Yu is an IBM Master Inventor.