Dr. Michael L. Brodie works on large-scale strategic Information Technology (IT) opportunities and challenges for Verizon Communications senior executives. His primary interest is in delivering business value from advanced and emerging technologies and practices to enable business objectives while optimizing and transforming IT. In addition to Computer Science he addresses business and economic issues such as computing-communications-entertainment-business convergence and the economic impact of IT. His research focus is on advanced computational models and architectures and the large-scale information systems that they must support. He is concerned with the Big Picture, business and technical contexts, core technologies, and integration within a large scale, operational telecommunications environment.

Prof. Guus Schreiber is a professor of Intelligent Information Systems at the Department of Computer Science department of the VU University Amsterdam. His research interests are mainly in knowledge and ontology engineering, with a special interest for applications in the field of cultural heritage. He was one of the key developers of the CommonKADS methodology. He acts as chair of W3C groups for Semantic Web standards such as OWL, SKOS and RDFa. His research group is involved a wide range of national and international research projects. He is now project coordinator of the EU Integrated Project NoTube concerned with integration of Web and TV data with the help of semantics and was previously Sceintific Director of the EU Network of Excellence "Knowledge Web".

Prof. Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Assistant Dean for Information Technology, at Rennselaer. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technology at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler has authored about 200 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, Semantic Web, agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the "Semantic Web," Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society.