Biographical sketches of authors

Jakka Sairamesh   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: jramesh@us.ibm.com). Dr. Sairamesh is a senior research staff member with IBM Research. He obtained his M.S. and M. Phil. degrees in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in 1995, all from Columbia University. Since then he has been working at IBM Research on electronic commerce platforms, trading systems, mobile commerce, information economies, Internet economics, and distributed systems. He has published numerous papers on trading systems, price-dynamics, digital libraries, and market-based control. He also played a role as an architect from Research for IBM's B2B products such as WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition and WebSphere Commerce Business Edition. He currently leads projects in the areas of an e-commerce platform, trading systems, and mobile e-business.

Rakesh Mohan   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: rakeshm@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mohan currently serves as the manager of the E-Commerce Platforms research group at the IBM Watson Research Center. He received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Southern California in 1989. His research interests include e-commerce and e-business systems and multimedia.

Manoj Kumar   IBM Research Division, IBM India Research Laboratory, Block 1, Indian Institute of Technology, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India 110016 (electronic mail: manoj1@us.ibm.com). Dr. Kumar is the director of the IBM India Research Laboratory. In his current assignment since July 2000, he previously had been with the IBM Watson Research Center, having joined IBM in 1983. He led projects in electronic commerce, video delivery and encoding technologies, and architecture and design of processors and of parallel computers. He received his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University in 1981 and 1984, respectively, all in electrical engineering.

Laurent Hasson   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: ldhasson@us.ibm.com). Mr. Hasson is currently one of the lead architects for the IBM WebSphere Commerce products, formulating the architecture for and developing the next generation of B2B and B2C commerce products. He joined IBM in 1996 in Toronto, where he became the lead developer for Net.Commerce V1. In 1997, he became the chief architect and lead developer for Net.Commerce V3, which marked a completely revamped architecture and programming model based on commands, dynamically pluggable customizations, and an object to relational persistence layer. He moved to the Watson Research Center in 1998, and through 1999, he worked with the sales and marketing teams to help expand the market opportunities for the product, conducting classes around the globe on e-commerce architectures, e-catalog design, and Net.Commerce solutions design and development. Working as a mentor to IBM Global Services and Lab Services teams, he also worked closely with many customers, providing project management, technical guidance, and architectural leadership on various projects. In 2000 and 2001, Mr. Hasson acted as the lead architect and development manager for WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition, an advanced B2B platform centered around hosted multiparty dynamic trading. He received a master's degree in computer science from Brown University in 1994 and a B.A. in computer science and mathematics from New York University in 1992.

Craig Bender   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: csbender@us.ibm.com). Mr. Bender is currently the Director for eServer Advanced Systems Infrastructure Development for the IBM Software Group, delivering B2B products to the marketplace. He joined IBM as a database administrator for the former Federal Systems Division in Owego, New York, in 1982, where he developed solutions for both military and continuous flow manufacturing applications. In 1985, he transferred to the former Entry Systems Division in Austin, Texas, where he designed and managed database and communications subsystems for OS/2. He also developed and implemented IBM's strategy for supporting IBM's OS/2 products on non-IBM personal computer systems of other manufacturers. As a programming consultant, Mr. Bender worked on the Corporate Technical Strategy Development Staff. In this assignment, he focused on corporate technical strategies, including client/server, security, and the advantages of the mainframe. He then worked in the IBM World Wide Client/Server Computing Unit, after which he worked in the IBM-Microsoft Project Office, focusing on IBM solutions. He received the B.S. degree in computer and information science with a minor in mathematics from the University of Delaware in 1982.