Biographical sketches of authors

Asit Dan IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (asit@us.ibm.com). Dr. Dan has been with the IBM Research Division since 1990 and is at the forefront of research and development in on demand computing and, before that, in transaction-processing architectures and video servers. He holds several top-rated patents in these areas and has received two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards and eight IBM Invention Achievement Awards. Twice, he received the honor of IBM Master Inventor for his work in these areas. Currently, he is managing the Business-to-Business Integration Department that is working on the development of the infrastructure for supporting dynamic and SLA-driven Web services and grid and autonomic computing. Dr. Dan received a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His doctoral dissertation received an Honorable Mention in the 1991 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition and was published by the MIT Press. He has published extensively, including several book chapters, and a book on multimedia servers.

Doug Davis IBM Software Group, 3039 Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 (dug@us.ibm.com). Mr. Davis works in the Emerging Technology division of IBM as the technical lead for the IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit. He was one of the original authors of Axis, the Apache SOAP engine, and his previous projects also include the WebSphere machine translation project, TeamConnection, and the FORTRAN 90 compiler. Doug has a B.S. degree from the University of California at Davis and an M.S. degree in computer science from Michigan State University.

Robert Kearney IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (firefly@us.ibm.com). Mr. Kearney has been with IBM for 34 years—first in software development, and for the past 21 years, at the Watson Research Center. Formally educated in mathematics (University of Massachusetts, University of Wyoming, and Pennsylvania State University), his expertise is in operating systems and applications. He is currently interested in tools development, and especially in support of business-to-business applications.

Alexander Keller IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (alexk@us.ibm.com). Dr. Keller is a research staff member in the Autonomic Computing Department at the Watson Research Center. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Technische Universität München, Germany, in 1994 and 1998, respectively, and has published approximately 40 refereed papers in the area of distributed systems management. He joined the IBM Research Division in 1999. Dr. Keller's research interests revolve around change management for applications and services, information modeling for e-business systems, and SLAs. He is a member of the USENIX Association, the IEEE, and the DMTF CIM Applications Working Group.

Richard P. King IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (rpk@watson.ibm.com). Mr. King joined the IBM General Systems Division in 1977 in Rochester, MN, where he worked on System/38^TM, especially in the area of system performance. He joined the IBM Research Division in 1981, where he is now a senior programmer. The projects he has worked on include fault-tolerant computing, the coupling of mainframe sysplexes, and high-performance intersystem messaging. Mr. King received a B.S. degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Cornell University in 1974 and an M.S. degree in operations research and industrial engineering from Northwestern University in 1975.

Dietmar Kuebler IBM Software Group, Schoenaicher Strasse 220, 71032 Boeblingen, Germany (dkuebler@de.ibm.com). Mr. Kuebler is a senior software engineer at the IBM Boeblingen Laboratory. Since joining IBM in 1990, he has held various positions in development, technical marketing, and project management, and has acquired experience in architecture and software development in multiple environments. His areas of expertise include object-oriented technologies, Java, WebSphere, and middleware technologies. Mr. Kuebler led the architecture and development of the Utility Web Services “Contracting, Metering and Accounting” for the Emerging Technologies ToolKit. Recently he has been involved in transferring these technologies into products and to customers. He is currently a member of the IBM On Demand Design Council (ODDC). He studied computer science at Stuttgart University, Germany, where he graduated in 1990.

Heiko Ludwig IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (hludwig@us.ibm.com). Dr. Ludwig is a research staff member at the Watson Research Center, where he started as a visiting scientist in June 2001. As a member of the Distributed Systems and Services Department, he works in the field of electronic contracts and policies, primarily on WSLA. Previously he was a research staff member at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he worked on cross-organizational process management, service outsourcing, electronic contracts, outsourcing-related security aspects, and service modeling. From 1992 to 1996, he was a research and teaching staff member at the department of Office Automation at the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany. During that time he worked on co-operative planning and decision-making, and on the integration of workflow and collaborative applications. He holds a Master (Diplom) degree (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in computer science and business administration from Otto-Friedrich University. He published a book and several book chapters, various journal articles and conference papers, acted in program committees, and organized workshops in the area of computer-supported cooperative work, workflow management, e-business infrastructures, and contracts and policies.

Mike Polan IBM Canada Lab, 8200 Warden Avenue, Markham, Ontario L6G 1C7, Canada (mpolan@ca.ibm.com). Mike Polan is an architect in the Tivoli division of the IBM Software Group, working on the issues of provisioning and systems management in the on demand environment. His experience in software development includes microcode, computer communications, application development tools, and e-commerce systems.

Mike Spreitzer IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (mspreitz@us.ibm.com). Dr. Spreitzer is a research staff member. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1989 from Stanford University. First at Xerox PARC, and later at the Watson Research Center, he did research work in programming languages and environments and distributed systems. His current focus is on performance management and performance characterization of clustered services.

Alaa Youssef Computer Science Department, Alexandria University, Egypt. As a research staff member at the Watson Research Center from August 1998 to August 2003, Dr. Youssef was a member of the team that developed the first prototype of a quality of service and performance management system for Web services. Dr. Youssef received his Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1998 from Old Dominion University, VA. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1991 and 1994, respectively. His research interests include distributed systems, service management middleware, network and application-level quality of service, and security. Dr. Youssef is a member of the IEEE.