Fatma Özcan  IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (fozcanus.ibm.com). Dr. Özcan has been a research staff member since 2001. She received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland. Her research interests include XML query languages and query optimization, integration of heterogeneous information systems, and software agents. Dr. Özcan is a member of ACM SIGMOD, and coauthor of the book, Heterogeneous Agent Systems.

Don Chamberlin  IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (chamberlalmaden.ibm.com). Dr. Chamberlin is an IBM Fellow and represents IBM on the W3C XML Query Working Group. He is best known as a coinventor of SQL and author of two books on DB2. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an honorary degree from the University of Zurich in recognition of his work on database query languages. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the SIGMOD Innovations Award.

Krishna Kulkarni  IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory, 555 Bailey Road, San Jose, California 95141 (krishnakus.ibm.com). Dr. Kulkarni is a member of the IBM Information Management Standards and Open Source Group. He serves as the primary IBM representative to the ANSI/INCITS H2 committee and as head of the United States delegation to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32/WG3 committee, responsible for the standardization of SQL/XML. He holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Edinburgh. He has contributed extensively to the evolution of the SQL standard for over a decade. Dr. Kulkarni has published a number of papers on database topics and is a coauthor of Object-Oriented Databases: A Semantic Data Model Approach, published by Prentice-Hall.

Jan-Eike Michels  IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory, 555 Bailey Road, San Jose, CA 95141 (janeikeus.ibm.com). Mr. Michels represents IBM on the ANSI/INCITS/H2 and ISO/JTC1/SC32/WG3 committees responsible for standardizing SQL and SQL/XML. Additionally, he is the IBM representative on the JSR 225 Expert Group, responsible for standardizing the XQuery API for Java™ (XQJ), and the editor of the XQJ specification. Mr. Michels holds an M.S. degree in computer science from the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany.