Mark Astley  Two Sigma Investments, LLC, 379 West Broadway, New York, NY, 10012 (mark.astleytwosigma.com). Dr. Astley was a research staff member at IBM Research until September, 2007. While at IBM, he contributed to various components of the IBM enterprise middleware platform including WebSphere Application Server. More recently, he contributed to the design and implementation of Linux kernel extensions which support fair-share scheduling for real-time systems. He is currently a developer at Two Sigma Investments. He has a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Sumeer Bhola  IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (sbholaus.ibm.com). Dr. Bhola is a research staff member in the Secure Software and Services department at the Watson Research Center. He received a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1994 and a Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999, both in computer science. He has worked on distributed computing, computer-supported collaborative work, autonomic computing, real-time systems, and computer security.

Michael J. Ward  IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (MichaelJWardus.ibm.com). Mr. Ward is a senior technical staff member and manages the Distributed Messaging Systems group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He has worked on networking software, Internet applications, distributed computing, computer-supported collaborative work, enterprise middleware, and real-time systems. He received a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Konstantin Shagin  IBM Haifa Research Lab, Haifa University Campus, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel (konstil.ibm.com). Mr. Shagin is a research staff member at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. Currently, he is working on the TransFab project, developing a high-performance, predictable transport fabric for real-time messaging. His main research interests are distributed computing, fault-tolerance, and QoS-aware messaging. In parallel, he is working toward the completion of his Ph.D. thesis at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology.

Harel Paz  IBM Haifa Research Lab, Haifa University Campus, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel (pazil.ibm.com). Dr. Paz is research staff member at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory and is currently working on TransFab, a real-time messaging middleware. He received a Ph.D. degree in 2006 from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis concerns memory management and, in particular, garbage collection.

Gidon Gershinsky  IBM Haifa Research Lab, Haifa University Campus, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel (gidonil.ibm.com). Dr. Gershinsky is the manager of Messaging Technology group at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. His research interests include real-time communication systems, low-latency messaging technologies for financial solutions, reliable multicast networking, and fault-tolerant middleware. He received a Ph.D degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.