Derek Corneil is a Quebec city native and received his BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from Queen's University in 1964 and his MA and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1965 and1968 respectively. He had an NSERC post doctoral fellowship at the University of Eindhoven (the Netherlands) in 1968-69 and joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in Jan 1970. He is cross-listed in the Department of Mathematics and has had visiting professorial positions at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University the Universite de Grenoble and the Universite de Montpellier. He served as the chair of the Department from July 1985 to June 1990, the Director of Research Initiatives for the Faculty of Arts and Science, from July 1991 to March 1998, acting Vice President of Research and International Relations from Sept to Dec 1993, and Academic Coordinator of Bell Canada University Labs at the University of Toronto from April 1998 to June 1999.

His research is primarily in graph theory; this interest spans theoretical, algorithmic and application issues. He has supervised or co-supervised the completion of 24 PhD and 30 MSc theses. The doctoral graduates are currently in academic or industrial positions in seven countries, including six provinces in Canada. He is the author or co-author of over 100 research publications and is currently editor of Discrete Applied Mathematics, Ars Combinatoria and SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications.

Dr James Gosling Chief Scientist, Java, Vice President and Fellow, Sun Microsystems

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary in 1977 and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints." He is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. Dr Gosling has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called "Emacs" for Unix systems. At Sun, his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He led the original design and implementation of the Java programming language.

Eric Manning received his Honours Bsc in mathematics and physics, as and his MA in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1965. He worked for almost two decades at the University of Waterloo, and moved to the University of Victoria in 1986, until becoming Principal Scientist, High Performance Networking Cluster, New Media Centre, Vancouver in 2001. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his research excellence. Dr Manning is co-author of the book Fault Diagnosis of Digital Systems published in English by John Wiley & Sons, New York, and in Japanese by Sangyo Tosho Limited, Tokyo. He has been a consultant to Bell-Northern Research, Northern Electric, the Federal Department of Communications, the Science Council of Canada, the St Lawrence Seaway Authority, the Federal Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce, the Ministry of State for Science and Technology, Honeywell Canada, Honeywell Inc., Nortel Technologies Inc., Nortel Networks Inc., and Sony Corporation, Tokyo. He has served on dozens of committees and advisory boards in his role as an expert scientist. His current research interests are in the areas of computer and telecommunications technologies, in particular data switching, computer networks and distributed processing. He is also interested in the social and economic impacts of computer and communications technologies. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and Honorary Professor of South East University in Nanjing, China.

Raymond Perrault is Director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. His major research contributions are in natural language processing, speech act theory, discourse, planning, plan recognition, and formal language theory. He is currently co-PI of the CALO Project, a large, multi-institutional, 5-year, DARPA-funded project whose objective is to build an intelligent office assistant that learns through interaction with its user and the world.

He is co-Editor in Chief of Artificial Intelligence and a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Perrault holds a BSc (Maths, 1969) from McGill University and a PhD (Computer and Communication Sciences, 1975) from the University of Michigan. From 1974 to 1983, he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto which he left as Full Professor. He joined SRI in 1983 and became Director in 1988. He was a founding Principal of Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University; he is also Consulting Professor in Stanford’s Philosophy Deptartment. He was member of the Board of Trustees of International Joint Conferences in Artificial Intelligence, Inc. from 1992-2001, General Chair of IJCAI-95 in Montreal and President of the Board from 1995-1997. He was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1983. From 1993-2003 he served on the Scientific Council of Instituto per la ricerca scientifica e tecnologica in Trento, Italy, and has been member and chair of the Advisory Board of the AI and Robotics program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Richard Edward Taylor was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and studied physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, receiving a BSc degree in 1950 and MSc in 1952. He began his graduate studies in 1952 at Stanford University in California. His thesis research was performed at Stanford's High Energy Physics Laboratory from 1954 to 1958. In 1958, he went to Paris as a "boursier" at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he assisted with the construction and operation of experiments at the newly opened Grand Accelerateur Lineaire at Orsay. Upon return to the United States in 1961, Dr Taylor joined the staff of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. His PhD was granted by Stanford in 1962. He worked at Stanford first as a staff member, joined the faculty in 1968, and was appointed associate director of research for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1982. His experiments in electron scattering, and investigations of the internal structure of the proton and neutron, have resulted in several fellowships and prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990.

Dr Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and a Professor of Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. He is also the Head of the Intelligent User Interfaces Lab at DFKI. He received his doctoral degree (1981) in computer science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Since 1975 he has been working in the field as a principal investigator in intelligent user interface projects. In 2000, he was the first AI researcher to receive the Beckurts Award, one of Germany’s most prestigious awards for scientific and technological innovations. In 2001, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Dr Johannes Rau, presented the German Future Prize to Professor Wahlster for his work on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. He was the first computer scientist to receive Germany’s highest scientific prize that is awarded each year for outstanding innovations in technology, engineering, or the natural sciences. In 2003, he was the first German computer scientist elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. He has published more than 150 technical papers and 6 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. He is the editor of the book Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation and the co-editor of Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces.

David Jefferson received his BSc in Mathematics from Yale University and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980. He then spent fourteen years on the faculties of USC and UCLA, during which time he published research in the fields of program verification, parallel computation, synchronization, simulation, artificial life, and the theory of evolution. He is best known for his work on optimistic methods of parallel discrete event simulation. He left academia to join Compaq's Network Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto where he led projects directed at extending the capabilities and applications of the Internet. He is now a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

William R. Pulleyblank was a professor at the University of Calgary from 1974 to 1981 and at the University of Waterloo from 1982 to 1990. He then spent two years as a guest professor at the University of Bonn where he held the position of the John von Neumann professor of Operations Research. He is currently Director of Mathematical Sciences in IBM's Research Division and the Director of the IBM Deep Computing Institute. As Director of the Deep Computing Institute, Dr Pulleyblank coordinates activities in the field of deep computing both within IBM and with industry, academic, and government research partners around the world. The Deep Computing Institute brings together experts in mathematical sciences, computer science, and other disciplines to address challenging business and scientific problems, including Grand Challenge problems.