James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Assistant Dean for Information Technology, at Rennselaer. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technology at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. One of the inventors of the "Semantic Web", Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society. He is the President of the Semantic Web Science Association, Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Juan J. (Juanjo) Hierro, currently holds the position of Chief Technologist on Software Technologies at Telefonica R&D. He obtained a degree in Computer Science in 1990 from the School of Computer Science of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and owns a certificate of investigation proficiency by the same university.

In his current position, Juanjo is responsible of definition and development of strategies in the field of software technologies. From his position, he leads projects which involve research and open source development of platforms and technologies in software areas related to the Web, Cloud tecnologies, next-generation Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the Future Internet of Services. He also coordinates the efforts towards adoption of results of these projects as standards in relevant forums such as W3C, OMG or TMF. Juanjo chairs the Morfeo Open Source Community (see www.morfeo-project.org), an open source community in which public institutions, the administration, other companies (specially, SMEs) and the university carry out open research and development activities targeted to defininition of standard vertical applications or basic software technologies, and integrate efforts towards creation of business opportunities around developed software. Despite its recent creation, Morfeo has gained a recognized position within the open source R&D community in Spain and the rest of Europe.

Juanjo holds a vice-chair position at the Steering Committee of NESSI, the European Technology Platform on Software and Services (see wwww.nessi-europe.eu). He is also member of the NESSI Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) Committee and co-leads activities targeted to delivery of open source reference implementation of NEXOF, the NESSI Open Reference Architecture, within the Open Source NESSI Working Group. He also holds a vice-president position at the Steering Committee of INES, the Spanish Technology Platform on Software as Services, Spanish counterpart of NESI (see www.ines.org.es). Within INES, Juanjo co-chairs the Open Source and Internet of the Future Working Groups.

Juanjo has participated as invited expert in several workshops as well as advisory expert groups organized by the European Commission in order to define objectives related to software and services in the EU Research Framework Program 7 (FP7). He also participates as invited expert by the European Commission in the Working Group focused on the Future Internet of Services and chairs the Service Front Ends Collaboration Working Group at FP7. Recently, has participated as assisted as an expert in a report that the EC is planning to produce about strategy on software for Europe.

Complementing all these activities, he has participated as invited speaker in several congresses and events and has authored or co-authored several scientific papers.

Jaideep Srivastava is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has established and led a laboratory that conducts research in databases, multimedia systems, and data mining. Dr. Srivastava has an active collaboration with the technology industry, both for research and technology transfer, and is an often-invited participant in technical and technology strategy forums. The US federal government has solicited his opinion on computer science research as an expert witness. He has supervised 26 Ph.D. dissertations, 53 M.S. theses, and a number of post-doctoral researchers. In the process, he has authored or co-authored over 220 papers in refereed journals and conferences, and as invited book chapters. A series of prototype software systems have built in his laboratory to evaluate and validate our research results; and have acted as vehicles of technology transfer. This research has been supported by leading government agencies as well as the leading players in the computer industry.

Dr. Srivastava has significant experience in the industry, in both consulting and executive roles. Specifically he has lead a corporate data mining team at Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) and built a data analytics department at Yodlee (www.yodlee.com) from the ground up. More recently, he spent two years as the Chief Technology Officer for Persistent Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Systems), where he built an R&D division with a number of Centers of Excellence people from the ground up. In addition, he oversaw the redesign of the training and technical vitalization program for 2,200+ engineers; and also established collaborative research programs with a number of academic institutions. He has provided technology and technology strategy advice to a number of large corporations including Cargill, United Technologies, IBM, Honeywell, KPMG, 3M, and Eaton. He has served in an advisory capacity to a number of small companies, including Lancet Software and Infobionics.

Dr. Srivastava has a bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India, and MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s premier professional society in the field. He has been appointed as IEEE’s Distinguished Visitor, and has given over 100 invited talks in over 25 countries.