Biographical note

Ahmed Elmagarmid is Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue University. He is the editor-in-chief of Distributed and Parallel Databases: An International Journal, editor of Information Sciences, and editor of the Advances in Database Systems series. Elmagarmid's research interests focus on consistency aspects of distributed databases; heterogeneous, federated, and multidatabases; and transaction management for advanced database applications, distance learning, and video databases. He has active projects in mobile databases, video databases, and datawebs and is a founding member of the Purdue Online effort. Marek Rusinkiewicz is MCC's Vice President for Information Technology Research. He is the manager of InfoSleuth project, aimed at the development of technologies for networked exploitation of information using semantic agents, and of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) project, investigating the relationships of workflow and CSCW technologies. He joined MCC from the University of Houston, where he is Professor of Computer Science. Rusinkiewicz was Principal Investigator of the OMNIBASE project and has consulted extensively for industry and government organizations in the areas of distributed database systems, multidatabase systems, cooperative information systems, and workflow management. Amit Sheth is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) Lab at the University of Georgia. He is also the President of Infocosm, Inc. His primary research interests include coordinating and collaborating for virtual teams and enabling infocosm. Among the research projects he leads are METEOR (for enterprise-wide and interenterprise, mission-critical, adaptive workflows in heterogeneous computing environments), InfoQuilt and Video Data Server (management of heterogeneous digital data, information brokering, and semantic issues in global information systems), and CaTCH (teleconsulting and collaboration). Two of his research projects, METEOR and InfoHarness, have resulted in commercial products.