Mitchell Kapor, 55, is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses.

He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. At Yale, he was very involved with the college's commercial radio station, WYBC-FM, where he served as Music Director and Program Director.

In the 1970’s Mr. Kapor worked as a disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station in Hartford, Connecticut; became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and taught TM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa; and worked as an entry-level computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later called Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company.

In 1978 he bought an Apple II personal computer and worked as an independent software consultant; as the co-developer of Tiny Troll, the first graphics and statistics program for the Apple II; as a product manager for Personal Software Inc., the publisher of VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet; and as the designer and programmer (in BASIC) of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.

He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, created Lotus 1-2-3. He served as the President (later Chairman) and Chief Executive Officer of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and as a Director until 1987. In 1983, Lotus’ first year of operations, the company achieved revenues of $53,000,000 and had a successful public offering. In 1984 the company tripled in revenue to $156,000,000. The number of employees grew to over a thousand by 1985.  More

Clive L Dym is Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design and director of the Center for Design Education at Harvey Mudd College. His primary interests are in engineering design and structural mechanics. After receiving the PhD from Stanford University, Dr. Dym held appointments at the University at Buffalo; the Institute for Defense Analyses; Carnegie Mellon University; Bolt, Beranek and Newman; and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was also head of his department at UMass (1977-85) and chair of his department at Harvey Mudd (1999-2002). Dr. Dym has held visiting appointments at the TECHNION-Israel Institute of Technology, the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at Southampton, Stanford, Xerox PARC, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and USC.

He has authored or coauthored 10 books and more than 100 archival publications and technical reports. Dr. Dym was founding editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing, and is currently Associate Editor of ASME's Journal of Mechanical Design. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Society for Engineering Education. Dr. Dym's awards include the Walter L. Huber Research Prize (ASCE, 1980), the Western Electric Fund Award (ASEE, 1983), the Boeing Outstanding Educator Award (first runner-up, 2001), the Fred Merryfield Design Award (ASEE, 2002), the Joel and Ruth Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award (ASME, 2004), and the Archie Higdon Distinguished Educator Award (Mechanics Division, ASEE, 2006).

Alan R Hevner is on an assignment at NSF as the Program Director of the Science of Design program. He is an Eminent Scholar and Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at the University of South Florida, where he holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology.

Dr. Hevner's areas of research interest include information systems development, software engineering, distributed database systems, health care information systems and telecommunications. He has published more than one hundred and fifty research papers on these topics and has consulted for several Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Hevner has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. He has held faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota. Dr. Hevner is a member of ACM, IEEE, AIS and INFORMS.

S. Gopalakrishnan (called Kris by his colleagues) is one of the founders of Infosys Technologies Limited, a highly respected Consulting, IT services and Business Process Management company operating in the global market. He has played a key role at Infosys in defining the company strategy and in using technology and innovation continuously to maintain its leadership of the industry.

Kris obtained M.Sc. (Physics) in 1977 and M. Tech. (Computer Science) in 1979, both from IIT, Madras. He started his career with Patni Computer Systems (PCS), Mumbai as a Software Engineer in 1979 and quickly rose to become an Assistant Project Manager by 1981. His seminal contribution during his stint at PCS was the development of a distributed process control system for controlling the LD converters at Rourkela Steel Plant.

In 1981, Kris, along with N.R. Narayana Murthy and five others, founded Infosys Technologies Limited. The initial years of his responsibility at Infosys included management of design, development, implementation and support of information systems for clients in the consumer products industry in the US. During 1987-1994 he headed the technical operations of KSA/Infosys (a joint venture between Infosys and KSA at Atlanta, USA) as Vice President (Technical).

In 1994, Kris returned to India and was appointed Deputy Managing Director of the company. In April 2002 he was appointed as Chief operating officer and since August 2006 is also the President and Joint Managing Director of the Company. His responsibilities include Customer Services, Technology, Investments and Acquisitions. Kris is also the Chairperson of Infosys Consulting, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys Technologies Limited.

Kris is currently the Chairman of Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (IIITM), Kerala, and Vice Chairman of the Information Technology Education Standards Board (BITES) set up by Karnataka Government. He is on the board of directors of National Internet Exchange of India. He is also the Chairman of Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), Karnataka Region. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and IEEE Computer Society.

Kristin Tolle received her Ph.D. in Management of Information Systems from the University of Arizona while working as a Research Associate in the Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab. During that time she developed several applications ranging from an adaptive internet music matching agent to a pharmcodynamic/pharmacokinetic-based drug dosing application. She is best known for creating the Arizona Noun Phraser, a core component of several domain specific information retrieval applications which also served as the basis of her Ph.D. thesis work on domain dependent named entity extraction.

Since joining Microsoft, Kristin has submitted several patents and worked for various product teams including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and Excel. She is currently a Program Manager in Microsoft Research working in the External Research and Programs Team running their eScience and Medical Informatics initiatives. Her research interests include, natural language processing, unsupervised ontology creation, medical data mining, medical data confidentiality, body sensors, body sensor networks, and medical information retrieval.

Mary Lou Maher is developing an emphasis on research in creativity in CISE (CreativeIT). She joined the Human Centered Computing Cluster in CISE in July 2006. She is the Professor of Design Computing and the Co-Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney. She received her BS (1979) in Civil Engineering at Columbia University and her MS (1981) and PhD (1984) in Civil Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She was an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the University of Sydney in 1990. She has held joint appointments in the Faculty of Architecture and the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney. She is a researcher in NICTA (National Information and Communication Technologies Australia) and a member of the Research Committee in the Collaborative Research Centre for Construction Innovation in Australia. Her current research interests include intelligent rooms, adaptive agents in design environments, motivated learning in physical and virtual worlds, tangible user interfaces for 3D design, empirical studies and new technologies for computer-supported collaborative design, and generative design systems in 3D virtual worlds.

Andrew B. Whinston received his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently Professor of Information Systems, Economics, and Computer Science, Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration, and Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at The University of Texas at Austin. He also holds the title of The John Newton Centennial Fellow-IC2. He has published extensively on resource allocation issues and is currently working on bundle markets in electronic commerce. Dr. Whinston is a member of several editorial boards and is editor-in-chief of "Decision Support Systems " and the "Journal of Organizational Computing ." He has published over 300 papers in major scientific journals, and, most recently, the following books on electronic commerce: 1. "Frontiers of Electronic Commerce " (with Ravi Kalakota), Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996. Republished in Chinese (2 volumes), 1997. Republished in Korean, 1998. 2. "Readings in Electronic Commerce " (edited with Ravi Kalakota), Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997. 3. "Electronic Commerce: A Manager's Guide " (with Ravi Kalakota), Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997. 4. "Economics of Electronic Commerce " (with S. Choi and D. O. Stahl), Macmillan & Co., 1997. Republished in Japanese, 1998.