Francisco Curbera, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA. Francisco Curbera is a research staff member and manager of the Component Systems Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he has worked since 1993. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University. His current research interests are in the areas of component-oriented software for distributed computing system and business process management. In the past, he has worked in the design of algorithms and tools for processing XML documents, and in the use of markup languages for automatic UI generation. Between 2000 and 2004 he helped create the core set of Web services technologies, authoring several of the original Web services specifications including WSDL BPEL4, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, and WS-MetadataExchange among others, and helping drive the standardization of the core set of Web services technologies at the World Wide Web Consortium and OASIS. He can be reached at curbera@us.ibm.com. He has served as general chair or program committee chair in several conferences in the areas of services oriented computing and business process management, among them ICSOC, CoopIS and ICWE, and is a member of the steering committee of the International Conferences in Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC).

Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, Germany. Dimka Karastoyanova is a junior professor at the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS) and a member of the Excellence Cluster “Simulation Technology” (SimTech) at the University of Stuttgart. She received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Technical Unviersitry of Darmstadt, Germany. Her research is mainly in the area of workflow technology and service composition, with particular focus on flexibility and adaptation. The research work targets different application domains, to which since recently the domain of scientific experiments, e-science and simulation has been included. This research work is closely related to enhancing middleware technologies, in particular service middleware, as well as provisioning of functions and resources as services. She has also been involved in research on applications on the Cloud and infrastructures for Cloud computing.

Rania Khalaf, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA. Rania Khalaf is a Research Staff Member and manager of the Component Systems group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Doctorate from the University of Stuttgart advised by Prof. Dr. Frank Leymann and her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her interests include Service Computing, Business Process Management and Distributed Computing. Rania's research focuses on business process languages and systems, along the spectrum from fully structured, modeled workflows to semi-structrued processes in which people play a key role such as Case Management, to lightweight 'business mashups' in SaaS systems, to those that are completely ad-hoc potentially without an underlying model or supporting runtime. Rania is a creator the Bite REST-based workflow language, a leading member of the team creating a SaaS platform for quick, lightweight development, deployment and runtime of lightweight compositional applications, co-editor of the WS-BPEL standard, and developer and co-architect of the first public BPEL implementation. Currently, Rania and her team are focused on enabling the understanding, tracking, and continuous improvement through online analytics of people-centric semi-structured processses spread across multiple systems from potentially massive amounts of data. A first step in doing so is the ability to have a live, end to end representation of the underlying behavior. Rania's work has been extensively published in key conferences and journals and she serves on several conference program committees.

Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany. Frank Leymann is a full professor of computer science and director of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include service oriented computing and middleware, workflow and business process management, programming in the large, transaction processing, integration technology, architecture patterns, and cloud computing.Before accepting his professor position in 2004 he worked for two decades for IBM Software Group building database and middleware products. In parallel to that, Frank worked continuously since the late eighties on workflow technology and became the father of IBM's workflow product set. As an IBM Distinguished Engineer and elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology he contributed to the architecture and strategy of IBM's entire middleware stack as well as IBM's On Demand Computing strategy. From 2000 on, Frank worked as co-architect of the Web Service stack. He is co-author of many Web Service specifications, including WSFL, WS-Addressing, WS-Metadata Exchange, WS-Business Agreement, the WS-Resource Framework set of specifications, WS-HumanTask and BPEL4People; together with Satish Thatte, he was the driving force behind BPEL. Also, he is co-author of the BPMN2.0 specification.

Alex Norta, University of Helsinki, Finland. Alex Norta is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his MSc degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria and his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His PhD thesis was partly financed by the IST project CrossWork, in which he focused on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. Alex was a co-organizer of the SOC-LOG’09 workshop that aimed at achieving a deeper insight into the potential of applying principles of service-oriented computing to the problem domains of logistics and supply chain.

Daniel Oppenheim, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA. Daniel Oppenheim is a Senior Research Scientists at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in NY. He received his doctorate degree from Stanford University for his interdisciplinary research on interactive real-time systems, supporting creativity, and novel usability paradigms. Joining IBM Research in 1993 as both scientist and renowned composer he was a founding member it’s Computer Music Center. Currently Daniel is a member of the process automation team within the new Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) discipline. His research takes an end-to-end view on the enterprise, business processes, globalization, ongoing innovation & transformation, measurements, and governance, while bridging between strategy, organization, people, work, and IT. He is the chief architect of IBM’s new Application Assembly Optimization (AAO); a platform that automates and supports large-scale globally distrusted software development projects.