Angelo Corsaro, is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science in the Distributed Object Computing Lab. at the Computer Science Department of the Washington University. His main interest are related to Real-Time Java, reflection and Meta Object Protocols (MOP), Aspect Oriented Programming, Generative Programming, component models, design patterns, scheduling problematics in real-time distributed systems, distributed computing, and formal methods. Angelo received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Washington University, St. Louis 2001. He can be reached at corsaro@cse.wustl.edu.

Fabio M. Costa, is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science in the Institute of Informatics at the Federal University of Goias, Brazil. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Lancaster in 2001. His research interests are in the area of adaptive and reconfigurable middleware platforms, mainly with the use of reflection and component-based technology in order to enable flexible support for dynamic applications involving distributed multimedia and mobility. He can be contacted at fmc@inf.ufg.br.

Geoffrey Coulson, is Reader in Distributed Computing in the Computing Department at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests are in novel middleware architectures, and in the application of middleware technologies to non-mainstream areas like programmable networking, mobile systems, multimedia, and real-time systems. He can be contacted at geoff@comp.lancs.ac.uk.

Nalini Venkatasubramanian, is an assistant professor at the Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include distributed and parallel systems, middleware, real-time multimedia systems, mobile environments and formal reasoning of distributed systems. She is specifically interested in developing safe and flexible middleware technology for highly dynamic environments. Nalini was a member of technical staff at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California for several years where she worked on large scale distributed systems and interactive multimedia applications. Nalini has also worked on various database management systems and on programming languages/compilers for high performance machines. She has an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is a member of the IEEE and ACM. She can be reached at nalini@ics.uci.edu.

Nanbor Wang is a research scientist at Tech-X Corporation, Boulder, CO. where he is working on the next genration computation environment for high-performance and high-throughput computation, collaboration environment, and integration of large-scale, distributed instrument control system. His research focuses on applying component-oriented, object-oriented programming, and meta-programming techniques for high-performance and real-time distributed object computing systems. Nanbor received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Washington University, St. Louis, MO and is a member of the IEEE and ACM. He can be contacted at nanbor@txcorp.com.

Renato Cerqueira is an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Since 1994, he has been a research staff member at the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio (Tecgraf/PUC-Rio). During 2001, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Renato received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from PUC-Rio in 2000. He was the treasurer and a local co-chair of ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2003, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research interests include component-based technologies, object-oriented languages, dynamic adaptation, middleware platforms, distributed programming, and ubiquitous computing. He can be contacted at rcerq@inf.puc-rio.br.

Richard Staehli is a guest researcher at Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway, where he is investigating component architecture support for multimedia and other QoS-sensitive applications. He received a Ph.D. in 1996 from The Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology and has since worked on video data types for Informix Software and on a CORBA application server for Oracle Corporation. More recently he worked as a senior technical consultant for the interactive web services firm AGENCY.COM. He can be contacted at richard@simula.no.