Pedro Szekely received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Project Leader at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) and a Research Assistant Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. His research interests pp include human-computer interaction, electronic commerce and negotiating agents. Dr. Szekely is the Project Leader for the CAMERA project researching ANTS technology with application to Harrier Marine aircraft safety. Dr. Szekely serves as the Principal Investigator for the MASTERMIND project, which produced the grammar-based adaptive forms technology being used by a number of projects inside and outside ISI. He also led the transition of MASTERMIND into the JFACC program where the adaptive forms were used to develop the objectives and plan editors. Dr. Szekely also led an effort in electronic commerce for the Defense Logistics Agency which concerned the development of a system for letting users specify business rules for automatically selecting sources of supply. Dr. Szekely has published numerous papers in human computer interaction and electronic commerce. He has served in the program committees of several human interface conferences, and has chaired two ACM conferences.
Robert Neches received his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981. He is the Acting Division Director of the Distributed Scaleable Systems Division of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, as well as Research Associate Professor at USC Computer Science. His interests span control and coordination in distributed systems; collaboration, coordination, and visualization aids for information analysis/management; and "System of systems" frameworks for information integration. He served at DARPA from 1994 to 1997, where he co-managed programs in Human-Computer Interaction and Intelligent Integration of Information, played a major role in defining and integrating DARPA's Advanced Logistics Program and DLA's Logistics Research and Development Program, and managed DARPA's Planning and Decision Aids program. Dr. Neches was leading founder of the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort (KSE), a consortium of over two dozen industry, government and academic research centers concerned with sharing and reuse of knowledge bases and knowledge-based software. He was primary coordinator of the consortium from 1989 until leaving for DARPA. On his initiative, the consortium established working groups on knowledge interchange, representation languages, and shared ontologies that laid the ground for DARPA's HPKB and RKF programs. The KSE also pioneered KQML, which has been highly influential among researchers using agent communication protocols. Dr. Neches, in fact, organized and led the first KQML working group meeting and recruited its leadership.
Martin Frank is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and a research assistant professor in the USC Computer Science Department. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995 for his work on end-user programming at the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center. His lifetime interest is in helping shift non-creative tasks from humans to intelligent systems, with particular emphasis on the human interface for task delegation, thus freeing humans to focus on more rewarding and more profitable higher-level tasks. The technical centerpiece of his vision is in explicit, declarative descriptions of the tasks that the intelligent systems accomplish and the ones that the human users accomplish; these descriptions then provide the basis for assembling a team of humans and systems for a given task on the fly. Dr. Frank has published a number of peer-reviewed technical articles and served as an organizer and/or reviewer for the ACM conferences on Computer-Human Interaction, Intelligent User Interfaces, and User Interface Software and Technology.