Professor Zhou Chaochen, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Personal Details: Born in 1937. Married with 2 children.

Education: Undergraduate study at Peking University in 1954-1958; Postgraduate study at Institute for Computing Technology, CAS, in 1963-1967.

Research interests: Formal techniques for programming, including formal semantics, specification, verification and design calculi for computing systems.

Previous Positions since 1992: 1992- Professor, Institute of Software, CAS; 1992-1997, Principal Research Fellow, International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University (UNU/IIST); 1997-2002 Director of UNU/IIST.

Academic Membership: 1993- Member of CAS; 2000- Member of the Third World Academy of Sciences. For more information see http://www.ios.ac.cn/english/people/zhouchaochen.htm.

Gary T. Leavens is a professor of computer science at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.  He has taught there since receiving his Ph.D. from MIT in 1989.  Before that he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Denver Colorado as a member of technical staff.

Professor Leavens's research interests include programming and specification language design and semantics, program verification, and formal methods, with an emphasis on the object-oriented and aspect-oriented paradigms. 

His best known work in the area of formal methods is related to the JML project, an international effort with many associated tools (see jmlspecs.org).  He also worked on the design of the specification languages Larch/Smalltalk (with Yoonsik Cheon) and Larch/C++ (with Yoonsik and Clyde Ruby).  These languages embody insights from his work on the theory of behavioral subtyping (with Don Pigozzi and Krishna Kishore Dhara). 

His best known work on language design and semantics is related to multiple dispatch languages (joint with Craig Chambers, Todd Millstein, and Curtis Clifton) such as MultiJava.  See http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~leavens for more information on his research. 

His hobbies include music and astronomy.  He is married to Janet Leavens, who is a Ph.D. candidate in French Literature at the University of Iowa.

John McDermid is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of York where he heads a major research group studying safety critical systems.  He is the Director of the Rolls-Royce funded University Technology Centre (UTC) in Systems and Software Engineering, the BAE SYSTEMS-funded Dependable Computing System Centre (DCSC) and a Defence and Aerospace Research Partnership in High Integrity Real-Time Systems. He has published 6 books, and over 300 papers. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2002.

Professor McDermid has extensive experience as a consultant, mainly in the area of safety critical systems and software. He is a Director of Origin Consulting and a Non-Executive Director of High Integrity Solutions.

Professor McDermid is a member of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC) and chairs the DSAC Information Superiority Board, mainly advising the MoD on Network Enabled Capability (NEC).

For more information see http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~jam/