Robert J. Walker is the newest member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. In March 2003, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia on a technique for easing software evolution and software reuse, called implicit context. His M.Sc. (1996) dealt with problems of system integration in computer graphics, and he also holds B.Sc. degrees in computer science (1994) and geophysics (1992), all from the University of British Columbia.

Rob has been a referee and external reviewer for a variety of software engineering journals and conferences. He is an active member of the research community in aspect-oriented programming, in addition to his interests in empirical validation and software evolution. He has performed and participated in a variety of empirical studies through his career.

Rob will act as Devil's Advocate and moderator in the panel debate.

Lionel C. Briand is with the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he founded the Software Quality Engineering laboratory. Before that he was the software quality engineering department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany. Lionel also worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland. But his first experiences are in the trenches, designing and developing large software systems, and he has, over the years, acted as a consultant to many industrial and government organizations. He holds a graduate degree in Geophysics and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, with high honors, from the University of Paris XI (Orsay), France. He is a professional engineer (P.Eng.) registered in Ontario.

Lionel has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many international, IEEE conferences. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Kluwer), and is on the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. His research interests include: object-oriented analysis and design, inspections and testing in the context of object-oriented development, quality assurance and control, project planning and risk analysis, technology evaluation.

David Notkin is Warren Francis and Wilma Bradley Professor and Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His interests are primarily in software engineering, with a particular interest in software evolution. He has graduated over 25 M.S. students and more than a dozen Ph.D. students, many of whom are active members of the research and development community.

He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1977 and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon in 1984. He has published dozens of referred articles. He is chair of ACM SIGSOFT, served as program chair for the First ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, as program co-chair for the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, and as program co-chair for ICS2000: Software - Theory and Practice (part of the IFIP World Computer Conference 2000). He served as a charter associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, and also served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. His awards include a 1986 IBM Faculty Development Award, a 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigators Award, and the 2000 University of Washington Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

Carolyn B. Seaman is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research generally falls under the umbrella of empirical studies of software engineering, with particular emphases on maintenance, organizational structure, communication, measurement, COTS-based development, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Seaman is also a Research Scientist at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering, Maryland, where she participates in research on experience management in software engineering organizations and software metrics.

She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, an M.S. in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the College of Wooster (Ohio). She has worked in the software industry as a software engineer and consultant, and has conducted most of her research in industrial and governmental settings (e.g., IBM Canada Ltd., NASA).

Walter F. Tichy is professor of Computer Science at the University Karlsruhe, Germany. He is also director of the software engineering department, including a SUN authorized Java Center, at Forschungszentrum Informatik, a research and transfer institute associated with the University. Previously, he was senior scientist at Carnegie Group, Inc., in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and on the faculty of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His primary research interests are software engineering and parallelism. His current research projects include experimental methods in computer science and software engineering, software architecture & pattern research, software configuration management, cluster computing, compilers and programming environments for parallel machines, and opto-electronic interconnects. He has consulted widely for industry.

Tichy received a B.S. from the Technical University in Munich in 1974 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1976 and 1980. He is a member of ACM, GI, and IEEE.