Eric
Raymond is one of the leading pioneers of the
Open Source Software (OSS) community, being one of
the group who coined the term in 1998. His paper, The
Cathedral and the Bazaar, which represents one of the
first rigorous and thorough analyses of the OSS
phenomenon has become the classic reference in the
area. Eric Raymond has written extensively on the OSS
phenomenon, with insightful articles such as
Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron.
These papers are very much concerned with the social
aspects of software development; thus, they will have
a good resonance with the spirit of the IFIP 8.2
group. He is a very forthright and committed speaker
and is very much in demand in this role nowadays. His
address on Open Source Software can be anticipated to
provoke much debate and discussion.
Michel
Parent has spent half of his time in research and
academia at such places as Stanford University and
MIT in the USA and INRIA in France where he is
currently the program director of the R&D effort
for " La Route Automatisée ", a program he
initiated following his research into a novel public
transportation system based on small automated
electric cars. Praxitele was the first version of
such a system, and it has been successfully tested in
the city of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines between 1997
and 1999 with 50 electric cars from Renault.
Michel was the president of the French Robotics
Association between 1982 and 1990 and is the author
of several books on robotics and vision and of many
scientific papers. He has organized several national
and international seminars or conferences and has
been teaching at various schools and universities.
Michel has an engineering degree from the French
Aeronautics School (ENSAE), a Masters degree in
Operation Research and a Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Case Western Reserve University, USA.
Robert
L. Glass is president of Computing Trends,
publishers of The Software Practitioner. He has
been active in the field of computing and software
for over 45 years, largely in industry (1954-1982 and
1988-present), but also as an academic (1982-1988).
He is the author of over 20 books and 70 papers on
computing subjects, editor of Elsevier's Journal of
Systems and Software, and a columnist for several
periodicals including Communications of the ACM (the
"Practical Programmer" column) and IEEE
Software ("The Loyal Opposition"). He
was for 15 years a Lecturer for the ACM, and was
named a Fellow of the ACM in 1998. He received
an honorary Ph.D. from Linkoping University in Sweden
in 1995. He describes himself by saying "my
head is in the academic area of computing, but my
heart is in its practice."
Pek
van Andel is a medical researcher who
developed an artificial cornea. His low-cost
'keratoprosthesis' device is still the most used and
was honored in 1992 with an innovation prize from the
city of Groningen, Netherlands where he studied
and currently works. He researches the nature of
serendipity in science, technology and art, and has
published about seventeen 'serendipity patterns' (Brit.
J. Phil. Sci. 45 (1994), 631-648). Most recently he
completed a book for the Cambridge University Press
entitled 'Gardens of Serendip' in which he analyzes
thirty patterns of serendipity. This book is the
result of his most recent serendipity research.
