Sean Baker is an independent consultant based in Dublin. He is a co-founder of IONA Technologies, and has held many executive positions in the company including CTO, Chief Scientist and VP of Applied Research. He is a regular speaker on middleware and related business issues. He is a member of the Boards of National Digital Research Centre and Delta Index, and a member of the Advisory Science Council, CIO Ireland, ICHEC Advisory Board and the Irish Software Association executive; and he was a member of the Board of the Object Management Group. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, and held a tenured post in the Department of Computer Science at TCD, where he helped form the Distributed Systems Group in 1980. He has published a number of books and articles in the area of distributed computing and application integration. He is a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society and of Engineers Ireland.

Manfred Hauswirth is Vice-Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland and professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He holds an M.S. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna. From January 2002 to September 2006 he was a senior researcher at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to his work at EPFL he was an assistant professor at the Distributed Systems Group at the TU Vienna. His main research interests are on semantic sensor networks, sensor networks middleware, large-scale semantics-enabled distributed information systems and applications, peer-to-peer systems, Internet of things, self-organization and self-management, Semantic Web services, and distributed systems security. He has published over 70 papers in these domains, he has co-authored a book on distributed software architectures and several book chapters on P2P data management and semantics. He has served in over 130 program committees of international scientific conferences and was program co-chair of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing in 2007 and general chair of the Fifth European Semantic Web Conference in 2008. He is a member of IEEE and ACM and is on the board of WISEN, the Irish Wireless Sensors Enterprise Led Network, and the scientific board of the Corporate Semantic Web research center at FU Berlin.