Dr. Cardenas was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and obtained the B.S degree from San Diego State University and the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1969. He was a visiting scientist/consultant to IBM Corporation in 1972-1975. He has been a consultant to many organizations in several countries. He is author and co-editor of several books, and of many other publications. His major areas of interest include database management, distributed heterogeneous and multimedia (text, image/picture, voice) systems, information systems planning and development methodologies, software engineering, and legal and intellectual property issues. He has been a consultant to both users and vendors of hardware and software technology.

Rajive Bagrodia is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. He obtained a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 1981. He obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1983 and 1987 respectively. He was selected as a Presidential Young Investigator by NSF in 1991. He is also the recipient of the 1992 TRW Outstanding Young Teacher award and the UCLA Computer Science Department Excellence in teaching award.

His research interests include distributed algorithms, parallel languages, programming methodology and performance evaluation. He has served as the Program Chair and the General Chair for the Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation and has served as a session chair and/or member of the Program Committee for various conferences including International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, International Conference on System Integration, Winter Simulation Conference, and PADS.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Programming Languages, Parallel and Distributed Computing, Parallel Programming, Parallel compilers, and Distributed Simulation.

Dr. Avizienis was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, and has resided in the USA since 1950. He received the B.S. (1954), M.S. (1955), and the Ph.D. (1960) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and joined the UCLA Faculty in 1962. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of the AIAA Information Systems Award (1979), the NASA Exceptional Service Medal (1980), the annual IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (1985) and the IFIP Silver Core Award (1986). His teaching and research interests are in computer system architecture, digital arithmetic, and fault-tolerant computing, especially software fault tolerance, fault-tolerant distributed system architectures, and design methodology for fault-tolerant systems.