Dr. Dennis Gannon is the Director of Applications for the Cloud Computing Futures Group. Prior to coming to Microsoft, he was a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University and the Science Director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs and, for seven years, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include large-scale cyberinfrastructure, programming systems and tools, distributed computing, computer networks, parallel programming, computational science, problem solving environments and performance analysis of Grid and MPP systems. He led the DARPA HPC++ project and he was one of the architects of the Department of Energy SciDAC Common Software Component Architecture (CCA). He was a partner in the NSF Computational Cosmology Grand Challenge project, the NSF Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery and the NCSA Alliance. He served on the steering committee of the GGF, now the Open Grid Forum and the Executive Steering Committee of the NSF Teragrid where he managed the TeraGrid Science Advisory Board. He was the Program Chair for the IEEE 2002 High Performance Distributed Computing Conference, the General Chair of the 1998 International Symposium on Scientific Object Oriented Programming Environments and the 2000 ACM Java Grande Conference, and Program Chair for the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing as well as the 1995 IEEE Frontiers of Massively Parallel Processing. He was the Program Chair for the International Grid Conference, Barcelona, 2006 and co-chair of the 2008 IEEE e-Science Conference. While he was Chair of the Computer Science Department at Indiana University, he led the team that designed the University's new School of Informatics. For that effort he was given the School's Hermes Award in 2006. He has published over 100 refereed articles and co-edited 3 books. He received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1980 after receiving a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Manish Parashar is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, and is also co-director of the Center for Autonomic Computing, director of the The Applied Software Systems Laboratory (TASSL), and Associate Director of the Rutgers Center for Information Assurance (RUCIA). Recently, he joined the National Science Foundation as a Program Director in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) working on the Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CF21) vision. He is affiliated with CAIP, WINLAB, CBIM and IMCS, and currently holds a visiting postion at the eScience Institute at Edinburgh, UK. He has held a joint research appointment with the Center for Subsurface Modeling,  The University of Texas at Austin , and a visiting position at the Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Images et Systemes d'information (LIRIS) , Lyon France. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Department of Computer Science and DOE ASCI/ASAP  Center, California Institute of Technology, at the DOE ASCI/ASAP FLASH Center, University of Chicago, and at the Max-Plank Institute in Potsdam , Germany . His research interests are in the broad area of parallel and distributed computing and include pervasive computational systems, autonomic computing, Grid peer-to-peer computing, scientific computing and software engineering. A key focus of his current research is on solving scientific and engineering problems on very large systems and the integration of physical and computational systems.

Dr. Roger Barga is currently an Architect and group lead in the Cloud Computing Futures (CCF) team. CCF is part of the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG), a new organization in Microsoft Research established to push the boundaries of computing. His team is responsible for engaging researchers in academia and government labs to leverage cloud computing infrastructure for their research. As part of this initiative, they are developing core services for research as a set of coherent and composable solutions, and they provide select reference data sets in the cloud to enable communities of researchers. Their goal is to make simple yet powerful tools available, that any researcher can use to extract insights by mining and combining diverse data sets. His team also offers tutorials on cloud computing, identifies best practices for deploying research applications and data collections in the cloud, and serve as thought leaders on the application of cloud computing for research. Prior to joining XCG I worked a Principal Architect for External Research (MSR), where I lead the Advanced Research Services and Tools (ARTS) team. The ARTS team was responsible for developing innovative tools and services using Microsoft products and technology accelerate research, such as the Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench, The Research Information Centre VRE, and Dryad/DryadLINQ on HPCS. His team also provided strategic and tactical hands-on technological leadership to projects across External Research’s international engagements. I joined Microsoft in 1997 as a Researcher in the Database Group of Microsoft Research, where I was involved in a number of systems research projects and product development efforts in database systems, application recovery, workflow and stream processing. Throughout his career at Microsoft he has enjoyed developing ideas from basic research, through proof of concept prototypes to incubation efforts in product groups. 

Dr. Kate Keahey is a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Computation Institute fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research interests focus on virtualization, resource management, and cloud computing. She is the founder and lead of the Nimbus project. Nimbus is an open source toolkit that allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud.

Dr. Peter Dinda is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, and head of its Computer Engineering and Systems division, which includes 17 faculty members.  He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a  Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.  He works in experimental computer systems, particularly parallel and distributed systems.  His research currently involves virtualization for distributed and parallel computing (http://v3vee.org/ and http://virtuoso.cs.northwestern.edu/), programming languages for sensor networks (http://absynth-project.org/), and empathic systems for bridging individual user satisfaction and systems-level decision-making (http://empathicsystems.org/). More information can be found at http://pdinda.org/. 

Dr. Robert Grossman is the Managing Partner of Open Data Group. Open Data helps companies develop and improve their analytic strategies and provides outsourced analytic services so that companies can increase revenues, decrease costs, and improve business processes. He is also the Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The Laboratory for Advanced Computing develops open source technology for internet-scale and cloud computing, such as UDT and Sector and hosts the development of standards, such as the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML). He has had a half time appointment at UIC since 1996. He is also an Associate Senior Fellow at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology (IGSB) at the University of Chicago. Robert Grossman provides services to support litigation and as an expert witness in the general areas of Internet technology, predictive modeling and data minining, risk modeling, e-business, e-marketing, analytic architectures, and high performance computing and networking. He has been active in these areas since the mid 1980’s and can address these areas from his personal experience, from a business perspective, or from a research perspective. He is a Member of the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), having been elected for the terms 2005-2009 and 2009-2011. Grossman is a frequent speaker and often participates on panels at conferences and trade shows about data mining, business intelligence, knowledge discovery, data warehousing, e-business, and web and grid computing. He has written over 120 papers and edited four books on these and related subjects. He earned his A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.