Robert J. Aiken is the senior manager of Academic Research Technology Initiatives at Cisco Systems Inc. These encompass Cisco’s University Research Program and Cisco’s global next-generation network activities—Internet 2 and Gigaport. His areas of research include Electronic Persistence Presence (EPP) and online Research Networks (RNs). Both represent dramatic changes to the way computer networks are conceptualized, created, and accessed by users. His publications include "New Frontiers for Research Networks in the 21st Century" (1999) in Cisco's The Internet Protocol Journal.

Before joining Cisco, Aiken was the network and security research program manager for the US Department of Energy's Computing, Information, and Communications Program. He was the program manager and main author of DOE’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, while also providing leadership and direction for DOE's ESnet and DOE2000 programs. At the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Aiken created and managed ANL's Network Research group. In 1991 he coauthored the conceptual design and architecture of the second generation NSFNET, which enabled the commercialization of the Internet backbone.

Aiken's academic posts include assistant professor of computer science at Hood College in Maryland, adjunct professor at California State University Hayward, and manager of Technology Services at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Howard Bloom is a visiting scholar at New York University and executive editor of the New Paradigm book series. In 1997 he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants have included psychologists, systems theorists, physicists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, and invertebrate zoologists. Two years earlier, Bloom founded an informal academic circle called The Group Selection Squad, whose efforts precipitated a radical reevaluation of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community.

He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology, the European Sociobiological Society, and the Academy of Political Science. Bloom is also a board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, a founding council member of The Darwin Project, advisory board member of youthactivism.org, and founder of the International Paleopsychology Project.

The introduction to Bloom's theories, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995), has undergone 14 printings and been the focus of considerable attention in the scientific community. He is also the author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000).

Ron Dekker is currently the head of the Scientific Statistical Agency (WSA in Dutch), a subsidiary of the Social Science Research Council. Founded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research in 1994, the SSA acts as an intermediary between scientists and data producers, and serves as the front office for microdata from Statistics Netherlands and other relevant data providers.

From 1999 to 2001, Dekker was head of The Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) Data Archives, which comprise the Steinmetz Archive (social sciences) and The Netherlands Historical Data Archive. His memberships and other activities include serving as vice-president of IASSIST, the International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology, a member of the Advisory Board of the Historical Sample Netherlands, and secretary of ESSNeth, the Research Council’s advisory committee on the European Social Survey. Dekker studied econometrics and worked for ten years as a researcher, mainly on labor economics and educational subjects.

Ricky Erway is product manager for multimedia services at RLG, Inc. with responsibility for RLG Archival Resources, The AMICO Library™ from RLG, and RLG Cultural Materials. She has been with RLG for seven years, starting as a program officer in Member Services. Before joining RLG, Erway was at the Library of Congress for nine years, the last five as associate coordinator of the American Memory program, aimed at significantly increasing public access to the special collections of the Library of Congress.

Ian Foster is a senior scientist and associate director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, and senior fellow in the Argonne/University of Chicago Computation Institute. He currently co-leads the Globus project with Dr. Carl Kesselman of USC/Information Sciences Institute, as well as a number of other major Grid initiatives, including Earth System Grid (funded by the US Department of Energy) and the GriPhyN and GRIDS Center projects (funded by the National Science Foundation).

Foster leads computer science projects developing advanced distributed computing technologies and parallel tools, as well as computational science efforts applying advanced computing techniques to scientific problems—in areas such as climate modeling and the analysis of data from physics experiments. In 2001 he was the chair of three conferences in the US and abroad dealing with distributed computing, super computing, and high performance computing.

Foster has written frequently in popular and academic journals on the GRID distributed computing concept, which enables large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data, and other resources across national and institutional boundaries. A book he edited with Dr. Kesselman, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, was published in 1998. Foster has written two other books on parallel program design and parallel programming, published in 1989 and 1995.

Eric Ketelaar is professor of archivistics in the Department of Book, Archives and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His current teaching and research concern the social and cultural context of records creation and use. From 2000 to 2001 he was The Netherlands Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (School of Information). From 1992 to 2002 he held the chair of archivistics in the Department of History at the University of Leiden. In 2000 the ICA elected him honorary president. He was general state archivist (national archivist) of The Netherlands from 1989 to 1997. For 20 years he served the International Council on Archives (ICA) in different capacities.

Ketelaar has written some 200 articles in several languages, including two books that are general introductions to archival research. He has conducted seminars across the globe on archival legislation, appraisal, and archival management. In 1997, The Archival Image, a collection of his essays in English, French, and German, was published. He is one of the three editors-in-chief of Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information.