Carlos J. P. Lucena is a Full-Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio (since 1982); Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Senior Research Associate, Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (since 1993); full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include multi-agent systems, electronic commerce, software engineering, and formal methods. Over three hundred refereed papers and five books in the above mentioned areas. He presented (and published papers) and acted as Program Committee Member in about 30 international conferences (example of sponsors: IEEE, ACM, AFIPS, IFIP, IFAC etc.). He has organized and chaired international conferences and workshops, in particular the first edition of the SELMAS workshop. Moreover, he acted twice as area chairman for IFIP World Congresses (1980, 1992) and four times as Program Committee member for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

Alexander Romanovsky received a PhD degree in Computer Science from St. Petersburg State Technical University. He was with this University from 1984 until 1996, doing research and teaching. In 1992-2000 he was involved in the Predictably Dependable Computing Systems (PDCS) ESPRIT Basic Research Action, the Design for Validation (DeVa) ESPRIT Basic Project, and the Diversity in Safety Critical Software (DISCS) EPSRC/UK Project. Now he is a Senior Research Associate with the School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), working on the Dependable Systems of Systems (DSoS) EC IST RTD Project. He is serving as a PC or steering committee member in AdaEurope 2003, WORDS 2003 and ISORC 2003. In 2002 he organised an ICSE 2002 workshop on Architecturing Dependable Systems. His research interests include software fault tolerance, concurrent programming, exception handling, software engineering, mobile systems, software architectures and distributed systems. He has co-authored more than 120 scientific papers, book chapters, and a patent in these and related areas.

Donald D. Cowan received the BASc degree in engineering physics from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1960 and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in applied mathematics in 1961 and 1965, respectively. He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and the director of the Computer Systems Group. He is the founding chairman of the Computer Science Department at the university. His research interests include computer/communications, software engineering, education, environmental information systems and mathematics. He has published over three hundred papers. Dr. Cowan is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ACM.

Paulo S. C. Alencar received the BSc and MSc degrees in physics from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, and the PhD degree in computer science from PUC-Rio, Brazil, in cooperation with GMD and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1992. He is currently a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research, teaching, and consulting activities have been directed toward software engineering and formal methods in software engineering. Professor Alencar has been a visiting professor at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, and at the University of Waterloo. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. He has published more than 70 technical papers. He is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, CIPS, ACFAS, and AAAI.

Jaelson Castro received BSc. and MSc. degrees in Electronic Engineering and Informatics, from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1982 and 1986, respectively and the PhD. degree in Computing from Imperial College, University of London, England, in 1990. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (since 1992), Brazil, where he leads the Requirements Engineering Laboratory (LER) . His current research interests include requirements engineering, multi-agent systems, software architecture, object-oriented analysis and design methods. He co-chaired the first edition of the Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems - SELMAS02 (ICSE 2002), acted as the conference chair for The Fourth International Conference on the Unified Modeling - UML 2001, co-chaired the Workshop From SofTware Requirements to Architectures - STRAW01 (ICSE 2001), co-chaired the Workshop on Interactive System Development and Object Models - WISDOM'99 (ECOOP 2001), an served as conference chair for the IX Brazilian Software Engineering Symposium - SBES 1995. He has published over one hundred papers and book chapters. Dr. Castro is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Brazilian Computer Society - SBC.