Richard N. Taylor is a Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Cali-fornia, Irvine, in the Department of Informatics. Hereceived a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980. Professor Taylor is Director of the Institute for Software Research, which is dedicated to fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies through partnerships with industry and government. He has taught courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in software engineering, software design, project development, and software engineering environments. He is the author of more than 100 journal and conference publications and has chaired the dissertation committees of over twenty Ph.D. graduates. He has served as chairman of ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering, SIGSOFT, and as chairman of the steering committee for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). He has served as an expert witness in several intellectual property disputes. Taylor was a 1985 recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1998, he was recognized as an ACM Fellow and in 2005 was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award.

Nenad Medvidović is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. As of January 1, 2009, he is the Director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE). Medvidović has taught undergraduate, graduate, and industry courses in software engineering, software architecture, software engineering for embedded systems, and formal methods. He has published more than 100 journal and conference papers and has chaired the dissertation committees of seven Ph.D. graduates. Along with Richard N. Taylor and Peyman Oreizy, he co-authored the ICSE 1998 paper titled, "Architecture-Based Runtime Software Evolution," which in 2008 was named that conference's most influential paper. Professors Medvidović and Taylor's paper, "AClassification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages," was recognized by the Elsevier Information and Software Technology Journal as the most cited journal article in software engineering published in 2000. Medvidović served as a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in creating their software architect training program (SWAP). He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and the IBM Real-Time Innovation Award.

Eric M. Dashofy is a senior member of the technical staff in the Computer Systems Research Department at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has written numerous technical publications in software engineering and architecture. He is the lead developer of the ArchStudio architecture-centric software development environment, an open-source, Eclipse-based tool set for modeling, visualizing, analyzing, and implementing architecture-based software systems. He also co-authored the xADL 2.0 architecture description language, upon which ArchStudio is based. His current work focuses on software architecture, high-performance computing, and wireless sensor networks of embedded devices.