Dr. Barry Leiner is Special Assistant to the President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, working in a number of areas of distributed system and networking technologies. Of particular interest are architectures and metrics for open digital library systems, interoperable electronic payment systems, and mobile information systems.

From 1996 to 1997, Dr. Leiner was Vice President of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), responsible for its newly formed West Coast Laboratories. From 1992 to 1996, Dr. Leiner was a Senior Scientist with the Universities Space Research Association. He spent the last two years on loan to the Advanced Research Projects Agency where he was Assistant Director of the Information Technology Office. He was responsible for the area of Networked Systems, developing the information technologies required to support widely distributed operation. Particular areas of focus were mobile information systems, high performance networking, and the technologies required to facilitate distributed applications that exploit the emerging ubiquitous network environment.

Prior positions included Director of Research with Advanced Decision Systems (1990-1992), Assistant Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (1985-1990), and Assistant Director, Information Processing Techniques Office, ARPA (1980-1985). Dr. Leiner has spent the last 20 years working in the area of packet switched networking technology and its applications.

Dr. Leiner is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (B.E.E.E. 1967) and Stanford University (M.S.E.E. 1969, Ph.D. 1973). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and the Internet Society and a senior member of the IEEE.

Dr. Edward Fox holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a B.S. from M.I.T. Since 1983 he has been at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU), where he serves as Associate Director for Research at the Computing Center, and Professor of Computer Science. He directs the Digital Library Research Laboratory, "Interactive Learning with a Digital Library in Computer Science", "Improving Graduate Education with a National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations", and a number of other research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech, Dr. Fox has taught more than 25 tutorials, in 9 countries. For 1988-95, Dr. Fox served as vice chair and then chair of ACM SIGIR.

Goal for the Workshop: To develop a science for DL, we must have metrics; these will help make studies comparable, and lead to technical advances much as has occurred in the information retrieval field for decades, or in the HCI arena in recent years.

Dr. William M. (Bill) Pottenger is a Project Director of the Interspace Prototype at CANIS - Community Architectures for Network Information Systems Laboratory in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bill has spent the last seven years in the field of optimizing compilers for parallel supercomputers, and recently began applying optimization techniques to digital library applications in his role as a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Bill is currently also serving as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bill's research interests at the CANIS Lab include the development of models of network information systems which scale across subject domain, media type, and collection size. CANIS has a unique record of fifteen years of large-scale development of new network information systems. Some models include: the Telesophy System, the Worm Community System, the Digital Libraries Initiative Testbed, and the Interspace Prototype. Funding has been provided by flagship grants from NSF and DARPA.

Goals for the workshop: Bill's specific interests include research into scalable automatic methods of validation.

Mr. Robert E. McGrath is a software developer and technical team leader at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has masters degrees in psychology and computer science, and has studied distributed and parallel systems for many years. He helped implement the original NCSA Web service, and has studied the scalability of the Illinois digital library architecture. He is co-author of the book on "Web Server Technology", published by Morgan Kauffman in 1996.

Goals for the workshop: Advances in technology have enabled us to scale up information systems extremely quickly, creating huge, diverse networks of information. This scale up has far outstripped our ability to measure and evaluate these systems. Furthermore, using the new systems is qualitatively different than previous systems, so we need new measures of quality and effectiveness.