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Ferdinando is a theoretical ecologist and computer scientists who always loved to study natural systems as well as the mechanisms through which the metaphors originating in human and computer languages affect the making and development of science. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical Ecology from the University of Parma in his native Italy, and had a long parallel career as a scientific software designer and engineer. His research on high-performance computer simulation and mathematical modeling applied to community and ecosystem ecology earned him collaborations with UNESCO, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission. After working in most fields of Ecology from theoretical Island Biogeography to spatially-explicit decision analysis, he came to the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics initially with mixed feelings (that "economics" word...) and soon discovered the joys and pains of interdisciplinary research, which he now loves, although he finds it a challenge (and a responsibility) to maintain scientific depth unaltered in face of the greatly increased breadth. He likes to say that whereas most ecologists spend their careers seeking answers, a lot of important work remains to be done on the questions, and concentrates on issues of semantics in ecological research. As a result of that, his research now focuses on conceptual frameworks and software infrastructure for natural system data and system modelling. He has collaborated with various international institutions and governments on environmental assessment methods, and in between his main projects on integrated modelling and environmental valuation, he still manages to sneak in some research in basic ecology, protected areas planning, and related fields. He is the author or coauthor of 110+ scientific publications and a number of major open source software packages; he has been the recipient of several million dollars in federal grants, mostly from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the European Union. He is pictured here with his favorite specimen of his favorite species.

Sergey graduated in Mathematics from the University of Novosibirsk, Russia. After postgraduate studies in logic, philosophy and finally, computer science he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Intercultural Open University, the Netherlands, for his work on agent based simulation and qualitative definitions of organization in complex systems. Sergey is working on visualization models for the languages of Semantic Web and on developing the GrOWL software. Sergey still has some interest in problems of complexity and organization, his main field of research is Knowledge Representation, more specifically ontologies. He is interested in semantics of visual languages and in formal reasoning about actions and processes.

Gary Johnson is a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Vermont, who enjoys hacking away at obscure device driver code almost as much as spinning on his head and trying to figure out how to balance his body weight on his elbow. On the software end of things, he strives onward tirelessly,squashing bugs and deftly dodging the quicksand pull of GUIs in his daily sorties into the wild lands of code development, and as an advocate for Open Source technologies everywhere, he is always ready at the drop of a hat to provide a dissertation on the importance of penguins and camels in improving human welfare in the modern age.

When given the option, Gary prefers to work from his trusty-dusty Linux From Scratch platform, wielding the eclectic sword of the Perl language against the insectoid hordes, but as the need arises, he is also comfortable waging war under the various banners of x86/MIPS assembler, C, C++, Java, Javascript, TCL, LISP, OCaml, PHP, SQL, and Unix shell scripting, as well as the ubiquitous web technologies of XHTML, HTML, CSS, and the DOM. In his down time, he can usually be found playing Linux sysadmin and studying up on any piece of CLI software he can get his hands on.

Unlike the disorganized little beasties that he fights, Gary graduated summa cum laude from Marlboro College in 2004 with his B.S. in Computer Science, focusing on the development and application of Open Source GIS software for landscape mapping and wildlife monitoring, and has since been working on a daily basis to "Save the World through Perl" as he pledged to do upon first entering his alma mater.

When not armed for battle in a ThinkGeek shirt, he can be found tracking mammals and interpreting bird calls in the frozen mountains of Southern Vermont (or more recently along the city streets of Burlington), building fires with his bow drill, and adding to his botanical catalogue of native wild plants. His fellows are still waiting anxiously for the day when he will discover how to plug his computer into a tree and disappear into a snow-covered hermitage.

Ioannis holds a Diploma and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.He used to be a scientific collaborator of the Informatics and Telematics Institute, in Thessaloniki, Greece and member of the Intelligent Systems and Software Engineering Lab. Now he is a researcher with the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale), in Lugano, Switzerland. His PhD research founded a software agent framework for environmental informatics, and his current work is focusing in the virtualization of environmental information and semantic modelling with applications in ecology, natural resource management and agriculture. His research interests include software engineering for ecoinformatics, ontologies and the semantic web, intelligent systems and software agents, agent-based social modelling and simulation, decision support systems and machine learning, and data and knowledge engineering.

Danh Le Phuoc is a PhD candidate of Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway. He graduated BSc, MSc of Computer Science at Hue University of Science, Vietnam. Currently, he is working for Semantic Reality (www.semanticreality.org) group of DERI. On top of that, he is also an active developer for several open source projects such as Integrated Modelling (www.integratedmodelling.org), Semantic Web Pipes (pipes.deri.org), Triplify (www.triplify.org) in conjunction with RDF exposing and interlinking community websites sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2008 (http://developer.joomla.org/gsoc2008/semantic-web.html).