Srikant Ramachandran is a Technical Leader within the Smart Services Technology Group at Cisco Systems. Srikant holds more than twenty years of experience in the networking industry with strong skill-sets in service delivery. Prior to joining Cisco, Srikant worked for Cisco partners in Australia consulting with customers and delivering professional services in advanced technologies such as Unified Communications. At Cisco, he leads research efforts and develops prototypes to test new ideas with a clear focus of applying such research to improve the efficiencies in service delivery to customers and partners. He also offers subject matter expertise in Unified Communications.

Srikant obtained his Masters degree in Computer Science from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand and the Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli. He has held the prestigious industry-recognized certification, the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) since 2001 along with specializations in Unified Communications. His research interests include Information Extraction, Retrieval and Knowledge maintenance.

Ying Chen is a Research Staff Member, Master Inventor and manager in IBM Almaden Services Research. Ying received Ph.D from Computer Science Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. She has over 13 years of industry experience in established IBM research center and storage Startup Company. Her current research focuses are in Text Analytics, Data mining, Service-Oriented Computing, and its application in social media analysis, patent and scientific literature analysis and financial analysis. She also has extensive backgrounds in storage systems, parallel and distributed computing, databases, performance evaluation and modeling.

Murray Campbell is a Senior Manager in the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. His group focuses on the application of analytics to solve business problems in areas such as workforce management and healthcare. Previously, Murray was a member of the team that developed Deep Blue, which in 1997 became the first computer to defeat the reigning world chess champion in a regulation match. Murray received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computing science from the University of Alberta in 1979 and 1981 respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. Murray is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Raghu Krishnapuram received his B. Tech degree from IIT-B and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. From 1987 to 2000, he was a faculty member at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado School of Mines,Golden, Colorado. Dr. Krishnapuram joined IBM Research - India in 2000. His research encompasses many aspects of analytics, optimization, artificial intelligence, and data mining. He has published over 160 papers in journals and conferences in these areas.

He is currently Associate Director, Solutions, IBM Research - India, where he is leading research projects in the areas of information management, telecom, IT/Wireless convegence, analytics and optimization, with a particular focus on emerging markets. Dr. Krishnapuram is an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the Technology Council of the IBM Academy of Technology.