David Holmes is a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, working in the VM Real-Time group on the Java Real-time System product. Located in Brisbane, Australia, David's previous work with Java technology focused on concurrency and synchronization support in the language and virtual machine and his prior project involved developing a real-time virtual machine that supported version 1.0 of the Realtime Specification for Java (RTSJ). David was a member of the JCP Expert Group for JSR-166 (Concurrency Utilities), that shipped in the Java 5 release, is a current member of the expert group for JSR-282 (RTSJ 1.1) and is on the Technical Interpretation Committee for the RTSJ. He has presented tutorials on concurrent Java programming and design at numerous international object-oriented programming conferences over the past nine years, and more recently tutorials on Real-time Java programming. Along with Ken Arnold and James Gosling, he is a co-author of the book "The Java Programming Language" - Third and Fourth Editions. He was also a contributing author to "Java Concurrency in Practice", by Brian Goetz et al. David completed his Ph.D. at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1999, in the area of synchronization within object-oriented systems.

Don Syme is a Senior Researcher in the MSR Cambridge Programming Principles and Tools group. He joined MSR in 1998, and was the initiator, co-designer and co-implementer of Generics for .NET and C# 2.0. More recently he is the designer and co-implementer of the F# language and co-author of "Expert F#".

Joel Pobar is a compiler and languages geek who recently relocated to the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. He was previously a Program Manager on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) team where he worked on late-bound dynamic CLR features and API's, the Shared Source CLI (Rotor) program, Generics and Dynamic languages. He is active in the .NET community, spending his spare time writing blog entries, articles for his favourite publication (MSDN magazine), and regularly speaks at Microsoft technology conferences.

Dr. Kresten Krab Thorup is Chief Architext and Co-founder of Trifork A/S. Thorup received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Aarhus; he has served on the expert group for JSR-14 (Adding Generics to Java), and is currently serving on JSR 244 (Java EE 5.0). Before joining Trifork, Thorup spend three years at NeXT in San Francisco.

Steve Vinoski is a member of technical staff at Verivue, a startup in Westford, MA, USA. He was previously chief architect and Fellow at IONA Technologies for a decade, and prior to that held various software and hardware engineering positions at Hewlett-Packard, Apollo Computer, and Texas Instruments.

Over the past 15 years, Steve has authored or co-authored approximately 70 highly-regarded publications on distributed computing and enterprise integration for magazines such as IEEE Internet Computing, C/C++ Users Journal, and C++ Report, and co-authored the book "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++" with Michi Henning, published in 1999.

Since early 2002 he has written a regular column entitled "Toward Integration" for IEEE Internet Computing, and serves as a member of its editorial board. Steve first wrote about REST in his July/August 2002 "Toward Integration" column, and his January/February 2007 column, entitled "REST Eye for the SOA Guy," serves as the inspiration for his QCon talk. Steve is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.