Paulo Alencar is a Research Professor with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and Associate Director of the Computer Systems Group. He received the BSc and MSc degrees in Physics (1980, 1983) from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, and the PhD degree in Computer Science (1992) from PUC-Rio, Brazil, in cooperation with GMD and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He has more than 20 years of experience in the software engineering and formal methods, and has made significant contributions to many areas, including software design and architectures, user interfaces, web-based applications, mobile software systems, software agents, and event and context-oriented applications. Dr. Alencar has received international research awards from organizations such as Compaq (Compaq Award for best research paper in 1995 for his work on a software evolution theory) and IBM (IBM Innovation Award, 2003). He has published over 140 refereed publications, and has been a member of program committees of numerous highly-regarded conferences and workshops. He has been a leading investigator in national projects supported by NSERC, Sybase, IBM, CITO, CSER, and Bell, and has engaged in many collaborative international projects involving Germany, Argentina, and Brazil.
Donald Cowan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, and Director of the Computer Systems Group. He received his education at the Universities of Toronto (BASc – 1960, Engineering Physics), Waterloo (MSc – 1961 and PhD – 1965, Applied Mathematics) and Guelph (honorary DSc. - 2011). His current academic specializations include software engineering, software applications, and web-based information systems incorporating geomatics. His recent research has focused on the design and implementation of the Web Informatics Development Environment (WIDE) toolkit, which has been used to produce over 70 operational web-based information systems in the areas of environment, community information, economic development, cultural heritage and health. Donald Cowan is the founding Chairman of the Computer Science Department in the Faculty of Mathematics (1967) at the University of Waterloo (now the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science). He is the author or co-author of over 250 refereed papers and 15 books in computer science, computer/communications, software engineering, education, environmental information systems, and mathematics.