Biographies of Invited Speakers Franco P. Preparata Franco P. Preparata is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University since January 1991. Formerly he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of research establishments, such as the University of Pisa, Italy, I.N.R.I.A., Rocquencourt, France, the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, Kyoto University and the Academia Sinica, Taiwan.     He began his research activity in switching and coding theory, and discovered the first known class of optimum nonlinear codes (known as the Preparata codes). Gradually his interests evolved towards the design and analysis of computer algorithms. He has made pioneering contributions to computational geometry, parallel computation and VLSI theory, and computational metrology. Currently his major research focus is computational biology.     He has published over 200 papers in these fields and is the author (or co-author) of three textbooks: Introduction to Discrete Structures (with R.T. Yeh), Introduction to Computer Engineering, and Computational Geometry (with M. I. Shamos).     Dr. Preparata is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM, and he is listed in a large number of standard professional references. In 1993 he received the Darlington Prize of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. In 1994 he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science. In 1997 he received the “Laurea honoris causa” (honorary doctorate) in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy.   Mikhail J. Atallah Mikhail J. Atallah is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science (1982) at Purdue University and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (courtesy). He received his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University in 1982, and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University in 1980.     His current research interests are in information security (in particular, secure protocols, software security, and watermarking). He received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1985. A Fellow of the IEEE, he has served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Information Processing Letters, Computational Geometry: Theory & Applications, International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications, Parallel Processing Letters, and Methods of Logic in Computer Science. He was guest editor for a special issue of Algorithmica on Computational Geometry, has served as editor of the Handbook of Parallel and Distributed Computing (McGraw-Hill), as editorial advisor for the Handbook of Computer Science and Engineering, (CRC Press), and as editor for Handbook of Algorithms and Theory of Computation (CRC Press). He was selected to serve on the program committees of various conferences and workshops (including ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, International World Wide Web Conference, ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Australasian Information Security Workshop, ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium, International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, and many others). He was keynote and invited speaker at many national and international meetings. In June 2001, he co-founded the software startup Arxan Technologies Inc. that has secured funding from top-tier venture capital firms.