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.

Aino Corry is technical conference editor and traveling architect at Trifork. She holds a masters degree and a ph.d. in computer science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has been interested in patterns since 1997 and her thesis: "Patterns in Software Development" is about patterns in general and design patterns in particular.

In an EU-funded research project, PalCom, at the university, she was a traveling software architect for the common software architecture and lead the sub-project "IT-support for pregnancies". Recently, she has returned to Trifork to facilitate projects and create conferences.

Erik Meijer is an architect in the Microsoft SQL server division where he currently works together with the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft Visual Basic language design teams on data integration in programming languages.

Prior to joining Microsoft he was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Erik is one of the designers of the standard functional programming language Haskell98 and more recently the Cw language.

Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.

He has many years of experience in structured documents including the design of laser printer controllers, early commercial applications of Tex. He has advised on the IBM B2B strategy, and is on the MS Customer Advisory Council and with OLL contributed to the SCORM elearning standard, and authoring tools. He is Chairman of Xia Systems, Online-Learning.com (OLL), and a director of Stilo/Omnimark, Bitflash, Amikanow and Synop and several other software companies.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular the Java tooling.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.