Referenten

Prof. Dr. Gregory Kersten
University of Ottawa, Canada

Gregory received his M.Sc. in Econometrics and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Warsaw School of Economics, Poland. His research and teaching interests include individual and group decision-making, negotiations and e-negotiations, knowledge-based systems and knowledge management, decision and negotiation support, Internet technologies and web-based systems, and electronic business.

He is a founding member and the first Director of the Concordia Electronic Commerce Institute and the Decision Analysis Lab (DAL), the Principal Investigator of the InterNeg Project (http://interneg.org), and a member of the Ottawa Carleton Institute for Computer Science. He is a Vice-Chairperson of the INFORMS Group Decision and Negotiation College, a departmental editor of the Group Decision and Negotiation Journal and member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Decision Systems, INFOR, and Control & Cybernetic Journal.  

Gregory has written over a hundred refereed papers, co-authored three books and has published articles in over twenty journals. In the InterNeg project which he founded in 1995 and has been co-ordinating since then the first Web-based e-negotiation system, Inspire, was built and used by thousands of people from over sixty countries, and the site “for and about negotiations research and training” was established. He is now working on an interactive course on “Negotiation and e-negotiation management and support” to be delivered in September 2002 to universities in Canada, Mexico and Europe in a mix of face-to-face and on-line modes.

He was a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He was a consultant for projects of the International Development Research Centre Canada, Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, Department of National Defence, and a Co-ordinator of the "Canadian management training and development program for Poland", Department of External Affairs Canada.

Prof. Dr. Martin Bichler
TU München

Martin Bichler received his MSc in Information Systems from the Technical University of Vienna, and his Ph. D. as well as his Habilitation (2000) from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, where he was Associate Professor at the Department of Information Systems. From 1997 to 1998, he was a research fellow at UC Berkeley. 2001 to 2003 he was research staff member in Deep E-Commerce team of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.

Martin has been involved in research and development in the areas of supply chain management, electronic markets, distributed systems, and operations research. He has published papers in journals such as Decision Support Systems, EJOR, GDN, Computer Networks, and the Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases. Martin has designed and developed several software packages. He was lead architect and project manager for the first version of MyTravelDream.com. The IBM MAP object framework has been integrated in Digital Union's ezMarket Platform and is now in use with a number of large-scale procurement auction sites and private exchanges. Martin has been on the program committee of many international conferences and workshops and is on the editorial board of the Electronic Commerce Research Journal. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society (TFEC), ACM, GI, WKWI and OCG. 

Dr. Michael Merz
Ponton Consulting, Hamburg

Michael Merz ist Diplom-Informatiker und Diplom-Kaufmann. Er promovierte 1996 am Fachbereich Informatik der Universität Hamburg mit "Summa cum Laude" und war anschließend Leiter verschiedener Forschungsprojekte im Bereich e-Commerce. Michael Merz leitet seit 1999 als Geschäftsführer das Unternehmen Ponton Consulting, ein IT-Beratungsunternehmen mit Schwerpunkt im Bereich eBusiness und XML. Dr. Merz hat seitdem verschiedene Forschungs- und Beratungsprojekte in diesem Umfeld geleitet und ist Autor mehrerer Bücher zum Thema "Electronic Commerce". 

Dr. Hans Weigand
University of Tilburg, The Netherlands 

Hans Weigand studied Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His Ph.D. thesis, defended also at the Vrije Universiteit, applied linguistics to the field of knowledge representation. In 1989, he moved to Tilburg University where he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the Fac. of Economics, Dept. of Information Management.

As part of the ESPRIT project TREVI, a multilingual lexicon has been developed that supports news filtering. As part of the ESPRIT project MEMO, industrial research has been done on Electronic Commerce, in particular the development of a Formal Language for Business Communication (FLBC) based on speech act theory and logic, as well as a Negotiation Support System for e-commerce. The last few years, his research interests have shifted to communication modelling, communication support (for example, agent societies, negotiation support systems, e-contracting systems), and communication in relationship to organizational coordination questions.

Hans Weigand is a senior member of the Research School CentER (for economic research) and the Research School SIKS (for Information and Knowledge Systems). He has published more than 60 refereed papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of the editorial board of Data & Knowledge Engineering.

Prof. Dr. Paul Grefen
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Paul Grefen is a full professor in the Department of Technology Management at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he leads the ICT Architectures group. From 1992 until 2003, he held assistant and associate professor positions in the Information Systems and Database Groups of the Computer Science Department at the University of Twente. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Twente on the subject of integrity control in parallel database systems. He was a visiting researcher at Stanford University in 1994. From 1995 to 1999, he was involved in the WIDE ESPRIT project, which focused on advanced database support for workflow management systems. From 1998 to 2000, he was involved in the CrossFlow ESPRIT project, which aimed at the development of cross-organizational workflow support for dynamic virtual enterprises. He has been a member of the program committees of a large number of international conferences and a regular reviewer for several international journals. He was main editor of the book on the WIDE project and has published a book on workflow management. His current research interests include architectural design of complex information systems, high-level transaction management, advanced workflow management, and contract support in electronic business.

Dr. Yigal Hoffner
IBM Zürich

Yigal Hoffner is part of the e-Business Solution Group at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Yigal works on models, services and tools needed to support eBusiness on Demand with a strong emphasis on matchmaking. He was the technical leader of the CrossFlow ESPRIT project, which dealt with cross organisational workflow management. Prior to working at IBM, Yigal worked on the development of a distributed system architecture at the Advanced Networked Systems Architecture (ANSA) project in Cambridge, UK. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and Cybernetics and a PhD in Computer Science.