Speakers

The 2006 LASER school brings together six of the best experts in the field:

• Ralph-Johan Back, Abo Akademi University
  Ralph-Johan Back is Professor of Computer Science at Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. He has presently a 5-year research position (Academy professor) at the Academy of Finland. He is the director for one of the Centers of Excellence nominated and funded by the Academy of Finland (Center for Formal Methods in Programming). He was the founder of TUCS (Turku Centre for Computer Science) and its first director, 1993 - 2000. He received his Ph.D. from University of Helsinki in 1978. He has spent a post doctoral year at the Mathematical Center (now CWI) in Amsterdam (1979-80), held a professor position at the University of Tampere (1982-83), and been a visiting professor at Caltech (1991-92) and Universty of Utrecht (1994).
  He is the inventor of the Refinement Calculus (1978) and the co-inventor of the Action system formalism (1982, together with Reino Kurki-Suonio). He has written two books on the Refinement Calculus, one published in 1980 and the second (jointly with Joakim von Wright) in 1998. His main interests are formal methods (in particular programming logics, programing methods, semantics and mechanized reasoning), distributed and parallel systems, multiprocessor technology, software engineering and teaching of mathematics. He is a member of IFIP WG 2.3 and Academia Europea.
  
  

• Erik Meijer, Microsoft
  Erik Meijer is an architect in the SQL Server division where he runs a small incubation team that collaborates with the Visual Basic and C# teams on making programming against data radically simpler for the masses. In the past, Erik has worked on programming languages such as Haskell, Mondrian, and Cω.
  

• Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zürich/Eiffel Software
  Bertrand Meyer is Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zürich and Chief Architect of Eiffel Software. His current research interests include object technology, Trusted Components, proofs of classes, object-oriented concurrency. He is the author of Object-Oriented Software Construction and other books on software engineering, object technology, and programming languages.
  
  

• Andreas Zeller, University of Saarland
  Andreas Zeller is computer science professor at Saarland University; he researches large programs and their history, and has developed a number of methods to determine the causes of program failures. His book Why programs fail is now available from Morgan Kaufmann.

• Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
  Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.
  
  A popular writer and speaker, Mary’s classes apply lean principles to Software Development problems and offer a fresh perspective on software development processes. Her book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004.

• Miguel de Icaza, Novell