Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for 20 years. He is the author of the best-selling book "Java Concurrency In Practice", as well as over 75 articles on software development. He is a frequent presenter at major industry conferences, and serves on numerous JCP expert groups. Brian is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Don Syme is a Principal Researcher in the MSR Cambridge Programming Principles and Tools group. He joined MSR in 1998, and was the initiator, co-designer and co-implementer of Generics for .NET and C# 2.0. More recently he is the designer and co-implementer of the F# language and co-author of "Expert F#".

Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, is an independent software designer, consultant and application architect with over 20 years of experience in all facets of software development. Rich has worked on scheduling systems, broadcast automation, audio analysis and fingerprinting, database design, yield management, exit poll systems, and machine listening, in a variety of languages.

He is co-creator of Haskell, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and thus; one of those who shapes the languages that you will be using in the future.

Simon Peyton Jones has a MA, MBCS, CEng and graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University. He is an Honorary Professor of the Computer Science Department at Glasgow University.

Simon Peyton Jones is mainly interested in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. In practical terms, that means he spends most of his time on the design and implementation of Haskell. In particular the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and its ramifications. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, Simon Peyton Jones is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation - that's one reason he loves functional programming so much.

Ulf Wiger became one of the first commercial users of Erlang (certainly the first in North America) when he bought a license in 1993. At the time, he was busy designing disaster response systems in Alaska. In 1996, he joined Ericsson and became Chief Designer of the AXD 301 development. At nearly 2 million lines of Erlang code, AXD 301 is the most complex system ever built in Erlang, and probably the most complex commercial system built in any functional language. In recent years, Ulf has been involved in several products based on the AXD 301 architecture, and has been an active member of the Open Source Erlang community. In February 2009, Ulf began his new job as CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting.