Elaine Rich is Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). Formerly on the faculty in computer sciences at the University of Texas, she received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include natural language processing. knowledge representation, and machine translation.

Kevin Knight received his B.A. from Harvard University and is presently completing his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. A regular consultant at MCC, his research interests include natural language processing, unification, and machine translation, and search.

Shivashankar B Nair received his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Engineering from Amravati University, Amravati, where he served as a faculty member from 1986 to 1998. He later joined the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, where he is currently an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. His major areas of interest include real-world Artificial Immune System Applications, Intelligent and Emotional Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Genetic Algorithms and Mobile Agent Systems.

Dr. Nair has been the chief investigator for projects funded both by the Indian government and foreign agencies and is a member of several international and national journal and conference committees. Presently, he is on a sabbatical as a Visiting Professor (Korean Brain Pool) at the Human-Centred Advanced Research Education Centre, Hanbat National University, Daejeon, South Korea, where he is investigating new ways of instilling emotions into robots.