Annika Hinze is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Waikato, New Zealand,
where she heads the research group on Information Systems and Databases. She received her Master's
from the Technical University Berlin in the area of Technical Mathematics. Annika received her Ph.D.
degree in Computer Science from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2003. In her PhD thesis, she proposed
an adaptive event-based system. Annika's current research focuses on context-aware systems, eventbased systems, interaction design and mobility. She combines methods from Information Systems with
Formal Methods and Human Computer Interaction. During 2009, while this book was prepared, Annika
was a visiting Professor at the Humboldt University Berlin for the area of context-aware systems. Annika was a co-chair for ODBASE and APCCM, and served in various roles for the event community's
central workshop/conference DEBS.
Alejandro Buchmann is Professor in the Department of Computer Science of Technische Universität Darmstadt since 1991 and is responsible for the area of Databases and Distributed Systems. He
studied chemical engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and received his PhD
from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1980. He was an Assistant/Associate Professor from 1980 to
1986 at IIMAS/UNAM and held positions as a senior researcher at Computer Corporation of America,
Cambridge Mass. (86-89) and GTE Laboratories, Waltham Mass. (89-91) before joining TUD. He was
responsible for the graduate research program in enabling technologies for e-commerce at TUD (1998-
2007) and initiated a research program in Cooperative, Adaptive and Responsive Monitoring in Mixed
Mode Environments (2006-). Alejandro’s current research interests are in the areas of event-based and
reactive systems, heterogeneous distributed systems, middleware, performance evaluation, peer-to-peer
systems and new paradigms for data management and information processing in Cyberphysical systems.
Alejandro’s involvement with event based systems dates back to the late 1980’s in the HiPAC project on
active databases. Subsequent work at TU Darmstadt included distributed event based systems, temporal
uncertainty in distributed event systems, quality of service and transactional properties, content based
publish/subscribe and concept based pub/sub for heterogeneous event systems, as well as performance
modeling and benchmarking of event based systems. Alex has been involved as general and/or program
chair in ICDE 01 and ICDE08, VLDB 96, SIGMOD 98, DEBS 08 and AmI 07, and is on the editorial
board of several journals. He has held visiting positions at UT Austin, ICSI Berkeley, HP Labs Palo Alto,
University of Virginia, Ecole Politechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL), IIT Bombay, and Caltech.