CLAUDE PETITPIERRE received his diploma in electrical engineering in 1972 from the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL). He spent the next 5 years in industry, before returning to the EPFL, where he obtained his dotorate in 1984. After spending a year (1985-1986) at the AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, he came back to the EPFL yet again, where he was appointed pro- fessor in 1987. His interests are in the theories and techniques that support the development of complete and reliable software products, and in the formal modeling and analysis theories. The work pursued in his laboratory led to the development of a parsimonious superset of Java, sup- porting concurrency in a way that provides the new language with modeling capacity similar to the one provided by formal languages such as CCS or CSP. This work has also delivered a num- ber of libraries and available program generators. He currently studies software engineering and develops tools and methods to implement Web based applications.