Bob Coyne has a wide range of experience developing innovative graphics software products, starting with Symbolics S-Paint and Paintamation, among the earliest and most powerful commercial paint and 2D animation systems. He subsequently directed software development at Nichimen Graphics, where his group created the Mirai 2D/3D animation system and Nendo 3D modeler. Most recently, at AT&T Labs Research, he initiated the WordsEye text-to-scene research project. Bob did graduate work in Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley and received his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University, studying Computer Science and English Literature. At Columbia, he was Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review and won the George Edward Woodbury Prize for poetry.

Richard Sproat received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs Research. Since August 2003, he holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Linguistics and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Richard's expertise is in Natural Language Processing, and he has applied that expertise in many areas, including Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Speech Recognition, and Datamining, in addition to his work on Natural Language Understanding in the WordsEye system. Richard is the author of over seventy technical publications and two books, and holds six patents. He has served on the editorial boards of several major linguistics and computational linguistics journals, and has been involved in the W3C's Voice Browser working group, developing standards for Text-to-Speech markup.

Gary Zamchick has product development experience across many industries - from technology to banking to publishing to education. He has developed an iterative, rapid visualization process that helps teams arrive at a richer set of valuable solutions. Recent clients include IBM Center for Advanced Learning, DARPA-IPTO, and Columbia's Center for Computational Learning.

Until 2002, Gary was responsible for Strategic Design at AT&T Labs Research. Prior to that, he produced multimedia-rich websites for People and Entertainment Weekly magazines at Time Inc. New Media. Additionally, as president of Dadabase Design for 16 years, Gary designed the user experience for banking kiosks (Citibank), home shopping solutions (AT&T), building display systems (ESI Design) and multi-player games. Gary has also illustrated the best-selling French for Cats humor book series (by Henry Beard) and done countless illustrations in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Gary got his start working with world famous designers Seymour Chwast (Push Pin Studios) and R.O. Blechman (The Ink Tank). He is currently teaching "Rapid Visualization" as an adjunct professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Larry Stead is a technologist with extensive experience in research, directing technology for start-up companies, and software/product development. He has a B.S. and M.S. from MIT in mathematics and computer graphics and an MBA from NYU.

Brian received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2001. He has worked as a Senior Technical Specialist at AT&T Labs - Research for the past ten years, concentrating on user interface design and evaluation. One of his current research projects on user interfaces for speech technologies is funded by the Department of Defense. Brian also has extensive experience in social and collaborative filtering, computer supported cooperative work, and information visualization with over thirty published technical papers and three patents. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology exploring next generation social mobile computing funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Information and Intelligent Systems program.

Over his successful 20+ year career in the information technology and interactive media industries, Steve Shaber has earned his keep as a computer scientist, application software developer, technical consultant, business strategist, project manager, product executive, general corporate attorney and intellectual property specialist. Steve earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA at the Wharton School, a JD at Columbia University, and has been associated with numerous large and small technology-intensive businesses, including IBM, Deutsche Bank, GE Capital and several start-ups. As a manager of Semantic Light, Steve participates in planning the launch of the WordsEye service, and directing the company's business and legal affairs.