Prof. Dr. Bernd J. Krämer is a professor at FernUniversität Hagen, Germany, where he holds the Chair of Distributed Systems Engineering. He is also a director of INTE, a consulting division of the Electrical Engineering faculty, a director and founder of the Research Institute for Efficient Energy Use in Buildings, a founder and member of the board of the German Academy for IT Sciences, and a member of FTK, a Research Institute for Telecommunications. He obtained his diploma and doctorate in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin. He was an adjunct professor of the School of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, adjunct professor of the Computer Science Department of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a senior researcher and project director of the German National Research Institute for Information Technology. He was a visiting professor of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1991, the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2001, and the University of Trento, Italy, in 2002. His research interests include Web-based hypermedia systems, distributed systems management and engineering, safety-related software, and formal methods. Currently he is the scientific director of a large EU project in the 5th Framework Program. Prior to this he has been the principal investigator of further EU funded projects and he received funding the German Minister of Research and Technology, the Minister of Science of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, the National Science Foundation, and other U.S. funding agencies. Dr. Kraemer has published five books including two textbooks, nine university level e-learning courses, 19 book chapters, 31 journal articles, and about 80 refereed articles in scholarly conference proceedings. Further he co-edited four journal issues and 11 books and conference proceedings. The latter include “Information Systems Interoperability³, published by Research Studies, UK (1998); the proceedings of the “18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems” (1998) and the “Third International Symposium on Software Engineering for Parallel and Distributed Systems” (1998); and “Safety-Critical Real-Time Systems”, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1997). He is the co-editor in chief of the Journal of Integrated Design and Process Sciences. He is on the editorial board of the Nectar Information server of the EU [http://www.nectar.org/], the Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, and the High Integrity Systems Journal.