1. Jim Bellingham is the Director of Engineering at the Monterey Bay
   Aquarium Research Institute. Jim's personal research interests
   revolve around the development and use of Autonomous Underwater
   Vehicles (AUVs).  In the process of developing these vehicles, he
   spent considerable time at sea, leading over 20 AUV expeditions in
   locations such as the Antarctic, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, South
   Pacific, and the Arctic.  Presently he is heavily involved in the
   development of seafloor observatories, which are next-generation
   systems employing telecommunications cables and sophisticated
   moorings to support hundreds or possibly even thousands of
   distributed sensors and robotic systems in the ocean. Jim received
   his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   in Cambridge, MA, in 1988. Dr. Bellingham was a co-founder of Bluefin
   Robotics Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AUVs for the
   military, commercial, and scientific markets.

2. Bill Kirkwood is currently the Associate Director of Engineering at
   the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. His main duties are to
   manage a team of 25 engineers and their efforts on approximately 30
   projects out of the 70 or more within MBARI. The projects range in
   complexity from very large teams on a few projects to small efforts
   in support of science through out the year.

   Besides departmental oversight Bill is also involved in three
   projects at various phases of development. He is the project engineer
   for the Deep Ocean Raman In Situ Spectrometer (DORISS) system which
   is a full ocean depth rated laser spectrometer with an associated
   Precision Underwater Positioning (PUP) system. He is the program
   manager and an engineer on the Multibeam Autonomous Underwater
   Vehicle (MBAUV). The MBAUV mapping system is an autonomous robotic
   system terrain following at 3 knots while simultaneously operating
   multibeam, side scan, and sub-bottom sonars to create topographic and
   geologic maps for science. His newest effort is a project called the
   Free Ocean CO2 Enrichment experiment working with science to look at
   the effects of an elevated CO2 and lower pH ocean.

   Previously he was the project manager and lead engineer on the
   remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon. An all electric deep water
   platform for science created and operated at MBARI. He is also
   currently an adjunct at the University of Santa Clara working on
   several projects with the mechanical engineering group there and on
   an approximately every other semester basis teaching a graduate
   course in Oceanographic Technology and Robotics.

3. Kanna Rajan is the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at MBARI which he
   joined this October. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist
   and a member of the management team of the the 95 member Autonomous
   Systems and Robotics Area at NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field,
   California.

   Kanna was one of the principals of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX)
   which designed, built, tested and flew the first AI based closed-loop
   control system on a spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's
   1999 Software of the Year, the agency's highest technical award
   (http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/remote-agent/). He was also the PI
   on the MAPGEN system for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission.

   His interests are in Planning/Scheduling, modeling and representation
   for real world planners and agent architectures for Distributed
   Control applications. 

   He was the Co-chair of the 2005 Intnl. Conference on Automated
   Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), Monterey California
   (http://icaps05.icaps-conference.org/) and till recently the chair of
   the Executive Board of the International Workshop on Planning and
   Scheduling for Space.