Valérie Chavez-Demoulin is a researcher on extreme value theory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she also received her Ph.D. in statistics. In particular, she developed a flexible, exploratory approach for extremes based on smoothing techniques that was applied to environmental and financial data.
Armin Roehrl is a final-year Ph.D. student in computational statistics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Prior to his thesis, he graduated in computer science and mathematics from Oxford University, UK. Currently, he works on Internet search technologies, parallel computing (with Swiss-Tx), pattern recognition, and parallel databases in a joint project with Oracle, Inc. He has developed a number of well-known intelligent agents and Web robots.
R. Alexander Roehrl is an analyst at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Austria, where he works on development issues and technological change, in the context of energy-economics, as well as the World Wide Web. His previous professional experience includes work on Gigabit Networks at the European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, and computational research work at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. He read physics and mathematics at the Universities of Oxford and Munich. Through a number of WWW projects, his particular interest lies in the field of dynamic personalised database-driven websites.
Anna Weinberg is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Econometrics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she applies multivariate statistics and the theory of graphs in a comparative development analysis of Russian regions. She graduated from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics of the Moscow Aviation Institute, Russia, and from the Faculty of Economical and Social Sciences of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is particularly interested in the history of mankind, including future scenarios of human beings colonizing other planets.