Vijay K. Vaishnavi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Information Systems at Georgia State University.  He holds a PhD from I.I.T. Kanpur and is an IEEE Fellow.  He has conducted research in a broad spectrum of areas in the software development field that include the following: inter-organizational systems, formal/informal software specifications, object modeling and design, and efficient data structures.  The National Science Foundation and private organizations including IBM, Nortel, and AT&T have supported his research.  Dr. Vaishnavi has published extensively in refereed scholarly journals such as journals as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Computers, SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Algorithms, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Computer Graphics and Image Processing, Acta Informatica, and Communications of the ACM.   He is an author of the book, Object Technology Centers of Excellence, with Timothy D. Korson (Manning Publications/Prentice-Hall).