Dr Maozhen Li is currently Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Engineering, in the School of Engineering and Design at Brunel University, UK. From January 1999 to January 2002, he was Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science, Cardiff University, UK. Dr Li received his PhD degree in 1997, from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. His research interests are in the areas of Grid computing, problem-solving environments for large-scale simulations, software agents for semantic information retrieval, multi-modal user interface design and computer support for cooperative work. Since 1997, Dr Li has published 30 research papers in prestigious international journals and conferences. Dr Mark Baker is a hardworking Reader in Distributed Systems at the University of Portsmouth. He also currently holds visiting chairs at the universities of Reading and Westminster. Mark has resided in the relative safety of academia since leaving the British Merchant, where he was a navigating officer, in the early 1980s. Mark has held posts at various universities, including Cardiff, Edinburgh and Syracuse. He has a number of geek-like interests, which his research group at Portsmouth help him pursue. These include wide-area resource monitoring, messaging systems for parallel and wide-area applications, middleware such as information and security services, as well as performance evaluation and modelling of computer systems. Mark’s non-academic interests include squash (getting too old), DIY (he may one day finish his house off), reading (far too many science fiction books), keeping the garden ship-shape and a beer or two to reduce the pain of the aforementioned activities.