Yahya H. Mirza is the founder of Aurora Borealis Software LLC and has spent the last 16 years with a single-minded focus of researching technology that can enable creativity, with the end goal of using it to pursue his ideas. YahyaÕ original background was aeronautical engineering and was initially employed by Battelle Labs in Columbus Ohio. Yahya's original passion was aircraft that could fly into space using hypersonic SCRAMjet propulsion. This passion for creative design led him to explore the usage of CFD as a design tool first on SGI workstations at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and then on a Cray YMP at NASA Ames in 1989. After being thoroughly frustrated by the lack of exploratory design tools, in 1991 Yahya entered the software industry to leverage object-oriented software technology to more quickly model his own aircraft design concepts. In 1993, this early inspiration led to a collaborative relationship with an aircraft design group at WPAFB to explore ideas for an aircraft modeling and design environment based on an object-oriented modeling language and distributed supercomputing. In 1994 Yahya got his first big break by winning a contract with Spatial Technologies to do some early research on the componentization of the ACIS geometry kernel utilizing Microsoft's component software technology COM. In 1995, after working on a COM related project through his company at Microsoft, Yahya attended Siggraph for the first time and saw Pixar's unveiling of Toy Story. Recognizing the vast number of similarities between conceptual aircraft design and the production of animated feature film, and their shared utilization of high performance computing, physical simulation, and modeling languages, Yahya spent three years as a visiting researcher in the UIUC Smalltalk Research Group searching for a more flexible dynamic object oriented host language. The objective was to find a more exploratory host language to serve as the basis of a highly dynamic component based modeling language.

In 2001, Yahya returned to Seattle and briefly worked through his company in one of the first five teams at Microsoft (Web Objects and Messaging) to use the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The possibility of using the CLR to serve as the basis for his modeling language work, Yahya set off to learn the internals of the CLR. In 2002, frustrated by Siggraph, OOPSLA, and other research conferences, catering largely to academics, and commercial conferences marketing specific technologies, Yahya created his own workshops motivated by his interest in utilizing applied research in dynamic languages, and their virtual machine implementations for computer animation. In 2003, after five continuous Siggraphs of passionately describing his work to several patient Pixar employees, Yahya was invited by the General Manager of the Pixar RenderMan team, to research GPU compiler technology for the RenderMan Shading Language. Through his Language Runtime (LaR) workshops, Yahya has had the pleasure of interacting with several really creative individuals who have made a deep impact in the computing industry, and have inspired him greatly. For the past three years, through his workshops, Yahya has been intensely researching parallel programming models, and a range of multi-core architectures including the CELL. Yahya's driving vision for many years has been to leverage these dis-joint and separate technologies to enable a real-time interactive feature film. As an incremental step, Yahya is currently working on a new distributed programming model to explicitly leverage large-scale clusters built from emerging multi-core processors.

Yahya doesn't like .coms is proud of the fact that in 1995 he told one of the largest VCs in the silicon valley they can go where the sun don't shine. Consequently Yahya continues to be the poorest entrepreneur in the industry and has occasionally resorted to performing his original guitar and piano music at restaurants, coffee shops and museums in the Seattle area as a way to fund his work until he makes it in the emerging interactive feature film industry. The CELL Computing Symposium 2006 (CCS-06) and its panels are Yahya's thinly veiled attempt to build awareness of the artistic and technical issues, required to create an interactive feature film. Much to Yahya's happiness, his sponsor: Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has given him the opportunity and complete freedom to do so.

Jim Kahle is a IBM Fellow and Chief Architect for the Cell Architecture being designed for Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. Previously he was Chief Architect of the Power4 core used in IBM servers and Apple's G5. He was the project manager for PowerPC 603 series that are used in Apple Laptops and Nintendo game cubes. Jim has been involved in Power architecture designs since its conception. He combines broad processor knowledge, high performance teams, deep client relationships to understand future requirements to achieve break through innovations in chip design.

After graduating in Computer Science from the University of Durham, England, Dominic spent time at Microsoft working on compilers followed by work as a research scientist with Pilkington Glass in the UK. He went on to join Psygnosis which was subsequently acquired by Sony in 1993. While at Sony, Dominic has worked on various PlayStation related projects and is now Vice President of the US Research and Development department of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.