Irina Kondratova has an extensive, career-long, broadly based research and publication record in several fields: online communities of practice; knowledge and technology transfer using collaborative tools; voice technologies, voice user interfaces and sensor-based distress detection in engineering structures. Dr. Kondratova is a Professional Engineer with the Association of Professional Engineers for the Province of New Brunswick and has more than 29 years of research, business and consulting experience. She is currently leading the People-Centred Technologies Research Group at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Information Technology (IIT) and is an Adjunct Professor with the Department of Civil Engineering, at UNB.

Irina's current research interests are in the area of mobile computing and voice technologies that enable telephone and mobile device users, via speech interface, to access and retrieve Web content. Irina led the establishment of a Voice and Multimodal Laboratory at IIT Fredericton that is designed to foster advanced research in applications of voice and multimodal technology and industry collaboration.

Joanna Lumsden is a Research Officer with the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (IIT). Based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Jo works as part of an interdisciplinary research team focussing on people centred technologies. Jo also serves as an Adjunct Professor with the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, in which capacity she teaches and supervises graduate students in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Jo came to Canada from Scotland in 2002. She has a B.Sc. Honours degree in Software Engineering and a Ph.D. in HCI, both from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Jo's current research interests are varied but all fall under the umbrella of HCI. Of particular interest to the ICEC community, Jo researches the design and usability of alternative interaction techniques (in particular interaction techniques based on gestural input and audio feedback) for use with mobile and wearable devices, with obvious potential for impact on the success of mobile commerce applications. Jo also has a keen interest in evaluation techniques and, in particular, systematic methods for tool (or general artefact) evaluation and selection. To this end, Jo has designed and manages a novel, purpose-built evaluation lab specially designed to support meaningful evaluation of mobile technologies - the NRC Mobile HCI Lab.

Murray Crease graduated with First Class honours in Computing Science from the Universtiy of Glasgow in 1996. After a year spent developing Call Centre software Murray returned to Glasgow to start his PhD on multimodal, resource-sensitive user interfaces which he completed in 2001. After two years working as a post-doc researcher investigating software support for experimental investigations Murray joined the NRC as a Research Officer in Fredericton, New Brunswick in May 2003. Murray is also an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick.

Murray's research is in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). His specific interests include:

• Mobile Applications - Mobile devices ranging from cell phones to PDAs are becoming more powerful and better connected all the time. Murray is interested in how best to leverage this capability in different contexts.
• Mobile Evaluations - The evaluation of mobile applications is problematic due to the dynamic context of the real-life users of such applications. Field studies - which provide a realistic evaluation context - are not the ideal solution due to difficulties in controlling the environment, capturing data and managing the experiment. Murray is interested in developing techniques which enable evaluations to be undertaken in a lab but with an appropriate environment modelled. 
• Tangible Interaction - Tangible interfaces allow users to manipulate computer systems in an intuitive way through the physical manipulation of objects. Murray is particularly interested in investigating how such interfaces can be used in a mobile context. Murray is also interested in use of ambient presentation techniques in combination with such interfaces.