Pankaj Mehra is founding member and chief scientist of HP's newest global research location, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He also leads the incubation within HP of taxonom.com, a concept-vocabulary generation service for enterprises. Pankaj has co-authored three books, the latest of which--Storage, Data, and Information Systems--was published by HP in 2005. Since 1989, Pankaj has published at reputable technical conferences in a number of technical areas, including IJCAI, KDD, Web Intelligence, Supercomputing, and Sigmetrics, and has written journal papers in: Software--Practice & Experience, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, among others. During 2008-09, Pankaj is serving on the program committees of International Semantic Web Conference ’08, Supercomputing ’08, and AAAI’09 Semantic Social Web Workshop. Pankaj currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing magazine. He is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard Company. Pankaj’s more than 20 filed and issued patents cover areas as diverse as interconnection networks, transaction processing, fault-tolerant servers, persistent memory, computer graphics pipelines, data-deduplication algorithms, and ontology-building algorithms. Pankaj’s contributions to computing have been recognized in awards from NASA, Sandia National Labs, and the late Jim Gray who awarded Pankaj and his colleagues the Terabyte Sort trophy for designing a system that achieved the fastest time to sort a terabyte of data in 1998. Prior to joining HP’s Tandem Labs, Pankaj was assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering department at IIT, Delhi, India. Pankaj received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.