François Coallier is professor at the Department of Software and IT Engineering at the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), one of Canada’s leading engineering school, affiliated to the Université du Québec network. He was CIO of ÉTS between 2010 and 2016 and the founding chair of ÉTS’ Department of Software and IT Engineering from its creation in 2004 till 2010. 

He has nearly twenty-two years of industrial experience in one of Canada’s largest companies, where he held various engineering and managerial positions in engineering, quality engineering, IT procurement, IT infrastructure deployment and operation and IT Enterprise Architecture Management. 

Dr. Coallier has been continuously involved in software and systems engineering standards development since 1984. He is the international Chair of the Joint ISO and IEC subcommittee responsible for the elaboration of standards for Internet of Things and related areas (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC41) since its creation in 2016. He was also the chair of SC7, Software and Systems Engineering, from 1997 to 2017, and its Secretary from 1993 to 1997.  

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society (CS),  he  has been the recipient of the 2015  IEEE CS Hans Karlsson Award “For leadership in the development of the theory and practice of international software and systems engineering standards.” 

François Coallier has a B.Sc. in Environmental Biology from McGill University, a B. Eng. in Engineering Physics and an M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Montréal’s École Polytechnique.

Philippe Kruchten is professor of software engineering at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He joined academia in 2004 after a 30+ year career in industry, where he worked mostly in with large software-intensive systems design, in the domains of telecommunication, defense, aerospace and transportation. Some of his experience in software development is embodied in the Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) whose development he directed from 1995 till 2003. RUP includes as architectural design method, known as “RUP 4+1 views”. His current research interests include software architecture and software evolution, in particular the phenomenon called “technical debt”, and more generally software engineering processes.

Steven Fraser is the principal consultant for Innoxec (Innovation Executive Services) in Silicon Valley where he advises on open innovation strategies, company-university partnerships, and practices that alleviate the “soft” challenges of deploying products highly dependent on software.  Steven has led open innovation programs for HP Labs, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel championing emergent technologies. Steven made the move from Ottawa to sunny Silicon Valley around the turn of the century following a year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) as a Visiting Scientist. Steven holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering (software specification validation) from McGill University in Montréal, Canada and is a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE. He has organized over 75 panels, workshops, tutorials, and corporate forums.