RALF STEINMETZ is Professor of Multimedia Communications at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Chairman of the Board of the Hessian Telemedia Technology Competence Center httc, and a leader in the worldwide community of advanced multimedia researchers. He initiated the IEEE Multimedia Magazine, has been editor of various journals, is an IEEE Fellow, and also recently became an ACM Fellow. His textbook, Multimedia Technology: Principles, Components and Systems, has been the authoritative resource in various languages for American and European universities since its first publication in 1995.
KLARA NAHRSTEDT is Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include Quality of Service provisioning for real-time multimedia processing and communication systems. She is the main editor of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Journal and has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, the Computer Networks Journal, and the Journal on Multimedia Applications and Tools.