Author Bios

Eric Tober is the Curriculum Developer at Nuance Communications. He joined Nuance in 1999 after performing postdoctoral reseach at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the IBM Almaden Research Center. Among his responsibilities, Eric creates Nuance's technical courses taught at Speech University (www.nuance.com). In particular, he has recently developed Nuance's VoiceXML application development course entitled "VoiceXML Voice Site Development." Eric is a member of the VoiceXML Forum's Education Committee and sits on the editorial board of the VoiceXML on-line magazine, "VoiceXML Review" (www.voicexmlreview.org). Nuance Communications is a Promoter member of the VoiceXML Forum.

Rob Marchand is the Director, Products and Services Development at VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. Rob has been with VoiceGenie Technologies since 1999, and has worked in advanced computing and telecommunications since 1985. At VoiceGenie, Rob is responsible for the VoiceGenie Developer Workshop (http://developer.voicegenie.com), and new products and services development. Rob is a member of the VoiceXML Education Committee, and of USENIX and SAGE, and a regular contributor to SANS. VoiceGenie is a Promoter Member of the VoiceXML Forum.

Jim Ferrans has worked at Motorola since 1999 on the VoxGateway, an advanced VoiceXML 2.0 system that is source-licensed to voice platform vendors, voice hosting companies, and voice application companies. Jim was on the VoiceXML 1.0 design team, and is an editor of the VoiceXML 2.0 specification. He began his career at Lucent, where he was lead architect and language designer for an SQL-based database system. After a stint at Gould Research, he co-founded Vista Technologies in 1986, where he led the development of various software and hardware design tools. In 1996 Vista sold itself to Peritus, where Jim managed the development of several successful Y2K remediation tools.

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