Dr. Thierry Coupaye is Senior Research Expert and Head of a Research Program on Virtualization, Storage & Autonomics inside Orange Labs (France Telecom R&D). He completed his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, France, in 1996 in the area of active databases (Event-Condition-Action rules) and worked afterwards as a teaching and research assistant at INPG Technological University. Then he worked as a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, U.K., in the area of semi-structured data management for genomics, and then in the Dassault Systems and University of Grenoble Joint Laboratory on large scale software deployment, before joining France Telecom in 2000. He lead several R&D projects in the database and software architecture areas and then took lead of the Distributed Software Architectures & Infrastructures Research Pole in 2003 and then the Networks & Systems Sciences Research Macro-Pole in 2006. He has been involved in several collaborative projects (Esprit Goodstep, ITEA Osmose, IST Artist, IST Selfman, RNTL Arcad, RNTL Selfware) and has evaluated several projects for the French (ANR) and European (IST) research funding agencies. He is the author of more than 50 refereed articles and has participated in several program and organization committees of conferences in these areas (IDEAS, ACM CBSE, IFIP SC, IEE DSOM, Euromicro CBSE, IEEE, ICAC, etc.). His current research interests include middleware architecture, component-based systems (he is co-editor of the Fractal component model specification: http://fractal.objectweb.org) and autonomic computing.