Lionel Seinturier received his PhD degree in computer science from the CNAM, Paris, in December 1997. He currently holds a research position in computer science at LIFL, a computer science research laboratory that is jointly owned by the University of Lille (France) and INRIA (the French research agency for computer science). He is also an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Paris 6. Before joining academia, Seinturier also worked as a research engineer for France Telecom's R&D department, on the integration of ATM network technology and CORBA middleware. Seinturier's