Ronald P. Luijten received his Masters of Electronic Engineering with honors from the University of Technology in Eindhoven, Netherlands in 1984. In the same year he joined the communication systems department at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland. He has designed various communication chips, including switches and ATM adapter chip sets, the latter culminating in a 15-month assignment at IBM’s networking development laboratory in La Gaude, France as lead-architect, in 1994-95. He currently manages the IBM server interconnect fabrics research team in Zurich, which is working on the OSMOSIS optical switch demonstrator in close collaboration with Corning, inc. His research interests are in high speed switching system design, including electronic crossbars and all-optical switches, and high-speed / high-density electro-optical interconnect. He holds more than 15 patents in the area of ATM and switching, and has co-organized 5 IEEE ICCCN conferences.