Vitaly Mikheev is the chief technology officer for Excelsior, LLC, a company focusing on design and development of optimizing compilers. Vitaly has been involved in software development since 1987 and focused on compiler construction technologies for the last decade. He started working with Java in 1998 as the architect of the Excelsior Java Virtual Machine. Before that, he worked on proprietary optimizing compilers for Nortel Networks. Vitaly is a member of ACM and a co-author of the patent on the garbage collector algorithm implemented in the Samsung's J2ME CDC virtual machine. He holds an MS in computer science from the Novosibirsk State University, Russia.