Robert Špalek received his Masters Degrees in Computer Science from Charles University, Prague and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is currently a graduate student at CWI, advised by Harry Buhrman. His research interests include quantum computing, computational complexity, algorithms, data structures, and search engines. He also enjoys climbing, salsa, photography, travelling to distant countries, and playing guitar.

Mario Szegedy received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Laci Babai and Janos Simon. He held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1989-90), a postdoc at the University of Chicago, 1991-92, and a postdoc at Bell Laboratories (1992). He was a permanent member of Bell Labs for 7 years and for two more years of AT&T Research. He left AT&T in September 1999 to conduct research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for a year. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Rutgers University.

He received the Gödel Prize twice, in 2001 for his part in the PCP Theorem and its connection to inapproximability and in 2005 for the analysis of data streams using limited memory.

His research interests include complexity theory, combinatorics, combinatorial geometry and quantum computing, but he also has an interest in algebra and in programming languages.

With a group of students he has founded QCteam, a quantum computing laboratory at Rutgers, which is his main project at the present time. The laboratory has received substantial funding from the university and from the National Science Foundation. It has a vigorous visitor program, and pursues collaboration with the local industry.