About the Authors
Maria-Florina Balcan
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
ninamf[ta]cs[td]cmu[td]edu
www.cs.cmu.edu/~ninamf/
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
ninamf[ta]cs[td]cmu[td]edu
www.cs.cmu.edu/~ninamf/
Maria-Florina Balcan is a Ph.D. candidate at
Carnegie Mellon
University under the supervision of
Avrim
Blum.
Everyone who knows her calls her "Nina," a tradition
originally started
by her brother Marius when he was too young to
appreciate longer names.
Nina received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of
Bucharest, Faculty of
Mathematics and
Informatics, Romania. Her primary research
interests are
Computational and Statistical Machine Learning,
computational aspects of Economics and
Game Theory, and Algorithms. She owes much of her
interest in Computer
Science to Professors Luminita State, her
undergraduate mentor, and
Florentina Hristea, her role model at the time,
who offered Nina the
opportunity of her first
textbook
co-authorship.
Avrim Blum
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
avrim[ta]cs[td]cmu[td]edu
www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
avrim[ta]cs[td]cmu[td]edu
www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/
Avrim Blum grew up in Berkeley, California,
and then went to MIT for
undergraduate and graduate school. He received his
Ph.D. in Computer
Science under supervision of
Ron
Rivest, and is now
Professor of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon
University. His
research interests include Approximation Algorithms,
Algorithmic Game
Theory, and Machine Learning Theory. He has two
children, Alex and
Aaron, who may or may not go into the
family
business.