Ilan Newman has been on the faculty at Haifa University since 1992. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the Technion. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 at the Computer Science Department of the Hebrew University under the supervision of Avi Wigderson. The title of his thesis was “On the complexity of simple Boolean functions.” His current research interests are in finite metric embeddings, combinatorial algorithms, property testing, and computational complexity.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Yuri Rabinovich received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Hebrew University under the supervision of Avi Wigderson and Nati Linial. The title of his thesis was “Theoretical properties of genetic algorithms.” Currently he works at the Computer Science Department of Haifa University. He is interested in geometric phenomena in discrete structures in general, and in the theory of finite metric spaces in particular.