Oded Goldreich (b. 1957) is a professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His professional career was greatly influenced by his graduate studies advisor, Shimon Even, and by his post-doctoral period (1983-86) at the theory group of the Laboratory for Computer Science of MIT. Oded feels privileged being a faculty member at Weizmann since 1994, and has enjoyed visits at MIT (1995-98), the Miller Institute of UC-Berkeley (1996), the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University (2003-4), and the Institute for Advanced Study (2011-12). His research interests include the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity. He has contributed to the development of pseudorandomness, zero knowledge proofs, secure function evaluation, property testing, and other areas in cryptography and computational complexity. He has authored numerous surveys and several books, including the two-volume work “Foundations of Cryptography” (2001 and 2004) and “Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective” (2008).

Rani Izsak is a Ph.D. student, supervised by Uri Feige, at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests include computational complexity theory and the design of algorithms.