Bill Fefferman is a Ph.D student at Caltech, in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Quantum Information, advised by Alexei Kitaev and Chris Umans. His research focus is quantum complexity theory. This is his second article in Theory of Computing.

Ronen Shaltiel graduated from the Hebrew University in 2001; his advisor was Avi Wigderson. His thesis focused on pseudorandom generators and extractors which remain his main focus until today. He spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study and did a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute with Oded Goldreich and Moni Naor. He is reluctant to provide personal details on an academic platform.

Christopher Umans graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 2000; his advisor was Christos Papadimitriou. After a postdoc in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research, he joined Caltech where he is now a professor of Computer Science. He is interested in derandomization, explicit constructions, algebraic complexity and algorithms, and hardness of approximation. Much of his time outside work is spent with his young children, Kira and Daniel.

Emanuele Viola has been at Northeastern University, Boston, for five years. The attached picture was taken by his sister Alessandra in 2012 at a trattoria in Garbatella, a quaint neighborhood of Rome where Emanuele has spent countless hours wandering.