Aleksandrs Belovs is a researcher at the Faculty of Computing, University of Latvia. He obtained his Master's degree from the University of Waterloo, and his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Latvia under the supervision of Andris Ambainis. Afterwards, he spent a year as a postdoc at CSAIL, MIT. Currently, he is at CWI, Amsterdam. His main research area is quantum computing.

Eric Blais is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. He completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. His advisor was Ryan O'Donnell. He was subsequently a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Theory of Computation group at MIT.