Swastik Kopparty received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. in 2010, and was advised by Madhu Sudan. During 2010-2011, he was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he has been at Rutgers University since then. He is interested in complexity theory, error-correcting codes, finite fields, randomness and pseudorandomness.

Mrinal Kumar is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University, where he is advised by Swastik Kopparty and Shubhangi Saraf. His research interests are in computational complexity, algebraic complexity and error-correcting codes.

Michael Saks received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1980, where he was advised by Daniel Kleitman. He was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, and held positions at Bell Communications Research and the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UCSD. He has worked in a variety of areas in theory of computing and discrete mathematics: lower bounds for data structures, circuits, communication complexity, branching programs and decision trees, streaming algorithms, sublinear algorithms, satisfiability algorithms, online algorithms, distributed computing, and derandomization, and extremal problems for graphs, hypergraphs and partially ordered sets.