Parikshit Gopalan has been a researcher at Microsoft Research (Silicon Valley and Redmond) and previously a postdoc at UT Austin and the University of Washington. After completing his undergraduate studies at IIT Bombay, he received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization program at Georgia Tech under the supervision of Richard Lipton. He has worked on coding theory, erasure coding for distributed storage and computational complexity. He is currently interested in algorithms and systems for big data and machine learning.

Amir Yehudayoff received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Ran Raz. Subsequently he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. His main research area is theoretical computer science, with a recent focus on learning theory and information theory.