Siavosh Benabbas got his B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology under the supervision of Mohammad Ghodsi in the Department of Computer Engineering. Since 2006, Siavosh has been a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. There, he received his M.Sc. under the supervision of Avner Magen and Charles Rackoff, while he is currently anticipating his graduation with a Ph.D. supervised by Toni Pitassi. Siavosh is interested in questions touching on Linear Programming and Semidefinite Programming Relaxations, their Integrality Gaps and their applications to Combinatorial Optimization.

Konstantinos Georgiou (or Costis as friends call him) did his undergraduate studies at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Athens (1998-2002), from where he also received his M.Sc. in Logic and Algorithms (2002-2004). In 2005 he moved to Toronto where he received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Avner Magen and Toni Pitassi (2010). Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, working on projects varying from Convex Optimization to Complexity Theory to Combinatorial Optimization to Algorithmic Game Theory. Costis spends his free time in his kitchen where he experiments with flavors and recipes.

Avner Magen (1968-2010) did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Hebrew University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2002 under the supervision of Nati Linial. After holding a postdoctoral fellowship at NEC Research in Princeton, NJ, he joined the University of Toronto in 2002, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as an Assistant Professor in 2004. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. Avner was a superb scholar, making fundamental contributions to a number of areas of theoretical computer science that include Metric Embeddings, Sublinear Algorithms, Convex Programming, Computational Geometry, and Approximation Algorithms. He was a wonderful colleague with a terrific sense of humor and great energy. He was a dedicated research supervisor and a superb teacher. He died at 42 in an avalanche while on a climbing tour in Alaska. He is sorely missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and students.

Madhur Tulsiani did his B.Tech. in Computer Science at IIT Kanpur, mentored by Professor Somenath Biswas (2001-05). He completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (2005-09) under Luca Trevisan. After graduation he spent two years as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. His research interests include Complexity Theory, Optimization, Approximation and Inapproximability, Pseudorandomness, and Cryptography.