Chandra Chekuri is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He moved to UIUC in the fall of 2006 after spending eight years at Lucent Bell Labs. He finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani in 1998. Before that he obtained his B. Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (now Chennai). He is primarily interested in algorithms for discrete optimization problems with current research focusing on approximation algorithms.

Martin Pál is a Software Engineer at Google, Inc., where he enjoys designing algorithms for internet advertising markets. Before joining the company that does no evil, he spent four lovely years at Cornell University pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision of Éva Tardos, followed by a year as a postdoc at DIMACS and Bell Labs.