Nikhil Bansal is a researcher at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai for his B. Tech. degree, and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by Avrim Blum. He got fascinated by algorithms after taking an undergraduate class by Prof. Ajit A. Diwan. Since then he has enjoyed thinking about various kinds of algorithmic questions.

Anupam Gupta is a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He grew up in Calcutta, India, attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur for his B. Tech. degree, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Alistair Sinclair. Anupam is interested in most kinds of algorithmic problems, and his research focus is on approximation and online algorithms, and metric embeddings.