Yossi Azar received his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University in 1989 (supervised by Noga Alon). He spent several years in the Bay Area (Stanford, DEC, IBM); his experience there included the Loma Prieta earthquake, 7.1 on the Richter scale. In 1994 he joined the computer science faculty at Tel-Aviv University. He was the chair of the department between 2002 and 2004. His main research interests are in the theory of algorithms, especially online, randomized and approximation algorithms, as well as in trying to understand his three children.

David Bunde is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, supervised by Jeff Erickson. Most of his research has been on scheduling and processor allocation, though he also likes to work on other algorithmic problems like the current paper and graph pebbling. In his spare time, he enjoys reading and playing strategy games, particularly Civilization III.

Yishay Mansour obtained his B.A. in 1985 and his M.Sc. in 1987 at the Technion; his M.Sc. advisor was Prof. Shmuel Zaks. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 1990 under the supervision of Professors Shafi Goldwasser and Baruch Awerbuch. Subsequently he became a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Since 1992 he has been with the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, where he was the chairman during 2000-2002. His research interests include online algorithms, communication networks, machine learning, reinforcement learning and the theory of computation.