Anupam Gupta is a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA. He grew up in Calcutta, India, went to the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur for his B.Tech. degree, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley under the guidance of Alistair Sinclair. He also spent two years searching for good and unknown restaurants in New York while he was ostensibly a postdoctoral researcher at Lucent Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. Anupam's interests include approximation algorithms, metric embeddings, networking, eating, and playing squash badly.

Aravind Srinivasan is a faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University under the supervision of David Shmoys, and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His research interests are in randomized algorithms, networking, social networks, combinatorial optimization, and related areas. Aravind is a native of Chennai, India, and his "mother tongue" (native language) is Tamil.