Moses Charikar is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Stanford University under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. Before that, he obtained his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests are in approximation algorithms, metric embeddings and algorithmic techniques for large data sets. His work on dimension reduction in l₁ won the best paper award at FOCS 2003. A one year stint in the research group at Google gave him an opportunity to apply his theoretical ideas in the real world. He still reaps the benefits of that experience -- he has successfully managed to retain the top spot for a Google search on his last name, but has wisely given up trying to compete with his well-known namesake for searches on his first name.

Robert Krauthgamer is a Research Staff Member in the theory group at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. He received his Ph. D. in 2001 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. A paper, coauthored (as part of his thesis) with his advisor, Uri Feige, was awarded the 2005 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize. Subsequently he spent two years as a postdoc in the theory group at Berkeley. His research interests include combinatorial algorithms, finite metric spaces, high-dimensional geometry, data analysis, and related areas. His favorite sport since youth has been swimming; once he swam across the Sea of Galilee in a 10km competitive race, and was the last one to arrive at the finish line.