Maria-Florina Balcan is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Avrim Blum. Everyone who knows her calls her "Nina," a tradition originally started by her brother Marius when he was too young to appreciate longer names. Nina received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Romania. Her primary research interests are Computational and Statistical Machine Learning, computational aspects of Economics and Game Theory, and Algorithms. She owes much of her interest in Computer Science to Professors Luminita State, her undergraduate mentor, and Florentina Hristea, her role model at the time, who offered Nina the opportunity of her first textbook co-authorship.

Avrim Blum grew up in Berkeley, California, and then went to MIT for undergraduate and graduate school. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science under supervision of Ron Rivest, and is now Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include Approximation Algorithms, Algorithmic Game Theory, and Machine Learning Theory. He has two children, Alex and Aaron, who may or may not go into the family business.