Paul Beame is a Professor Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1987 under the supervision of Stephen A. Cook. He is currently Chair of the IEEE CS Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing. His research has primarily focused on the complexity of concrete computational problems and proof complexity, with a particular emphasis on complexity lower bounds.

Matei David recently graduated from the University of Toronto; his advisor was fellow coauthor Toniann Pitassi. In writing this, Matei realizes the relativity of the term “recently.”

Toniann Pitassi is a professor at the University of Toronto, who still feels lucky to get paid to do this. Her hobbies include sculpting (where she is enthusiastic, but lacking in talent), running (same skill set), and spending quality family time, which currently means YouTube videos or Rummikub.

Philipp Woelfel graduated in December 2003 from the University Dortmund under the supervision of Ingo Wegener. In 2005 the German Research Foundation admitted him to the Emmy-Noether Programme, which allowed him to meet two of his coauthors during his Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005-2007) at the University of Toronto Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary. His research interests include computational complexity, randomized algorithms, and distributed computing.