Eric Allender is a professor at Rutgers University. He has been at Rutgers since receiving his Ph.D. in 1985 at Georgia Tech, under the supervision of Kim N. King. While at Georgia Tech, he was the Backbone of the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable and he still plays trombone from time to time. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory. Circuit complexity, Kolmogorov complexity, and complexity classes are his main research interests. He and his wife find happiness on the dance floor and toiling in their garden.

Shiteng Chen is currently a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, advised by Periklis Papakonstantinou. He did his undergraduate studies in the pilot computer science program at Tsinghua University, the “Yao class.”

Tiancheng Lou is currently with Google. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University under the supervision of Professor Andrew C. Yao. He holds numerous programming contest awards.

Periklis A. Papakonstantinou is an assistant professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University. He took up this appointment (in 2010) immediately after some wonderful years at the University of Toronto, where he had the privilege of being part of a great theory group. During his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto he read theory of computing and cryptography with his advisor Charlie Rackoff, whose teachings contributed to his deep appreciation for concepts in Computer Science. Significant influence on his research identity and taste comes from his teachers Gábor Pete and Balázs Szegedy (from studies in mathematics at the University of Toronto), and Stavros Cosmadakis (from his engineering studies at the University of Patras in Greece). His current research interests are in the foundations of computer science (at large), and he has a more than occasional interest in Cryptography and Machine Learning. In his early youth he enjoyed riding motorbikes and collecting graduate degrees.

Bangsheng Tang is currently an Associate Researcher at Hulu, Beijing Office. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, under the supervision of Periklis A. Papakonstantinou. This work was done during his Ph.D. studies. He did his undergraduate studies in the first-ever Tsinghua University Special Pilot CS Class, founded by Andrew C. Yao. His research interests include algorithm design, computational complexity and computational group theory.