Scott Aaronson is David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his bachelor's from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. Before coming to UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson's research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, and the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics.
Srinivasan Arunachalam is a Research Staff Member in IBM Research. Before joining IBM, Srinivasan was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, hosted by Aram Harrow. Srinivasan received his PhD from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and QuSoft, Netherlands, supervised by Ronald de Wolf, after his M.Math degree from University of Waterloo and Institute of Quantum computing, Canada, supervised by Michele Mosca. His research interests include quantum algorithms, quantum complexity theory and Analysis of Boolean functions.
Yuliy Baryshnikov graduated as an applied mathematician from MIIT in Moscow, then worked till 1990 at the Institute for Control Sciences.
He spent the next decade in Europe, first as Alexander von Humboldt research fellow, then as a Habilitandedstipendiat of the DFG, and, finally, as a professor at the Math department of UVSQ in France.
In 2001 Yuliy joined Bell Labs (then at Lucent Technologies), first as a Member of technical staff, later as a department head. He moved to the University of Illinois in 2011, where he is a Professor in Mathematics and Electrical and Computing Engineering.
His areas of interest include probability, dynamical systems, singularities, analytic combinatorics, social choice, and, lately, applied topology.
Charles H. Bennett is a physicist and information theorist at IBM's Research Division, best known for his work on the physics of information processing, including the thermodynamics of computation, the Maxwell's demon problem, quantum cryptography, quantum computing, quantum teleportation and quantum channel capacity. Lately he has become interested in the application of quantum information and computational complexity theory to problems in cosmology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020 he delivered the (virtual) Shannon Lecture.
Prof. Nicolas Gisin was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1952. His interests cover a wide range of topics, from the foundations of quantum physics and philosophy, to applications in quantum communications. He has authored a popular book on Quantum Chance and Non-locality and is a co-founder of the company IDQ.
After graduating from Princeton, Nemenman trained at the Kavli Insitutute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB and at the Columbia University Medical Center. He was a permanent staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining Emory University Departments of Physics and Biology, where he is now a Winship Distinguished Research Professor and a Director of the Theory and Modeling of Living Systems Initiative. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Scholar Awardee. He works on understanding how physical limitations on information processing shape biological organization, from the structure of neural networks responsible for learning in animals, to design of signaling pathways in microorganisms. His work involves paper-and-pencil theory, numerical simulations, and analysis of high-throughput experimental datasets.
Sandu Popescu has been Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol since 1999. He studied with Yakir Aharonov, followed by postdoctoral research positions with François Englert, and then with Abner Shimony and Bahaa Saleh. From 1996 to 1999 he was Reader at the Isaac Newton Institute, University of Cambridge. Popescu's main body of work is in the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information, where he was one of the pioneers of the field, and more recently in the foundations of statistical mechanics and quantum thermodynamics. He received the Dirac Medal in 2016 and is a Fellow of Royal Society. For more information, visit www.sandupopescu.com.
Chris Sims received both his MS and PhD degrees in Cognitive Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He served as Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Drexel University from 2015–17 before joining the faculty of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research is centered on visual memory and perceptual expertise, sensori-motor control and motor learning, and learning and decision-making under uncertainty.
Mary Wootters is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2014, and a BA in math and computer science from Swarthmore College in 2008; she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014 to 2016. She works in theoretical computer science, applied math, and information theory; her research interests include error correcting codes and randomized algorithms for dealing with high dimensional data. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2019.
Lydia Zakynthinou is a PhD student in the Computer Science program at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Professors Jonathan Ullman and Huy Lê Nguyễn. Before joining Northeastern, Lydia earned a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a Master of Science from the University of Athens. Her research interests lie in the areas of learning theory and differential privacy.
Doron Zeilberger is the Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is widely known for the development of “WZ” (Wilf-Zeilberger) Theory and Zeilberger’s algorithm which are used extensively in modern computer algebra software. Zeilberger was the first to prove the elusive result in combinatorial theory known as the alternating sign matrix conjecture. Among his honors are: the American Mathematical Society Steele Prize for seminal contributions to research (co-recipient with Herb Wilf); the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications Euler Medal for “Outstanding Contributions to Combinatorics”; the Laura H. Carnell Professorship at Temple University; and the MAA Lester R. Ford award for a paper in The American Mathematical Monthly.