Daniele Micciancio is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Micciancio got his MS (1996) and PhD (1998) degrees from MIT, and joined UCSD as a professor in 1999, after spending one more year at MIT as a postdoc. Dr. Micciancio is the recepient of a Matchey Award (FOCS 1998), NSF CAREER award (2001), Hellman fellowship (2001) and Sloan research fellowship (2003). His research interests include computational problems on lattices, coding theory and cryptography. He is the author of the book "Complexity of Lattice problems: a cryptographic perspective".

Janos Pach received his Ph. D. in Mathematics in 1981, from Eotvos University, Budapest, with the Gold Ring of the President of the Hungarian Republic. He is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at City College, New York, Senior Research Fellow at the Renyi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Research Professor at Courant Institute, New York University. His main fields of interest are discrete and computational geometry, convexity, and combinatorics. He has written more than 200 research papers. His most recent book ``Research Problems in Discrete Geometry'' with Peter Brass and Willy Moser (McGill) was published last year by Springer. Janos Pach is co-editor-in-chief of Discrete & Computational Geometry and serves on the editorial boards of seven other professional journals. For his scientific achievements, he received the Grunwald Medal from the Janos Bolyai Mathematical Society (1982), the Lester R. Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America (1990), the Renyi Prize and the Academy Award from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1998). One of his daughters is a freshman at McGill.

Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She joined UBC in 1996 after completing Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at the University of Washington. Before returning to graduate school, she worked as a software engineer at a research and development telecommunications company for 5 years. She also holds a B.Sc. degree from the University of Alberta. She works primarily on building simpler and more effective tools to help developers manage software evolution tasks. In 2005, she held a UBC Killam Research Fellowship and also received the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for her work in software evolution from AITO. In 2006 she received an NSERC Steacie Fellowship and the CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award. She has recently been a co-author on two papers awarded SIGSOFT distinguished paper awards. One of the most rewarding parts of her career has been collaborating with many talented graduate and undergraduate students.

Dr. Stephen D. H. Hsu is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and B.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986. He was a Harvard Junior Fellow and assistant professor at Yale University before moving to Oregon in 1998. He is a co-founder of SafeWeb, which was acquired by Symantec on October 15, 2003. In 2005 Stephen, along with SafeWeb co-founder James Hormuzdiar, co-founded Robotgenius, an Oakland based security software company.

Daniel Levitin, Ph.D. is the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication at McGill, with a principal appointment in the Department of Psychology. He holds an Associate membership in the SOCS, and in the Schulich School of Music. Prior to entering academia, he was an award-winning record producer, and served as Vice-President of talent acquisition (and later President) of 415/Columbia Records, which was sold to Sony Music in 1990. He worked for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Interval Research (a Silicon Valley Think-Tank) during the 1990s, developing the ideas that eventually became the first music downloading and recommendation dot-com, MoodLogic, and working with computer industry pioneers including David Liddle (Xerox Alto and Star), Joy Mountford (Apple Computer Desktop design), Malcolm Slaney (Apple Computer sound tools), and Dick Shoup (the laser printer). He has authored 50 scientific articles on music cognition, and statistical methods for analyzing acoustical data (including spherical statistics and functional data analysis). Prior to joining McGill, he taught Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the author of the best-selling book "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession."