Bahman Bahmani is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University supported by the William R. Hewlett Stanford Graduate Fellowship. His research interests are in algorithmic and architectural aspects of web and large data applications. His Ph.D. advisor was Rajeev Motwani. After Rajeev's passing, Ashish Goel and Prabhakar Raghavan became his advisor and coadvisor. He is a recipient of the Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award for his contributions to the area of search technologies.

Aranyak Mehta is a Research Scientist at Google Research, based in Mountain View, CA. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 2005, advised by Dick Lipton and Vijay Vazirani, with a thesis on Algorithmic Game Theory. He received a B.Tech from I.I.T. Bombay in 2000, where he started research in theoretical computer science with the support of Milind Sohoni and Sundar Vishwanathan. His interests lie in Online and Approximation Algorithms, Auction and Mechanism Design, and in algorithmic and auction theoretic applications in industry. He grew up in Bombay, inevitably becoming a fan of cricket and Bollywood, and currently enjoys living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rajeev Motwani was born on March 24, 1962 in Jammu, India. He died on June 5, 2009. He received a B. Tech degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1988 under the supervision of Richard Karp. The list of his research interests is long and eclectic, and includes graph theory, approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms, online algorithms, complexity theory, web search and information retrieval, databases, data mining, computational drug design, robotics, streaming algorithms, and data privacy. He received the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his research on probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation. Dr. Motwani successfully spanned both theory and practice, being an early advisor and supporter of Google, in addition to many other successful startups and venture firms in Silicon Valley.