Johan Håstad graduated from M.I.T. in 1986. His advisor was Shafi Goldwasser. He won the 1994 Gödel Prize for his work on circuit complexity. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences (Sweden) and was an invited speaker at ICM 1998 and a plenary speaker at ECM 2004. His CS interests include cryptograpy, complexity theory and approximability of NP-hard optimization problems. He also enjoys table tennis and wine.

Subhash Khot graduated from Princeton University in 2003 under the supervision of Prof. Sanjeev Arora. He won the Best Student Paper award at FOCS 2003 and shared the Best Paper Award at FOCS 2004. He is interested in complexity theory, approximability of NP-hard problems and the theory of metric embeddings. He loves watching movies, cooking, and hanging out with friends and the family. Once an avid fan of cricket, he is not interested in the game anymore, thanks to the dismal performance of the Indian cricket team over the past several years.