About the Speakers

Ankur Moitra (MIT)

Ankur Moitra is the Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics at MIT and the Director of the Statistics and Data Science Center. The aim of his work is to bridge the gap between theoretical computer science and machine learning by developing algorithms with provable guarantees and foundations for reasoning about their behavior. He has won several awards for his research and teaching, including a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Hertz Fellowship and a School of Science Excellence in Graduate Teaching Prize.

Ola Svensson (EPFL)

Ola Svensson is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL, Switzerland. He is interested in theoretical aspects of computer science with an emphasis on the approximability of NP-hard optimization problems. Ola is an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2022, and his work has received several recognitions including the 2019 Michael and Sheila Held Prize by the National Academy of Sciences and best paper awards at FOCS and STOC.