About the Speakers

Boaz Barak (Microsoft Research)

Boaz Barak received his Ph.D in 2004 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Following a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the faculty of Princeton University. Since 2010, he is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Boaz is interested in theoretical computer science, and in particular cryptography and computational complexity. He received the ACM doctoral dissertation award in 2004 and a Packard fellowship in 2007.

Ryan O'Donnell (Carnegie Mellon University)

Ryan O’Donnell received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the MIT Mathematics Department. Following this he was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study and at Microsoft Research. Since 2006 he has belonged to the Computer Science Department faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is now an associate professor. Ryans research interests are analysis of Boolean functions, approximability of optimization problems, learning theory, complexity theory, property testing, and probability. He has received the NSF Career Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.