About the Speakers

Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University)

Venkatesan Guruswami received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2001. He was then a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley during 2001-02. Since 2008, Venkat has been at Carnegie Mellon University where he is currently a Professor in the Computer Science Department. Venkat's research interests include the theory of error-correcting codes, PCPs and complexity of approximate optimization, pseudorandomness, and communication and computational complexity. His work on list decoding has led to codes with minimum possible redundancy for correcting any desired fraction of worst-case errors. Venkat is a recipient of the EATCS Presburger Award, Packard and Sloan Fellowships, the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award.

Sergey Yekhanin (Microsoft)

Sergey Yekhanin received a Specialist Diploma from Moscow State University in 2002, and Ph.D. from MIT in 2007. In 2007-2008 he was a Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 2008 Sergey joined Microsoft where he is currently a Researcher. His research interests lie in algebraic coding theory, combinatorics, and computational complexity theory. Sergey is a recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (2007) and the IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award (2014). He was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians.