About the Speakers

Michael Mitzenmacher (Harvard)

Michael Mitzenmacher is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Michael has authored or co-authored approximately 200 conference and journal publications on a variety of topics, including algorithms for the Internet, efficient hash-based data structures, erasure and error-correcting codes, power laws, data mining, and compression. His work on low-density parity-check codes shared the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award and won the 2009 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award. His textbook on randomized algorithms and probabilistic techniques in computer science was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press. He served as Area Dean of Computer Science for Harvard from 2010-2013, and currently serves as SIGACT Chair.

Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google Research)

Sergei Vassilvitskii received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2007 under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. After graduation he was a research scientist at Yahoo! Research, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. In 2012 he joined Google research. He is known for his work on clustering, including the k-means++ algorithm, and for designing algorithms for modern parallel systems. His research has won best paper awards at SPAA (2013) and WSDM (2015), and has been widely implemented as part of scalable machine learning packages.