About the Speakers

Ronald de Wolf (QuSoft, CWI and University of Amsterdam)

Ronald de Wolf (1973) studied computer science and philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, with a focus on logic-based machine learning. He obtained his PhD in 2001 from the University of Amsterdam and CWI (advised by Harry Buhrman and Paul Vitanyi) on a thesis about quantum computation and communication complexity, for which he received the 2003 ERCIM Cor Baayen Award. Subsequently he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. Currently he is a senior researcher at CWI and full professor at the University of Amsterdam. He works on quantum computing, focusing on algorithms, complexity theory, and the applications of quantum information to other areas.

Oded Regev (Department of Computer Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University)

Oded Regev is a professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Prior to joining NYU, he was affiliated with Tel Aviv University and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris under the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Tel Aviv University in 2001 under the supervision of Yossi Azar. He is the recipient of the Wolf Foundation’s Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research in 2005, as well as best paper awards in STOC 2003 and Eurocrypt 2006. He was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant in 2008.

His main research areas include theoretical computer science, cryptography, quantum computation and complexity theory. A main focus of his research is in the area of lattice-based cryptography, where he introduced several key concepts, including the ‘learning with error’ problem and the use of Gaussian measures.