Adam R. Klivans received his B.S. and M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from MIT, where Dan Spielman was his advisor. He then held an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard under the guidance of Leslie Valiant. After spending six months at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago as a visiting professor, he became an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Computer Science. He is frequently confused with Adam Kalai.

Amir Shpilka was born in 1972 in Israel and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2001, under the supervision of Avi Wigderson. As of 2005 he is a CS faculty member at the Technion. He is married to Carmit and has two children. His research interests lie in Complexity Theory, mainly in Arithmetic Circuit Complexity. When not working or enjoying his family he likes to read and play chess.