Emmanuel Abbe received his Ph.D. from the EECS department at M.I.T. under the supervision of Lizhong Zheng, and his M.Sc. degree from the Mathematics Department at EPFL. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and in the Program for Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. His research interests are in coding theory, random graphs, and in the interplay between those fields.

Andrea Montanari is an associate professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and of Statistics, Stanford University. He received the Laurea degree in physics in 1997, and the Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2001, both from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique of Ecole Normale Supérieure (LPTENS), Paris, France, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA. From 2002 to 2010 has been Chargé de Recherche at LPTENS. In September 2006, he joined the faculty of Stanford University. Dr. Montanari was co-awarded the ACM SIGMETRICS Best Paper Award in 2008. He received the CNRS Bronze Medal for Theoretical Physics in 2006, the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008, and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2013. His research focuses on algorithms on graphs, graphical models, statistical inference and estimation.