David Karger received his AB, summa cum laude, in computer science from Harvard University in 1989 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1994. He is a professor of computer science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Karger splits his research between algorithms and information management. His work in algorithms has focused on applications of randomization to optimization problems and led to significant progress on several core problems. He has also researched applications of theoretical ideas to applied areas such as compilers and networks.

His dissertation received the 1994 ACM doctoral dissertation award and the Mathematical Programming Society's 1997 Tucker Prize. He received the National Academy of Science's 2004 Award for Initiative in research. His research in information management has considered tools that help people organize information in ways that make sense to them, as well as tools that help people share and annotation information in collaborative environments.

Manolis Kellis is an associate professor of Computer Science at MIT in the area of Computational Biology, a principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He leads the MIT Computational Biology Group.

Professor Kellis’ expertise is in the areas of computational biology, genomics, epigenomics, gene regulation, and genome evolution. His group specifically seeks to understand how the genome sequence leads to the unique biology of each person, through understanding the functional building blocks of the human genome, their interconnections, and their association with disease and health phenotypes.

His work spans four areas: In the area of genome interpretation, he has developed comparative genomics methods to identify genes and regulatory elements systematically in the human genome. In the area of gene regulation, Kellis studies the regulatory motifs involved in cell type specification during development, their combinatorial relationships, and how these establish expression domains in the developing embryo. In the area of epigenomics, Kellis has uncovered chromatin signatures associated with distinct functions across multiple cell types, and sequence signals responsible for their establishment and maintenance. In the area of evolutionary genomics and phylogenomics, Kellis has studied the dynamics of gene phylogenies across complete genomes, the emergence of new gene functions by duplication and mutation, and has defined signatures for measuring selection within the human population.

Nancy Leveson is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and professor of engineering systems at MIT. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Leveson conducts research on the topics of system safety, software safety, software and system engineering, and human-computer interaction.

In 1999, she received the ACM Allen Newell Award for outstanding computer science research and in 1995 the AIAA Information Systems Award for "developing the field of software safety and for promoting responsible software and system engineering practices where life and property are at stake." In 2005, she received the ACM Sigsoft Outstanding Research Award. She has published more than 200 research papers and is author of a book, Safeware: System Safety and Computers published by Addison-Wesley. She consults extensively in many industries on the ways to prevent accidents.

Henry Lieberman has been a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1987. His interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human interface. He directs the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in interactive interfaces.

Many of his current projects revolve around applying Common Sense Reasoning to interactive interfaces. He is using a large knowledge base of Commonsense facts about everyday life to streamline interfaces and provide intelligent defaults and proactive help. He holds a strong interest in making programming easier for nonexpert users. He is a pioneer of the technique of Programming by Example, where a user demonstrates examples, which are recorded and generalized using techniques from machine learning. He has also worked on natural language programming and visual programming.

He worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (now CSAIL) in parallel computing for artificial intelligence and in computer systems for education. He has published more than 100 research papers and edited three books. He holds a doctoral-equivalent degree (Habilitation) from the University of Paris VI and was a visiting professor there from 1989 to 1990.

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor and head of the Programming Methodology Group. Liskov's research interests lie in programming methodology, programming languages and systems and distributed computing.

Major projects include: the design and implementation of CLU, the first language to support data abstraction; the design and implementation of Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs; and the Thor object-oriented database system, which provides transactional access to persistent, highly available objects in wide-scale distributed environments. Her current research interests include Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems, peer-to-peer computing, and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in large-scale distributed systems. 

Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Association for Computer Machinery. She received the Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996 and the IEEE von Neumann medal in 2004. At the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2008, she was awarded the Programming Languages Achievement Award. In 2009, she received the A.M. Turing Award from ACM.

Nancy Lynch is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and heads the Theory of Distributed Systems research group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

She has written numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and validation of distributed systems. She is the author of the graduate textbook Distributed Algorithms and a co-author of the monograph, The Theory of Timed I/O Automata.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, and a winner of several prizes for contributions to distributed computing theory. Lynch's academic training was in mathematics, at Brooklyn College and MIT. She served on the mathematics and computer science faculty at several other universities, including the University of Southern California and Georgia Tech, prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems. Her current projects involve designing algorithms for mobile wireless networks, and analyzing timed and hybrid systems and security protocols.

Born in Palermo, Italy, Silvio Micali received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. He joined MIT in 1983, where he is Ford Professor of Engineering.

His scientific contributions include complexity-based pseudorandom generation and cryptography, interactive and computationally sound proofs, zero knowledge, secure protocols, and resilient mechanism design. He is the recipient of the Goedel prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography), and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rob Miller is an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He earned his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002, and his dissertation earned an honorable mention in the ACM Distinguished Dissertation competition. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2005, and has won four best paper awards at USENIX and UIST conferences.

His research interests lie at the intersection of programming and human computer interaction: making programming easier for end-users (Web end-user programming), making it more productive for professionals (HCI for software developers), and making humans part of the programming system itself (crowd computing and human computation).

Pablo Parrilo received an electronics engineering degree from the University of Buenos Aires (1995), and a PhD in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology (2000). He has held visiting appointments at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Physics), the Lund Institute of Technology (Automatic control), and UC Berkeley (Mathematics). Before joining MIT EECS in 2004, he was an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich).

Parrilo is the recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council (2005), as well as the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize (2005). He is currently on the Board of Directors of the Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM) society, and a member of the Editorial Board of the MOS/SIAM Book Series on Optimization. At MIT, he is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC).

Tomaso A. Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

He is author or co-author of more than 400 papers in the fields of learning theory, computer science, computational neuroscience, and nonlinear systems theory and he belongs to the editorial board of several scientific journals. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a founding fellow of AAAI. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a founding fellow of AAAI. He has received several awards, including the Otto-Hahn-Medaille Award of the Max-Planck-Society, the Max Planck Research Award (with M. Fahle), from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the MIT 50K Entrepreneurship Competition Award, the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia in 2000 (Volta Bicentennial) and the 2003 Gabor Award.

He is one of the most cited computational neuroscientists (with an h-index greater than 80 — based on GoogleScholar). His research has been interdisciplinary, between brains and computers. His long-term research is now focused on the problem of learning in biological organisms and in computers. In recent decades he has developed theoretical foundations in statistical learning and applications in computer vision, bioinformatics and computer graphics. He has also been active for several years in the area of computational neuroscience. A former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation, he was involved in starting several other high-tech companies.