About the Speakers

Benjamin Rossman (University of Toronto)

Ben is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto since 2016. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2010 and spent several years in Japan as a postdoc at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and researcher at the National Institute of Informatics. The main thread of his research investigates the average-case circuit complexity of subgraph isomorphism problems. His Ph.D. thesis on the k-clique problem received the Ackermann Award of the European Association for Computer Science Logic. Last summer Ben coorganized a workshop in St Petersburg on Low-Depth Complexity. He is enthusiastic about the recent developments and renewed interest in circuit complexity.

Ryan Williams (MIT)

Ryan Williams is an Associate Professor at MIT. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, under the guidance of Manuel Blum. He thinks about algorithms and complexity theory, and is fortunate to advise wonderful PhD students. He has received some best paper awards, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians. He also presently serves on the ACM SIGACT Executive Committee.