William "Velvel" Kahan was born in Canada and attended the University of Toronto for both his undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics, and was eventually hired there as a professor. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1968 with a joint appointment in the Math Department and as a member of the new Computer Science Department in the College of Letters and Science–before it merged with the EECS Department in the College of Engineering in 1973. He retired from the University in 2008. Kahan was instrumental in creating the IEEE 754-1985 standard for floating-point computation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He developed a program called "paranoia' in the 1980s to test for potential floating point bugs and developed the Kahan summation algorithm which helps minimize errors introduced when adding a sequences of finite precision floating point numbers. Kahan won the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1989.

Jan Vitek is a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. He holds degrees from the University of Geneva and Victoria. He works on topics related to the design and implementation of programming languages. In the Ovm project, he led the implementation of the first real-time Java virtual machine to be successfully flight-tested. Together with Noble and Potter, he proposed a concept that became known as Ownership Types. He was one of the designers of the Thorn language. He worked on gaining a better understanding of the JavaScript language and is looking at how to support scalable data analysis in R. Prof. Vitek chaired ACM SIGPLAN; he was the Chief Scientist at Fiji Systems and the founding team at H2O.ai, a vice chair of AITO; a vice chair of IFIP WG 2.4, and chaired SPLASH, PLDI, ECOOP, ISMM and LCTES and was program chair of ESOP, ECOOP, VEE, Coordination, and TOOLS.

Sherry Li is a Senior Scientist in the Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has worked on diverse problems in high performance scientific computations, including parallel computing, sparse matrix computations, high precision arithmetic, and combinatorial scientific computing. She is the lead developer of SuperLU, a widely-used sparse direct solver, and has contributed to the development of several other mathematical libraries, including ARPREC, LAPACK, PDSLin, STRUMPACK, and XBLAS. She earned Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua Univ. in China. She has served on the editorial boards of the SIAM J. Scientific Comput. and ACM Trans. Math. Software, as well as many program committees of the scientific conferences. She is a Fellow of SIAM and a Senior Member of ACM.

Soumith Chintala is a Researcher at Facebook AI Research, where he works on high-performance deep learning. Soumith co-created PyTorch, a deep learning framework that has traction among researchers. He works on computer vision, robotics and machine learning systems. He holds a Masters in CS from NYU.