Umesh Vazirani received his B.Tech. in computer science from MIT in 1981 and his Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1986. He is a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley and director of BQIC – the Berkeley center for Quantum Information and Computation. Prof. Vazirani is a theoretician with broad interests in novel models of computation. He has done seminal work in quantum computation and on the computational foundations of randomness. He is the author of two books “An introduction to computational learning theory” with Michael Kearns and “Algorithms” with Sanjoy Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou.