Dr. Eduardo Laber did his academic training at PUC-RIO. He completed his degree in Computer Engineering in 1996, his master’s and PhD in Computer Science in 1997 and 1999 respectively, and his research during this period was on data compression. From mid-1999 to early 2001 he was a collaborating professor at COPPE-SISTEMAS, UFRJ and, since 2001, he has been a professor at the Informatics Department at PUC-Rio. He was a visiting scientist for two months at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 and 2002. His main research focus is the design and analysis of algorithms with theoretical performance guarantees for problems that emerge in different areas such as data compression, artificial intelligence and finance, among others. Due to his interest in solving industry problems he also seeks to keep himself up-to-date on recent advances in the areas of machine learning and optimization. In these last two topics he gives courses, advises graduate students and carries out projects of

technology transfer with different companies. Professor Laber's scientific research has been recognized by the scientific community in view of his publications in some of the main journals and conferences in Computer Science, such as the Journal of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, STOC, SODA and IEEE Data Compression Conference. He is a CNPq Level 1 researcher and an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Laber has also supervised several master's theses and four doctoral theses, three of which have been awarded prizes at the national level by the Brazilian Computing Society. He works with a reduced number of students in order to guarantee greater exchange with his advisees, and he is strongly committed to teaching as he believes this to be one of the greatest contributions of his profession. For this reason he invests a considerable part of his time in the continuous improvement of teaching material such as course notes, slides and assignments.