Bernhard Schölkopf is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. He is coauthor of Learning with Kernels (2002) and is a coeditor of Advances in Kernel Methods: Support Vector Learning (1998), Advances in Large-Margin Classifiers (2000), and Kernel Methods in Computational Biology (2004), all published by the MIT Press.

John Platt is the Manager of the Knowledge Tools group at Microsoft Research, and Program Chair of the 2006 NIPS conference.

Thomas Hofmann is a Director of Engineering at Google's Engineering Center in Zurich and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.