Nello Cristianini was born in Gorizia, Italy. He has studied at University of Trieste in Italy; Royal Holloway, University of London; the University of Bristol; and the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is an active young researcher in the theory and applications of Support Vector Machines and other learning systems and has published in a number of key international conferences and journals in this area. His research interests include: machine learning theory and algorithms; bioinformatics; text categorization.

John Shawe-Taylor was born in Cheltenham, England. He studied at the University of Cambridge; University of Ljubljana in Slovenia; Simon Fraser University in Canada; Imperial College; and Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the theoretical analysis of learning systems in addition to other areas of discrete mathematics and computer science. He is a professor of Computing Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is currently the co-ordinator of a European funded collaboration of sixteen universities involved in research on Neural and Computational Learning.