Avrim Blum is Professor and Chief Technology Officer at TTIC. He was formerly Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His main research interests are in Foundations of Machine Learning and Data Mining, Algorithmic Game Theory (including auctions, pricing, dynamics, and connections to machine learning), the analysis of heuristics for computationally hard problems, and Database Privacy. He has served as Program Chair for the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) and the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT). He was recipient of the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF National Young Investigator Award, the ICML/COLT 10-year best paper award, and the Herbert Simon Teaching Award, and is a Fellow of the ACM.