Shai Ben-David holds a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto in both the mathematics and computer science departments. He was a professor of computer science at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Ben-David has held visiting positions at the Australian National University and Cornell University, and since 2004 has been a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His research interests are in CS theory and machine learning. He has been program chair for COLT and ALT (the two main annual machine learning conferences), and also served on their steering committees. Ben-David has also been an area chair and senior program committee member for ICML and NIPS (the two major general machine learning conferences).