Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University, where he was Senior Wrangler. He is now a Professor in the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative and Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia.  He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University, Florida State University, and Indiana University. after being a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Peterhouse College Cambridge. He has supervised the Ph.D. of 75 students. He has an hindex of 86 with over 41,000 citations.

Fabio Porto is a Senior Researcher at the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, in Brazil. He is the founder of the DEXL Laboratory, developing R&D activities in the context of scientific data analysis and management. He holds a PhD in Informatics from PUC-Rio, with sandwich at INRIA, in 2001, and a postdoc at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He has more than 80 research papers published in International Conferences and Scientific Journals, including VLDB, SIGMOD and ICDE. He was the General Chair of VLDB 2018 and SBBD 2015.