Dr. Fernandez-Duque grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1993, after getting his medical doctor degree, he moved to University of Oregon in Eugene, where he worked with Mike Posner on issues of attention and executive function. He also did research on change blindness with Ian Thornton, and on metaphors of attention with the philosopher Mark L. Johnson. His now wife, Jodie Baird, taught him about theory of mind and metacognition. In 2000, he moved to Toronto for his postdoc to work under the supervision of Sandy Black, a cognitive neurologist at the Rotman Research Institute and Sunnybrook Hospital. He also did research on attention and executive function in Alzheimer's disease. He also studied fronto-temporal dementia (FTD), a disease characterized by impaired social skills and denial of deficit. In 2004, he took a job as faculty at Villanova University, a liberal arts college in the suburbs of Philadelphia where he pursues research on judgment and decision making, and on social cognition while also occasionally teaching classes at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Alur was born in Pune, a city in the state of Maharashtra in the Deccan plateau in Western India. He obtained his bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1987, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, he was with the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories. His research is currently focused on formal methods for system design, spans artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, distributed systems, logic in computer science, machine learning, and programming languages. He is also a professor for the University of Pennsylvania and in the Department of Computer and Information Science.