Arindam Banerjee is an Assistant Professor and a McKnight Land Grant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a Resident Fellow in the Institute on Environment at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, where his dissertation was nominated for the best dissertation award. His research interests are in Machine Learning, Data Mining, Information Theory, Convex Analysis and Optimization, and their applications in complex real world learning problems including problems in Text and Web Mining, Bioinformatics, Social Networks, Finance, and Climate Sciences. He has published extensively in the top conferences, including KDD, ICML, ICDM, and SDM, as well as top journals, including Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (ITIT), and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI). He has won several awards including the NSF CAREER award, 2010, the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2009-2011, the J. T. Oden Faculty Research Fellowship from the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), University of Texas at Austin, 2006, and the prestigious IBM PhD fellowship for the academic years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. He has also won several awards for his publications, including the Best Paper Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2004, the Best Research Paper Award under University Cooperative Society Research Excellence Awards, University of Texas at Austin, 2005, and the Best of SIAM Data Mining (SDM) Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, 2007.