Richard Cotton is a data scientist with a mixed background in proteomics, debt collection, and chemical health and safety, and he has worked extensively on tools to give nontechnical users access to statistical models. He is the author of the book Learning R, O'Reilly, and has created a number of popular R packages, including assertive, regex, pathological, and sig. He works for Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

Kirill Müller holds a diploma in computer science and currently works as a research assistant at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) in Zurich. He is an avid R user and has contributed to several R packages.

John Silberholz is a fourth year PhD student at the MIT Operations Research Center, working under advisor Dimitris Bertsimas. His thesis research focuses on data-driven approaches to design novel chemotherapy regimens for advanced cancer and approaches to identify effective population screening strategies for cancer. His research interests also include analytical applications in the fields of bibliometrics and heuristic evaluation. John codeveloped 15.071x: The Analytics Edge, a massive open online course (MOOC), which teaches machine learning and optimization using R and spreadsheet solvers.

Before coming to MIT, John completed his BS degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland. He completed internships as a software developer at Microsoft and Google, and he cofounded Enertaq, an electricity grid reliability start-up.