Lav R. Varshney is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a research assistant professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and a research affiliate in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B. S. degree with honors in electrical and computer engineering (magna cum laude) from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2004. He received the S. M., E. E., and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge in 2006, 2008, and 2010, respectively, where he received the J.-A. Kong Award Honorable Mention for Electrical Engineering doctoral thesis and the E. A. Guillemin Thesis Award for electrical engineering S. M. thesis. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY from 2010 until 2013, where he conceptualized and led computational creativity system design to significant popular attention. His research interests include information and coding theory, signal processing and data analytics, collective intelligence in sociotechnical systems, neuroscience, and creativity. Dr. Varshney is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi, and a senior member of IEEE. He has received many paper awards including the NYC Media Lab -Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Paper Award (2015), was a finalist for the 2014 Bell Labs Prize, and his work appears in the anthology The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014.