Peter Richtárik is a professor of Computer Science at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, where he leads the Optimization and Machine Learning Lab. Through his work on randomized and distributed optimization algorithms, he has contributed to the foundations of machine learning and optimization. He is one of the original developers of Federated Learning. Prof Richtárik’s works attracted international awards, including the Charles Broyden Prize, SIAM SIGEST Best Paper Award, and a Distinguished Speaker Award at the 2019 International Conference on Continuous Optimization. He serves as an Area Chair for leading machine learning conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR, and is an Action Editor of JMLR, and Associate Editor of Numerische Mathematik, and Optimization Methods and Software.