Aart J.C. Bik received his PhD degree from Leiden University in 1996 (his sparse compiler research received the C.J. Kok Outstanding Thesis Award). He was a Principal Engineer at Intel, where he was the lead compiler architect of automatic vectorization in the Intel C++/Fortran compilers (recognized with the Intel Achievement Award). In 2007, he moved to Google, where he has worked on various projects such as the large-scale graph processing system Pregel (awarded the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award), Google Glass, and the optimizing compiler for the Android Runtime. In November 2019, Aart joined the MLIR compiler team, where he revamped his passion for compiler support for sparse computations.