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Your search for The Future returned 23 results

Jeremy Bailenson
Director, Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University

Jeremy Bailenson is an expert on human interaction in virtural environments. He is the founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, marketing, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality. He is the coauthor of Infinite Reality, the canonical book on the psychology of virtual reality, which has had a major impact in many contexts, for example corporate strategy, supreme court deliberation, and national security.

Jim Bower
Neuroscientist, Education Pioneer, Software Entrepreneur

James Bower is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

He is also founder, chairman and CEO of Numedeon Inc., producer of Whyville.net, one of the most popular educational websites for children, with 2.2 million registered users. Whyville is the leading educational virtual world for children ages 8 - 15. It was launched in 1999 by Numedeon, Inc. to apply over 17 years of research in education and cooperative learning to develop an innovative environment for engaging children in constructive and engaging activities on the web.

Aside from Whyville.net, Numedeon’s proprietary software also powers a virtual campus for the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (UTHSCSA). UTHSCSA-Virtual supports scientists and medical professionals in their collaborations both locally and at a distance.

Bower was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for 17 years. His scientific research focuses on the cerebellum and the mammalian olfactory system and employs a variety of experimental and computational techniques. His laboratory invented the neural-simulation system GENESIS and pioneered techniques in multi-single-unit neuronal recording. He has a longstanding interest and involvement in science education at all levels, having founded several international courses in computational neuroscience and established annual computational neuroscience meetings.

Dr. Bower has also been involved in educational reform efforts since he was President of the Teen League of Rochester (NY) as a high school student from 1970 - 1971. While at Caltech, he founded and directed the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative (CAPSI). He has been a member of numerous national advisory groups on education, including the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science, the National Science Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience.

He has published more than 100 scientific articles and has authored several books. Bower received a Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Stewart Brand
Author, Futurist, Activist, and Visionary

Since he emerged in the counter-culture sixties, Stewart Brand has been a force in the world for giving access to the information needed to make the planet a better place.

He is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, a scenario strategy consulting business and part of the Monitor Group, where he works with leading companies and public institutions on their futures.

Mr. Brand is the president of The Long Now Foundation. Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 1972 issue. In 1984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 1989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting advisor to Ecotrust, the Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forests from Alaska to San Francisco.

In his most recent book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Stewart tackles controversial issues such as nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering. He has advocated nuclear power as a responsible strategy to address power demand in the face of the stark reality of global warming. His seminal essay on this topic, entitled Environmental Heresies, appeared in the MIT Technology Review in May 2005.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 1999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 1994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 1987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 1974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.

Stan Davis
Visionary Business Thinker

Stan Davis is a prominent author, consultant, and speaker on the future of business. For more than 40 years, he has researched and documented the big shifts in science, technology, markets, and organization as they play out on business strategy and implementation. He has 13 books under his belt, with collective sales of more than 1 million copies in 15 languages. He coined the term “mass customization” in the 1980s in his bestseller, Future Perfect (recipient of Tom Peters's "Book of the Decade" Award). Other books include the bestselling Blur (with Chris Meyer), as well as 2020 Vision (with Bill Davidson), Future Wealth (with Chris Meyer), It’s Alive: The Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (with Chris Meyer), and The Art of Business. His early career as an academic was spent primarily at the Harvard Business School. Stan is active with corporations and institutions as an advisor, educator, and guest presenter, having worked with Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Citibank, Ernst & Young, Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Mercedes-Benz, and Sun Microsystems. He is longtime advisor to the board of the Massachusetts Medical Society, which publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, the world's most prestigious medical journal.

Cory Doctorow
Technology Activist, Journalist and Science Fiction Writer

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He is a Visiting Senior Lecturer at Open University (UK); in 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

His novels are published by Tor Books and HarperCollins UK and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest novel, is For the Win, a young adult book about video-games, labor politics and economics. His New York Times Bestseller Little Brother was published in May 2008, and his latest short story collection is Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. In 2008, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (with an introduction by John Perry Barlow) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. His latest adult novel is Makers, published by Tor Books/HarperCollins UK in October, 2009.

His critically acclaimed book, Little Brother, was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula, Sunburst and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America's top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008.

He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.

In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called him, "The William Gibson of his generation." He was also named one of Forbes Magazine's 2007/8/9/10 Web Celebrities, and one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders for 2007.

Esther Dyson
Influential Venture Capitalist; Commentator, Emerging Digital Technology & Health

Esther Dyson, named by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful women in American business, is the founder and chairman of EDventure. She is considered one of the most influential voices in the Internet industry as a board member and/or early investor in several companies that helped define tech startup success, among them Flickr, Meetup, del.icio.us, and Technorati. Over the last few years, Esther has been focusing more and more of her time and energy on private aviation and commercial space startups, as well as on health care and genetics companies.

Esther is currently on the board of directors of 23andMe, a startup with the mission to be the world's trusted source of personal genetic information, and a trustee of the Personal Genome Project. She also recently finished six months of cosmonaut training in Russia and serves on the NASA Advisory Council.

Marc Goodman
Leading Authority on the Future of Global Security, Cyber Crime and Terrorism

Marc Goodman is an internationally acclaimed expert on the unanticipated influences technology wreaks on security, business and international affairs. With over twenty years of global experience in cyber crime, cyber terrorism and information warfare, he has worked with INTERPOL, the United Nations, NATO, the U.S. Department of State and the Los Angeles Police Department. He is frequently sought after by global policy makers, corporate leaders, and security executives on technology related security threats. Marc provides audiences a front seat view into the digital underground on emerging technology, geopolitical, and security trends that will drastically redefine the markets in which they operate.

Founder of the Future Crimes Institute, Marc’s current areas of research spotlight the security implications of disruptive technologies: artificial intelligence, the social data revolution, synthetic biology, virtual worlds, robotics, ubiquitous computing and location-based services. Marc serves as the faculty advisor for global security at Silicon Valley's Singularity University, a NASA and Google sponsored venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity's grand challenges. In addition, he advises NATO as a subject matter expert on Critical Cyber Infrastructure Protection and the UN Counterterrorism Task Force on terrorist use of the Internet.

Marc began his career in Los Angeles as a street police officer with assignments in patrol, undercover operations, and investigations. With the LAPD, Marc received numerous awards, including the City's highest possible unit citation for his pioneering work in high-tech policing. While there, Marc founded the LAPD's Internet unit to deal with the emerging impact of technology on crime and criminality. For more than a decade, Marc worked with INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization, having chaired numerous INTERPOL expert groups on emerging security threats. In that capacity, Marc trained police and security forces throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia and has worked in 70 countries around the world.

Marc holds both a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Master of Science in Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics & Political Science.

Paul Horn
Distinguished Scientist in Residence, NYU; former Director of IBM Research

Dr. Paul M. Horn was named NYU Distinguished Scientist in Residence and NYU Stern Executive in Residence in September of 2007. Prior to his NYU position he was Senior Vice President of the IBM Corporation and Executive Director of Research. In this job he directed IBM’s worldwide Research program with 3200 technical employees in eight sites in five countries around the world, and helped guide IBM’s overall technical strategy. Dr. Horn transformed IBM’s research and development model into an engine of innovation and growth. Under his watch, IBM created the Deep Blue and Blue Gene supercomputers, pioneered the use of copper and "self-assembly" in chip manufacturing, and created new disciplines in autonomic computing and services science. Dr. Horn was a champion for translating technology based research into marketplace opportunities. Trained as a solid state physicist he has held, key management positions in science, semiconductors, and storage; successfully applying these disciplines to solving real world technology problems. Dr. Horn’s top priority as head of IBM’s Research Division was to stimulate innovation and innovative business model and quickly bring those innovations into the marketplace to sustain and grow IBM’s businesses, and to create the new businesses of IBM’s future.

Born in New York, Dr. Horn graduated from Clarkson College of Technology and received his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Rochester in 1973. Prior to joining IBM in 1979, Dr. Horn was a professor of physics in the James Franck Institute and the Physics Department and at the University of Chicago. Dr. Horn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1974-1978. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a former Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters and has published over 85 scientific and technical papers.

Dr. Horn has received numerous awards including the 1988 Bertram Eugene Warren award from the American Crystallographic Association, the 2000 Distinguished Leadership award from the New York Hall of Science, the 2002 Hutchison Medal from the University of Rochester, and the 2002 Pake Prize from the American Physical Society. In 2003 Dr. Horn was named as one of the top computing business leaders in the US by Scientific American magazine. He is also a member of numerous professional committees including three in Washington: the GAO (General Accountability Office) board of advisors, the Gallaudet University Advisory Board, and the board of trustees of the Committee for Economic Development. He is also on the Clarkson University and the New York Polytechnic Board of Trustees, the UC Berkeley Industrial Advisory Board, and is a trustee of the New York Hall of Science.

Eamonn Kelly
Futurist, Change Agent, and Strategic Thought Partner

Eamonn Kelly sits at the forefront of exploring the emergence of a new economic, social, and geopolitical order and its far-reaching consequences for organizations and individuals.

A partner at Monitor Group, Eamonn leads the firm's network, thought leadership and marketing initiatives. For 10 years previously, he served as CEO and president of Global Business Network (GBN), the renowned futures network and scenario strategy consultancy. He has developed insights, tools, and methodologies for mastering uncertainty and has consulted to dozens of the world’s leading corporations in many sectors and global and national public agencies. Prior to joining GBN, Eamonn was head of strategy at Scottish Enterprise, one of the world's most respected development agencies, where he led the creation of effective strategies for economic and social development in a new era. In his highly acclaimed book, Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World, Eamonn weaves together seven powerful “dynamic tensions” that will fundamentally reshape human life in the coming decades. He offers breakthrough insights into how these tensions will conflict and interact to create huge waves of change beyond anything society has experienced previously.

Kevin Kelly
Technology Visionary

Kevin Kelly has been a participant of, and reporter on, the information technology revolution for the past 20 years. Based in his studio in Pacifica, California, he immerses himself in the long-term trends of technology, tools, new media, and cultural behavior. He writes about the ripple effects and social consequences surrounding the culture of technology. Kevin's most recent book is entitled What Technology Wants and presents a refreshing view of technology as a living force in the world. Kevin Kelly is currently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. During Kelly’s tenure as editor at Wired, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of two Oscars). He is also currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control (called “required reading for all executives” by Fortune). In addition, he writes for prominent publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire. Earlier in life, Kevin was a photographer in remote parts of Asia (instead of going to college), publishing his photographs in national magazines and recently in the photo art book Asia Grace.

Chris Luebkeman
Architect, Engineer, Designer of the Built Environment

Dr. Chris Luebkeman is a bridge builder of many kinds. He is a third generation educator, formally trained as a geologist, structural engineer and architect, who believes that successful design cannot be separated from breadth of knowledge and steadfast inquiry. Chris speaks widely to the issues of sustainability and thoughtful design. He applies the lessons learned in the design of the built environment to businesses of all kinds. His keynotes, workshops, and strategy sessions are created for executives seeking better design sensibility for their products, services, and processes. Through his unique user-centric methods, Chris helps clients better understand the needs and desires of consumers, customers, and citizens.

Chris runs the Global Foresight + Innovation initiative at Arup, a global design and engineering firm and a leading creative force behind many of the world's most innovative projects and structures. In his role, he conceives new ways of building—recyclable buildings, reusable offices, and furniture that can decompose—and works with some of the world’s largest companies to develop what he calls ‘plausible futures’ to better understand the opportunities that change is creating for them in the built environment.

In his book, Drivers of Change 2009, Chris and the Foresight team at Arup look at 50 important factors that will affect our world, arranged in a framework known as STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental and political). Designed as a collection of notecards, the book provides a tool for developing business strategy, brainstorming, education, or simply to think creatively and holistically. The cards are designed to encourage deeper consideration of the forces driving global change and the role that individuals can play in creating a more sustainable future.

Christopher Meyer
Innovator, Business Builder, and Author on the Future of the Global Economy

Christopher Meyer is a Founder of Monitor Talent. Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and as leader of a think tank.

Chris' fourth book, Standing on the Sun, will be published by Harvard Business School Press and will be available in early 2012. His previous books include the BusinessWeek Best Seller Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth— the book on which Monitor Talent is based. He blogs on the Harvard Business Review site, and has contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

From 2004 to 2009 he was the Chief Executive of Monitor Networks, a Monitor Group company. Prior to joining Monitor Group, Chris was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business.

Earlier, he was a Vice President and Group Head at Mercer Management Consulting, where from 1984 to 1995 he founded and built the firm’s practice in the information industries, comprising telecommunications, hardware, software, and information services and media.

Chris holds BAs in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School. In addition, he held a University Predoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

He serves on the Boards of Icosystem, the Bankinter Foundation for Innovation, the Business Innovation Factory, and the New Rep Theater, and the Advisory Boards of Innocentive and LaunchCyte.

Byron Reeves
Professor, Stanford University; Behavioral Scientist, Proponent of Interactive Gaming & Virtual Worlds in the Workplace

Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and is Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industry program, Media X. He is an expert on the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses, and has published over 100 scientific papers about media and psychology. His research has been the basis for a number of new media products at companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, in the areas of voice interfaces, automated dialogue systems, and business process simulations. He is currently working on the application of multi-player game technology to behavior change and the conduct of serious work, and is Co-Founder of Seriosity, Inc., a company building enterprise software inspired by game psychology.

Howard Rheingold
Pioneering Thinker on the Future of Technology and Society

There are a lot of voices talking about social media today, but Howard Rheingold defined the field before it existed. A noted author and commentator, Rheingold has a proven record of accurate technology and social forecasting, over two decades of syndicated columns, best-selling books, and pioneering online enterprises. His latest research and forthcoming book focuses on 21st century literacies -- how individuals and organizations learn to use digital media effectively and credibly. He coined the term "virtual community" in 1987.

Howard teaches at both Stanford University and UC Berkeley's School of Information. His courses include Participatory Media / Collective Action, Digital Journalism, and Virtual Community / Social Media. An acknowledged authority on the marriage of mobile phone, PC, and wireless internet, Rheingold's previous work reveals how this convergence has changed the way we meet, mate, entertain, govern, and conduct business. His book Smart Mobs, named one of the “Big Ideas books of 2002” by The New York Times, chronicles the new forms of collective action and cooperation made possible by mobile communications, pervasive computing, and the Internet.

Rheingold is the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Knowledge-Networking Grant through the Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. He was founding Executive Editor of Hotwired, the first commercial webzine where the web-based discussion forum and the online banner ad were invented. Rheingold has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, ABC Primetime Live, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Macneill-Lehrer Report, NPR’s Fresh Air and Marketplace.

Deborah Schultz
Social and Open Web Advocate

Deborah is an Internet industry veteran who merges expertise in design, marketing and innovation to bring fresh approaches to business. She is widely recognized for her impact on the social web and how it impacts society and business. Her work architecting a Social Media Lab for P&G focused on customer relationships, reinventing the nature of the company’s customer connection. Her current work focuses on the importance of real-world experimentation, open-innovation and the new human dynamics required for both startups and large organizations to succeed in an always-on, connected world.

She speaks and consults on innovation and the business impact of the Internet, specifically on the impact of the social web. She currently serves on Procter & Gamble’s Digital Advisory Board and is a Senior Fellow with the Altimeter Group. Deborah has consulted with and advised Fortune 50 companies including Pepsi, General Mills, and GE, as well as numerous Internet startups and VC firms. She is a regular keynote speaker at tech and business conferences and is a co-host of the popular podcast Tummelvision.tv

Previously, Deborah was the Marketing Director at Six Apart, ran her own technology consultancy firm, was a management consultant at AnswerThink and spent five years at Citibank where she developed many of the global bank's first internet initiatives. One of her proudest accomplishments was launching the Downtown Info Center, a lower Manhattan community center & online hub to revitalize lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11th. Deborah is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University.

The former Manhattanite is now a tireless road warrior and can be found in SF, NYC, or Tel Aviv. But wherever she is, she's always 'connected'.

Peter Schwartz
World-Renowned Futurist and Strategist

Peter Schwartz is Senior Vice President for Global Relations and Strategic Planning for Salesforce.com. He is co-founder and former chairman of the Global Business Network (GBN), the world’s preeminent member organization focused on scenario thinking and planning, where he lead programs for corporations, governments, and non-profit institutions. His research and scenario work encompassed energy resources and the environment, technology, life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, aerospace, and national security. A prolific author, Peter’s book, Inevitable Surprises, offers a provocative look at the complex forces at play in the world today and their implications for business and society. His first book, The Art of the Long View, is considered a seminal publication on scenario planning and has been translated into multiple languages. Peter addresses many different audiences in corporate board rooms, at conferences on issues such as global warming and human life extension, and at the World Economic Forum. He led the scenario team at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, where many of the scenario tools were pioneered. He has even lent his futurist skills to Hollywood as a script consultant on such films as The Minority Report, Deep Impact, Sneakers, and War Games.

Clay Shirky
Writer, Consultant, and Teacher on New Technology and Social Media

Clay Shirky is today's leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the internet revolution, Clay provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology's effects on society. Writing extensively about the Internet since 1996, he is the author of the best-selling Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. In Here Comes Everybody—selected by Guardian as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time—Clay explored how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination. Cognitive Surplus reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Clay holds a joint appointment at New York University, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Journalism Department. He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.

Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld, and Foreign Affairs. In addition to writing, Clay has a consulting practice focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a partner at the investment firm the Accelerator Group, an international investment company. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department’s first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

Brian Solis
Leading Thinker on the Impact of Social Media on Business and Culture

Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Brian has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture. His book, Engage, is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web. His most recent book, The End of Business As Usual, explores the rise of the connected consumer, their effect on the bottom line, and how organizations can adapt to effectively compete for their attention, their business or contribution, and most importantly, their loyalty.

Brian Solis is a Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group and works with businesses on new media strategies and frameworks to build bridges between companies and customers, employees, and other important stakeholders. Additionally, he specializes in change management to help businesses (and the leadership team) introduce new media resources, systems and processes, and management layers to effectively embrace and excel around the connected customer. As a result, CRM Magazine named Brian as an influential leader of 2010.

Brian’s ideas and perspective is often cited in the press such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and many other business, technology, and mainstream outlets.

Brian Solis is an avid speaker, keynoting conferences and corporate events around the world. His work in new media dates back to 1997 when he was originally tasked with building branded communities in forums and discussion boards, which represented the foundation of his future study. This work continues today with a primary focus on closing the gap between strategy and execution in relation to business, creative, and intelligence.

His blog, BrianSolis.com is among the world’s leading business and marketing online resources, ranking among the top 1% of all blogs tracked by Technorati. Brian is also ranked as one of the leading voices in the AdAge Power 150 index of worldwide marketing bloggers. He actively contributes to FastCompany, BusinessWeek, AdAge, Harvard Business Review, and Mashable.

Prior to joining Altimeter Group, Brian led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups since 1999 as Principal of FutureWorks.

Steve Weber
Political Economist and Critically Acclaimed Author

Steven Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics. Steve is Professor of Political Science and Professor of The Information School at UC Berkeley, and Visiting Professor of Management and Senior Research Fellow at Moscow School of Management - Skolkovo. His research, teaching, and advisory work for the last decade have focused on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to health care, information technology, software, and global political economy issues relating to competitiveness. He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly and public debates on international relations and US foreign policy.

Steve went to medical school at Stanford then did his Ph.D. in the political science department at Stanford. He served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and was Director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley from 2003 to 2009.

Over the last 20 years Weber has consulted with multinational companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations on risk analysis, strategy, and business forecasting in the areas of international political risk, technology, and global economic change, in part through Monitor Group in San Francisco and The Glover Park Group in Washington DC. Some recent clients include IBM, AMD, Dupont, Xstrata, Singtel, Visa, SK Group, PhRMA, Merck, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ACLU, Governments of Singapore, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United States, Microsoft, CEMEX, Motorola, American Banking Association.

Steve’s 2004 book, The Success of Open Source, is the leading study of the political economy of the open source software community. He is the also the author of Cooperation and Discord in US – Soviet Arms Control, the editor of Globalization and the European Political Economy, and has written and co-written numerous articles in academic and popular publications about international political economy, globalization, emerging security issues, etc. (including “How Globalization Went Bad,” in Foreign Policy 2007, “A World Without the West,” The National Interest summer 2007, and "America's Hard Sell", Foreign Policy 2008). His most recent book, The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas (2010), with co-author Bruce Jentleson of Duke, proposes terms of global leadership for an emerging era of ideological competition. Forthcoming in March 2011, co-edited with Nils Gilman and Jesse Goldhammer, is Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century.

Lawrence Wilkinson
Executive, Advisor, and Commentator on the Future of Media and the Consumer

Lawrence Wilkinson provides strategic counsel and venture design services through the firm Heminge & Condell, based in San Francisco. He has been an active entrepreneur and advisor in the media and related businesses for more than 30 years. He helped create such diverse companies as Oxygen Media, Global Business Network (GBN), Ealing Studios, and Design Within Reach. Today, Lawrence continues to serve as Vice Chairman of Oxygen Media, Inc., which he co-founded with partners Geraldine Laybourne, Oprah Winfrey, Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, and Disney. Oxygen currently provides a cable television service reaching more than 40 million households in the U.S. (contracted to grow to a minimum of 60 million by the end of 2008) and award-winning web services. Lawrence continues to keep his hand in the film production world, serving as a director and advisor to Ealing Studios, Ltd.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Technical Strategy and Innovation Expert

For over 30 years Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger influenced and shaped IBM’s innovation and technical strategy. During his tenure he was responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing appropriate activities in and outside of IBM in order to capitalize on them. He led a number of successful companywide initiatives including the Internet and e-business, supercomputing, Linux, Grid computing and, in October 2002, IBM's On Demand Business initiative. Retired in 2007, Irving continues to consult for IBM on major new market strategies like Cloud Computing and Smart Planet.

A widely sought after expert in the fields of innovation, technology and transformation, Irving was appointed Strategic Advisor in March 2008 at Citigroup to assist with innovation and technology initiatives across the company. He is helping to formulate Citigroup initiatives related the future of global banking, including mobile banking, Internet-based financial services, and financial systems modeling and analysis. He was a member of President Obama's Technology, Innovation and Government Reform transition team. The goal of this initiative was to developed a set of policy proposals to make government more open and transparent, leverage high-technology to grow the economy and create jobs, and use social networking tools to involve citizens in government transformation through their collective energy and expertise.

Irving is Visiting Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, Adjunct Professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School, and Senior Fellow at the Levin Institute of the State University of New York. In addition, he is a member of several boards including the InnoCentive Advisory Board, the Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations Board, the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Scientists, and the Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.

He was co-chair of the President Bill Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, as well as a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is a former member of the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories, of the Board of Overseers for Fermilab and of BP’s Technology Advisory Council. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of Cuba, he was named the 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger received an M.S. and a Ph. D. in physics from the University of Chicago.

Jonathan Zittrain
Foremost Authority on the Future of the Internet

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society and is on the board of advisors for Scientific American. Previously, he was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Forum Fellow of the World Economic Forum, which has named him a Young Global Leader.

His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. His book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, focuses on the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC, and he has co-edited two studies of Internet filtering by national governments, including Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering.

Ethan Zuckerman
Fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law; Founder, Global Voices

Ethan Zuckerman is an activist and scholar whose work focuses on the global blogosphere, free expression and social translation in the developing world. He is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. In this role, Ethan contributes both to the understanding of the role and power of civic media in the broader media ecosystem, and builds tools that help communities around the world share their perspectives and stories.

Prior to joining MIT, Ethan was a longtime fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society where he focused his research on the impact of technology on the developing world. His projects included a study of global media attention, research on the use of weblogs and other social software in the developing world, and the use of web 2.0 technologies by activists.

In 2004, he co-founded Global Voices, an award-winning international citizen media network. Global Voices maintains an online newsroom, which reports from over 100 nations via weblogs and a translation network that publishes content in 12 languages. Global Voices offers trainings in citizen medium podcasting and videocasting throughout the developing world, and runs an advocacy project that supports free speech online.

Ethan has also been involved with founding several internet start-ups including: Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space; and Geekcorps, a non profit group that provided technology assistance to governments and companies in the developing world.

Ethan graduated from Williams College with a BA in Philosophy in 1993. In 1993-4, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.

Ethan was given the 2002 Technology in Service of Humanity Award by MIT's Technology Review Magazine and named to the TR100, TR's list of innovators under the age of 35. In 2004, Ethan was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

He lives the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts with his wife Rachel. He serves on the boards of regional and international organizations that focus on technology and education, including on the sub-boards of the Open Society Institute's Information Program and US Program.

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