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Your search for The Future returned 22 results

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 Wired, Popular Science, Make, The New York Times, 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. In 2007, he served as the Canada–U.S. Fulbright Program Visiting Research Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

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

His novels are published 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, The 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 most recent novels include Makers, and a new young adult novel, For the Win which is about union organizing in video games.

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

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 next book, due October 2010, is entitled What Technology Wants and will present a refreshing view of technology as as 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, author, leader of a think tank, consultant, and executive. He writes and speaks about the trends shaping business and economic developments. His most recent book is It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. He has also co-authored Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth with Stan Davis, and contributed to publications such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Business 2.0.

Chris’ recent research and consulting have focused on the development of the Adaptive Enterprise, helping companies create the capacity to sense, respond, and adapt to changes in their business environments.

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.

Before joining Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, 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 a B.A. 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 Board of Icosystem, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the Mass Nanotech Exchange, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, and the advisory Boards of LaunchCyte and Corey McPherson Nash.

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.

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. He currently teaches at Stanford University.

Eric Roston
Science Journalist and Climate Change Expert

Eric Roston is a journalist and science writer in Washington, DC, and author of the critically acclaimed book, The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat (Walker & Co.). The book, based on three years of research, argues that "carbon" is the most important word that many people understand the least. The book traces the dynamic, fundamental science that unifies seemingly disparate parts of our experience: Climate, energy, health, industry--the fastest way to learn the most about the world is through the carbon atom.
The book has received endorsements from many prominent thinkers. Writing in the journal Nature, Sir John Meurig Thomas compared The Carbon Age to Michael Faraday's historic public lectures. The book met an exuberant reception at TIME, Newsweek, NPR, Discover, New Scientist, the publishing journals, and the blogosphere. A State Department grant in 2009 led Roston through six cities in India, where he talked about climate change and journalism with groups of reporters, business leaders, students, and many others.
Roston writes Climate Post, a popular weekly climate-and-energy news analysis and is affiliated with the the Washington, DC, office of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.
Previously, Roston wrote for TIME, in its Washington bureau, where he covered economics, politics and technology. Roston joined the magazine in 2000 as a business reporter in the New York bureau, covering stories such as the collapse of Enron, China's emergence as a force in global trade, and how advanced computing technologies are reshaping the economy. An eyewitness to the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Roston was a part of the reporting team that won a National Magazine Award for best single-issue coverage.
In September 2002, Roston became a part of TIME's Washington bureau, covering politics, energy, science, and health issues. He has penned a monthly column on technology and society for TIME Inside Business. He was TIME's first blogger, writing a daily commentary on "the technology that will carry us through tomorrow--and the stuff that keeps us stuck in yesterday."
Roston has been a guest on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," CleanSkies.tv, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC, National Public Radio and various radio stations nationwide and abroad. Prior to TIME, he wrote for LIFE magazine and contributed to Slate.com, where he wrote the "Today's Papers" column. Roston, who is fluent in Russian, holds an M.A. in Russian history, and a B.A. in modern European history, both from Columbia University.

Deb Roy
Leading Expert on Technology & Human Cognition, MIT Media Lab

Deb Roy is an entrepreneur, innovator, and an expert on data analysis and interpretation. He is the founding director of the Center for Future Banking at MIT, which, in collaboration with Bank of America, explores how emerging technologies and insights into human behavior can transform customers' experience. In this effort, he is joined by a multidisciplinary team of researchers and students with a passion for invention who are developing new ideas for the banking industry, and building and testing new working prototypes.

A pioneer in cognitive modeling, communication theory, and human-machine interaction, Roy is the AT&T Associate Professor at MIT and chair of the academic program in Media Arts and Sciences. In this role he oversees the academic program of 140 masters and Ph.D. students at the MIT Media Lab. In addition, he directs the Cognitive Machines group, a research team of 15 PhD students and staff working on several projects, including: the Human Speechome Project, a pioneering effort to understand how children develop language grounded in extensive longitudinal video; collaborative work with Autism researchers and clinicians to better understand the developmental course of the disorder in young children; and The Restaurant Game, a research project that will harness the power of the Internet and capture rich behavior and language by algorithmically combining the gameplay experiences of thousands of people playing an identical scenario.

In 2008 he co-founded his first start-up company in the consumer media space based on research in his lab. A native of Canada, Roy received his bachelor of computer engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1992, his PhD in the Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 1999, and joined the MIT faculty immediately after in 2000. He has authored numerous scientific papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining and information visualization.

Deborah Schultz
Social and Open Web Advocate

Deborah Schultz is a Partner with Altimeter Group and leads it’s Innovation and Best Practices business focused on bringing together the ecosystem of emerging technologies including investors, start-ups, businesses, end users, service providers, and thought leaders for experimentation, active learning and real-world application. Most recently, she architected the Procter & Gamble Social Media Lab to study the impact of the social web on customer relationships and the business benefits of “open innovation.” She continues as a member of P&G’s Digital Advisory Board. Deborah is an internet industry veteran and early social and open web advocate focused on the adoption and impact of the social web on culture, society & business. She has worked with and advised startups, Fortune 50s and VC’s on technology adoption.

Peter Schwartz
World-Renowned Futurist and Strategist

Peter Schwartz is co-founder and current chairman of the Global Business Network (GBN), the world’s preeminent member organization focused on scenario thinking and planning, where he leads programs for corporations, governments, and non-profit institutions. His current research and scenario work encompasses 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 Media and the Internet

Clay Shirky is a writer, educator, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) in their graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice-versa. He consults to a variety of organizations on network technologies, and is an acknowledged expert on collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and Open Source development. Clay has spoken and written extensively on the Internet since 1996, with regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and his own shirky.com blogsite. He has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and others. In his highly acclaimed book, "Here Comes Everybody", Clay explored how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination. In his newest book, "Cognitive Surplus," reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Steve Weber
Political Economist and Critically Acclaimed Author

Steven Weber is a specialist in international relations with expertise in international and national security; the impact of technology on national systems of innovation, defense, and deterrence; and the political economy of knowledge-intensive industries particularly software and pharmaceuticals.

Trained in history and international development at Washington University, and medicine and political science at Stanford, Weber joined the Berkeley faculty in 1989. In 1992 he served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. He has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is Senior Policy Advisor with the Glover Park Group in Washington DC and actively consults with government agencies, private multinational firms, and international non-governmental organizations on issues of foreign policy, risk analysis, strategy, and forecasting.

Steve's major publications include The Success of Open Source, Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control, and the edited book Globalization and the European Political Economy; and numerous articles and chapters in the areas of U.S. foreign policy, the political economy of trade and technology, politics of the post-Cold War world, and European integration. His next book, with co-author Jonathan Sallet, extends the analysis of the political economy of open source software to other technology sectors in the world economy and maps the consequences for economic growth and innovation. With colleague and co-author Bruce Jentleson at Duke, Weber directs the "New Era Foreign Policy Project" and is completing a book manuscript on "The New Age of Ideology" in world politics.

Andreas Weigend
Leading Behavioral Marketing Expert; Former Chief Scientist, Amazon.com

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create. He works with companies that are eager to discover and tackle the pertinent questions and to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data. His clients include Alibaba, Best Buy, Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa, Match.com, Nokia, Priceline.com, Singtel, Thomson Reuters, the World Economic Forum, as well as exciting startups around the globe. Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture that has become central to Amazon's success. Since 2003, he has been teaching Data Mining and E-Business at Stanford and The Digital Networked Economy at Tsinghua in Beijing.

Andreas also shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Business Forum 2009 in Milan and the World Innovation Forum 2010 in New York. Known as a lively and engaging speaker, his main goal is to challenge the minds of his audience, helping them understand the irreversible impact the Social Data Revolution has on people, business, and society. He also gives speeches and workshops to the world’s most innovative firms that combine cutting-edge ideas with his expertise on behavioral economics and vision for consumer-enabling technologies.

Andreas received his undergraduate education in Germany and Cambridge (UK), and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in physics. His career as a data scientist combined with his deep industry experience across information-intensive organizations allows him to successfully bridge the gap between academia and industry. Andreas lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, and on weigend.com.

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
Internet Scholar, Activist, and Author

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, academic and engineer whose work focuses on technology in the developing world. 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 became a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in January, 2003. His work at Berkman focuses on the impact of technology on the developing world. His current projects include 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.

Prior to his work at Harvard, Ethan was involved with founding several internet start-ups. He helped co-found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. Ethan served as Tripod's first graphic designer and developer, and later as VP of Business Development and VP of Research and Development. After Tripod's acquisition by Lycos in 1998, Ethan served as General Manager of the Angelfire.com division and as a member of the Lycos mergers and acquisitions team. Ethan then went on to found Geekcorps, a non profit group that provided technology assitance 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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