Ray Kurzweil, Founder and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Dr. Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. His web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on future trends in artificial intelligence.

In 2002, Ray Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. Dr. Kurzweil has received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received eleven honorary Doctorates, honors from three U.S. presidents, and seven national and international film awards. His first popular work on computer technology, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His current bestseller, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence." His next book, Singularity is Near, will be published in early 2004.

Michael Denton, Senior Research Fellow in Human Genetics, University of Otago, New Zealand

Michael Denton’s primary research focus is on the molecular genetics of retinitis pigmentosa. He is well known for his two influential books, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. His recent work considers whether organic forms (e.g., proteins, RNA folds, microtubular forms, cells forms, and body plans) are intrinsic features of nature – whether they are essentially the same as chemicals or molecules. He presented this idea in his December 2002 paper, "The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the Pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law," which appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. In his paper, he argues that the way matter is arranged into the higher architecture of life is determined by a set of rules or “laws of form” that determine and predict all biological forms, just as the laws of chemistry predict all chemical forms.

Ilkka Tuomi, Visiting Scientist, European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville, Spain

Ilkka Tuomi is a well-known author, speaker, and columnist in Finland. He has been an invited speaker in over 90 national and international conferences and given over 100 interviews for the Finnish and international media since 1982 on science, culture, technology, and economy. Mr. Tuomi's most recent book, Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet, was published by the Oxford University Press in October 2002. He also published a widely-noted article at First Monday, "The Lives and Death of Moore's Law," in October 2002. Mr. Tuomi has served on the boards of several Finnish societies, including the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society and the Finnish Society for Investigative Journalism. He has been a member of the scientific council of the Finnish National Fund for Research and Development (SITRA), and executive board of the Finnish Information Society Forum. His hobbies include phenomenological epistemology, cultural history, social implications of technology, technology policy, cognitive sciences, future studies, moving images, and scuba diving.

K. Eric Drexler, Founder and Chair, Foresight Institute

Dr. Drexler is a researcher concerned with emerging technologies and their consequences for the future. In the mid-1980s, he introduced the term "nanotechnology" to describe atomically-precise molecular manufacturing systems and their products. He wrote Engines of Creation (1986) to introduce a broad audience to the promise and dangers of advanced nanotechnologies, and Nanosystems (AAP 1992 Most Outstanding Computer Science Book), based on his MIT dissertation, to provide a graduate-level introduction to the field. His research in nanotechnology ranges from computational modeling of molecular machines to engineering analysis of molecular manufacturing systems and their potential products. He lectures widely on the field, its development, and its implications for the human future.

John R. Koza, President, Genetic Programming

Dr. Koza received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1972 under the supervision of John Holland. He was co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Scientific Games Inc. from 1973 through 1987, where he co-invented the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries. He is author of four books on genetic programming, including the 2003 book Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence. The focus of his research is on automatically solving problems (and, in particular, producing human-competitive results) by using a minimum of human-supplied information. He has taught a course on genetic algorithms and genetic programming at Stanford University since 1988. He is currently a consulting professor in the Biomedical Informatics Program in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University and a consulting professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Keith Devlin, Executive Director, CSLI, Stanford University

Dr. Devlin, mathematician, is Executive Director of Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information and a Consulting Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. He is one of the initiators of Stanford’s Media X network, a campus-wide research program focused on the design and use of interactive technologies. He is the author of 23 books, including, Infosense,: Turning Information into Knowledge, The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time and The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip. Dr. Devlin is the author of over 65 published research articles. He is a member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a World Economic Forum Fellow. His current research is centered around the task of applying mathematical techniques to issues of language and information, and the design of information systems.

Ben Goertzel, Founder and CEO, Biomind

Dr. Goertzel has been involved in AI research and application development since the late 1980’s, and was the founder of Webmind Inc. serving as the firm’s CTO and Chairman from 1997-2001. Dr. Goertzel holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University. Over the period of 1989-1997, he has held several university faculty positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in New Zealand, Australia, and the US. He is the author of numerous research papers and journalistic articles, a biography of Linus Pauling, and five scholarly books on topics in the cognitive sciences, including Chaotic Logic (Plenum Press, 1994) and Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum Press, 2001). His book, authored with Cassio Pennachin, on the design concepts of his company’s Biomind AI Engine is scheduled for release in 2004.

James N. Gardner, Complexity Theorist

James N. Gardner is a widely published complexity theorist and science essayist whose peer-reviewed articles and scientific papers have appeared in Complexity (the journal of the Santa Fe Institute), Acta Astronautica (the journal of the International Academy of Astronautics), and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. His first book, Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe, proposes that life and intelligence have not emerged in a series of random Darwinian accidents, but are hardwired into the cycle of cosmic creation, evolution, death, and rebirth.

Mr. Gardner has also written popular articles for WIRED, Nature Biotechnology, The Wall Street Journal, and World Link. In addition to his scientific pursuits, he serves as partner in a flourishing law and government affairs firm which he co-founded. His clients include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Microsoft, and the Association of American Publishers. Mr. Gardner is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School.

William A. Dembski, Associate Research Professor, Baylor University

A mathematician and philosopher, Dr. Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University, and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle. Dr. Dembski previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Dembski has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. He has published articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals, and is the author/editor of seven books, including The Design Inference and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence.

Nick Bostrom, Research Fellow, Oxford University, Co-Founder and Chair, World Transhumanist Association

Dr. Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford University. He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (with David Pearce) and is a frequent spokesperson and commentator in the media. Bostrom’s research interests are in philosophy of science, probability theory, and the ethical and strategic implications of anticipated technologies (including AI, nanotech, genetics, etc.). He has a background in cosmology, computational neuroscience, mathematical logic, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and stand-up comedy. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (Routledge, New York, 2002).

Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice-President and CTO, Sun Microsystems

With more than 20 years experience in the technology industry, Greg Papadopoulos is responsible for managing Sun's technology and architecture, standards, the Science Office, global engineering architecture, and associated advanced development programs. Before joining Sun in 1994, Papadopoulos was senior architect and director of product strategy for Thinking Machines. He was also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, where he conducted research in scalable systems, multithreaded/dataflow processor architecture, functional and declarative languages, and fault-tolerant computing. Mr. Papadopoulos holds a B.A. in systems science from the University of California at San Diego, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

William H. Calvin, Theoretical Neurobiologist, University of Washington in Seattle

Dr. Calvin is the Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics from M.I.T., and is the author of 11 books on neural systems, evolution, paleoanthropology, the evolutionary development of syntax, and other seminal subjects in the nature and origin of human mental life, such as The River that Flows Uphill: A Journey From the Big Bang to the Big Brain. He is a leading explicator and theorist of evolutionary psychology, and a proponent of Darwinian mechanisms in neural development and the generation of conscious thought. His latest work, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change, won the 2002 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Science. His 2004 book, The Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond, will explore the emergence of higher intellectual function, occurring 50,000 years ago in the transition to behaviorally-modern humans. Dr. Calvin is affiliated with Emory University's great apes project, and serves on the Foundation for the Future's Advisory Board.

Howard Bloom, Visiting Scholar, New York University

Howard Bloom is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication's inception. He is the author of two critically-acclaimed books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. His forthcoming book (précis here) is Reinventing Capitalism.

John Smart, Founder and President, Acceleration Studies Foundation

John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy, and the speculative hypothesis of the technological singularity. He is completing an M.S. in Future Studies at the University of Houston, has authored the career guidance work The Path of Heart, and is writing his second book, Destiny of Species, on developmental trends in accelerating change. He has run three businesses, the last for nine years as CEO of Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. Mr. Smart received a B.S. in Business Administration from the Haas School at U.C. Berkeley, has done graduate work in human physiology and medicine at U.C. San Diego, and undergraduate coursework in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UCLA, U.C. Berkeley, and U.C. San Diego.

Steve Jurvetson, Managing Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Steve Jurvetson was the founding VC investor in Hotmail, Interwoven, and Kana. He has led DFJ's investments in Tradex (acquired by Ariba for $6B) and Cyras (acquired by Ciena for $2B), and, most recently, in pioneering companies in nanotechnology and molecular electronics. Previously, Jurvetson was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his communications chip designs were fabricated. His prior technical experience includes programming, materials science research, and computer design at HP's PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek. He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software. As a Consultant with Bain & Company, Jurvetson developed executive marketing, sales, engineering and business strategies for a wide range of companies in the software, networking, and semiconductor industries. At Stanford University, he finished his BSEE in 2.5 years, graduated #1 in his class as the Henry Ford Scholar, went on to receive an MS in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, and his MBA from the Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Mr. Jurvetson serves on the Merrill Lynch Technical Advisory Board and is Co-Chair of the NanoBusiness Alliance. He was recently honored as "The Valley's Sharpest VC" on the cover of Business 2.0 and chosen by the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner as one of "the ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century." He was profiled in the New York Times Magazine and featured on the cover of Worth and Fortune magazines. Mr. Jurvetson was chosen by Forbes as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors," by the VC Journal as one of the "Ten Most Influential VCs," and by Fortune as part of their "Brain Trust of Top Ten Minds." Mr. Jurvetson has written several columns on nanotech and other emerging technologies.

Robert Wright, Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania

Robert Wright is the author of The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. The Moral Animal was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 12 best books of 1994 and has been published in 12 languages. Nonzero was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000 and has been published in nine languages. Mr. Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was published in 1988 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Mr. Wright is a contributing editor at The New Republic, Time, and Slate. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine. He previously worked at The Sciences magazine, where his column "The Information Age" won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism.

James M. Crawford, Autonomy and Robotics Area Lead, NASA Ames Research Center

Dr. Crawford leads autonomy and robotics research at NASA's Ames Research Center. Ames is NASA's center of excellence in information technology, and the autonomy and robotics area is one of the world's foremost research teams in the software areas required for building intelligent robotic explorers and assistants. In addition, Dr. Crawford leads the creation of the Collaborative Decision Systems project – a projected $250 million effort that will lay the foundation for building smarter, more mobile, robotic explorers for solar system exploration in the next decade.

Dr. Crawford received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. He then joined AT&T's Bell Laboratories. At Bell Labs and in the university community he worked for 6 years in academic research in Artificial Intelligence. He then spent 5 years in the software industry at i2 Technologies where he was the optimization architect for i2's flagship Supply Chain Planner, and the chair of i2's Optimization Council. Dr. Crawford is the author of over fifteen publications in refereed journals and conferences and holds five patents.

Matt Lennig, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Nuance

Dr. Lennig has served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Nuance, one of the nation's leading speech software solutions providers, since January 1996. From 1989 to 1996, Dr. Lennig served as Senior Manager of Speech Technology & Applications at Bell-Northern Research, the research and development subsidiary of Northern Telecom. Dr. Lennig holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, a M.Eng. from McGill University, and a A.B. from Princeton University.

Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President, O'Reilly & Associates

Tim O'Reilly's O'Reilly & Associates is widely considered the best computer book publisher in the world. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and a vigorous opponent of frivolous software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Since its inception, his company has played a central role in the popularization and usability of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, sold to America Online in 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web. The O'Reilly Network also manages and does content development at sites such as Perl.com and XML.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, the Open Source Software Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Mr. O'Reilly has served on the board of trustees for both the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is presently on the boards of CollabNet and ActiveState. He has written and co-written a number of books on internet software, and publishes online through the O'Reilly Network.

Christine Peterson, Co-Founder and President, Foresight Institute

Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is cofounder and President of Foresight Institute, a nonprofit which educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects. She directs the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organizes the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chairs the Foresight Gatherings. She lectures on nanotechnology to a wide variety of audiences, focusing on making this complex field understandable, and on clarifying the difference between near-term commercial advances and the "Next Industrial Revolution" arriving in the next few decades. Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth's environment and traditional human communities avoid harm and instead benefit from expected dramatic advances in technology. This goal of spreading benefits led to an interest in new varieties of intellectual property including open source software, a term she is credited with originating. With Eric Drexler and Gayle Pergamit, she wrote Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, 1991, which sketches nanotech's potential environmental and medical benefits as well as abuses. An interest in group process led to coauthoring Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press, 1997) with Gayle Pergamit. Christine holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from MIT and lives in San Francisco.

Scott A. Hunt, Peace Scholar and Activist, author of The Future of Peace

Scott A. Hunt has written 14 feature articles in national magazines, dealing with issues of social justice and human rights. He has taught at the University of California Berkeley's continuing education program, at the Virupa Ecumenical Institute, and at various other institutions. His corporate experience includes successful positions in the senior management team at E*Trade Securities, as part of the district management team of NASD Regulation, and as Vice President of 1View Network, acquired by Digital Insight Corporation (Nasdaq: DGIN). Mr. Hunt graduated from Harvard University in 1990 with a B.A. in Government, specializing in Political Philosophy. Mr. Hunt has done advanced studies in the three major divisions of Buddhism (the Vajrayana, Mahayana, and Theravada traditions). After 22 years of study, he was given permission to teach Buddhism by His Holiness Trichen Rinpoche, Supreme Head of the Nyingma Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. His book, The Future of Peace: On the Front Lines with the World's Great Peacemakers, was selected as a finalist for the 2003 Nautilus Book Award.

Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext

Ross Mayfield is a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years of startup executive management experience and a focus on helping people and companies communicate effectively. Most recently, Mr. Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout developing enterprise software for the telecommunications industry, and as Interim VP of Marketing for an Immersive Group Simulation provider to military and homeland defense markets. Previously, he co-founded and served as President of RateXchange, the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom. RateXchange reached $1 billion market capitalization, raised over $45 million in equity and debt, and generated a thousand-fold return on investment for initial shareholders. His management of marketing led to majority market share, perceived leadership in its market category, and recognition by Forbes as "The Best of the Web." He is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program at the Anderson School of Business.

Mark Finnern, Collaboration Manager, SAP Developer Network

Mark Finnern studied business-oriented Computer Science in Furtwangen, Germany. Since 1990, he has worked for SAP in Germany and the U.S. as a consultant, developer, and product manager. He has held speaking engagements at several SAP Tech Ed, Sapphire, and ASUG conferences. Mr. Finnern is the founder and host of the Bay Area Futurist Salon, a group that explores accelerating change in technology, science, society, and business. He is the Collaboration Manager of the upcoming SAP Developer Network, Founder and Host of the Bay Area Futurists Salon, Director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and a new blogger for the O'Reilly Network.

Marcos Guillen, Founder, President, and CEO, Artificial Development

Marcos Guillen founded Artificial Development in July 2003 to build a complete emulation of the Human Cortex and peripheral systems, and to deliver a wide range of commercial products based on CCortex™, an artificial version of the Human Brain. Previously, Marcos was co-founder, president, and CEO of Red Internauta, Spain's largest independent dial-up ISP, from 1999 to 2002. Before Red Internauta, Marcos founded Ran Internet in 1995, the 3rd-largest Spanish hosting provider, and served as the company's CEO from 1995 through 1999. Prior to forming Ran, Marcos founded and managed HS Computers, a computer retail chain, from 1992 to 1995.

Sonia Arrison, Director of Technology Studies, Pacific Research Institute (PRI)

Sonia Arrison is director of Technology Studies at the Pacific Research Institute where she researches and writes on the intersection of new technologies and public policy. Specific areas of interest include privacy policy, e-government, Internet taxation, intellectual property, nanotechnology, and telecommunications. She is a regular columnist for Tech Central Station, a National Press Club First Amendment Scholar, and her work has appeared in many publications including CBS MarketWatch, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Times, and Consumer Research Magazine. She is author of Consumer Privacy: A Free Choice Approach, co-author of Internet Taxes: What California Legislators Should Know, and editor of Telecrisis: How Regulation Stifles High Speed Internet Access. Prior to joining PRI, Arrison specialized in regulatory and political issues at the Donner Canadian Foundation. She also worked at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, where she specialized in regulatory policy and privatization. She received her BA from the University of Calgary and an MA from the University of British Columbia.

Alex Lightman, CEO, Charmed Technology, Chair, N. American IPv6 Summits

Alex Lightman is a leading writer and speaker on the future of technology. He has published over 250,000 words in the 21st century, including 100 articles for business, technology, and political magazines. He is the author of the first book on 4G: Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and The Infinite Internet (Wiley, 2002). Alex is CEO of Charmed Technology and chairs the IPv6 Summits in North America, which attract the largest assemblage of Internet innovators in government, business, and academia. He is also the first and so far only Cal--(IT)2 scholar, affiliated with the University of California, and a visiting scholar with California State University (via SDSU). CEO Magazine recognized him as one of ten CEOs of the Future. He has been interviewed over 1,000 times, primarily related to wearable computers as fashion.

Melanie Swan, Research Director of Telecom Economics, RHK, Inc.

Melanie Swan has founded and lead several investment partnerships focused on public and private equity investments. She is one of the founding members of Silicon Valley based Sand Hill Angels. Ms. Swan is Research Director of Telecom Economics at RHK, Inc. focused on the future of the telecom industry, key emerging trends and the forecasting of financial items and Internet traffic growth. Ms. Swan has also been an entrepreneur, leading MS Consulting Group in providing operating, financing and marketing strategies for a variety of traditional and Internet firms. Prior to that, she was the co-founder and President of the GroupPurchase Corporation, a firm that created direct input purchasing cooperatives for small businesses via the Internet and was acquired by Laguna Street Software in April 2000. Before starting GroupPurchase, Ms. Swan was responsible for Strategic Alliances at iPass, the leading provider of enterprise connectivity services. Prior to iPass, Ms. Swan was an Investment Banker at J.P. Morgan in New York and a Research Analyst with Fidelity Management & Research Company in Boston, MA. Ms. Swan began her career as a Senior Consultant with Arthur Andersen & Co. in Los Angeles, CA where she designed, coded and implemented PC, client-server and mainframe accounting and manufacturing software solutions. Ms. Swan holds an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in French from Georgetown University.