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Pop!Tech 9 Speakers
 African Panel Pop!Tech partnered with Sun Microsystems and the United Nations. Together, we have selected ten next-generation thought leaders in social activism and technology from across Africa and financially supported their presence and participation at the conference.
  Yochai Benkler is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. more>>
  Sue Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Sue studies the field of Memetics; she looks at the unwieldy lives of memes (ideas, concepts) as they spread like viruses of the mind, compete, breed and die.
  Edward Castronova is an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the department. Edward obtained a BS in International Affairs from Georgetown University in 1985 and a PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991. During his studies he also spent several years at research institutes in Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Berlin. more>>
  Peter Diamandis is a pioneer and leader in the commercial space arena. Peter is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation which recently awarded a $10,000,000 prize for private spaceflight. He is also the CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company that offers FAA-certified weightless flights utilizing a specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft. more>>
  Graham Flint of the Gigapxl Project, a physicist by profession, has sought to bring the perspective of a physicist to other fields; especially to architecture, astronomy, medicine, military science, photography, and, most recently, to information display. more>>
  Ze Frank is a brilliant performance artist, humorist, filmmaker, and web designer. He generally defies description - but check out www.zefrank.com to get a sense of his extraordinary talents. more>>
  Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His unique laboratory investigates the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation, from molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House/Smithsonian Millennium celebration and automobile safety systems, the World Economic Forum and inner-city community centers, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds.
  Ingo Günther, sculptor, born in 1957, grew up in the city of Dortmund, Germany. In the '70s, travels took him to Northern Africa, North and Central America, and Asia. He studied Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Frankfurt University (1977) before he switched to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1978, where he studied with Schwegler, Uecker, and Paik (M.A. 1983). In the same year, he received a stipend from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf for a residency at P.S.1 in New York. He received a DAAD grant the following year and a Kunstfonds grant in 1987. more>>
  Haale weaves Persian melodies and Sufi-inspired lyrics through a soundscape of tribal beats, sci-fi sonic guitars, and a twanging setar. Drawing on her Persian and urban American roots, she brings audiences into the ecstatic and electric space where these two worlds meet. more>>
  Bob Hanner is the Associate Director for the Canadian Barcode of Life Network and is on faculty at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Bob is also Chair of the Database Working Group for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), an international initiative to implement DNA barcoding for species identification. Bob was formerly the Scientific Program Director of the Coriell Cell Repositories at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research where he demonstrated DNA Barcoding to be an essential quality assurance tool for the Institute's nonhuman biomaterial collections, which are widely used in genetic research. more>>
  Sam Harris is the author of the international bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of spiritual disciplines, for twenty years. Sam is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). more >>
  Dutch visual artist Theo Jansen studied science at the University of Delft. As an artist he spent the first seven years of his career painting, after which he decided to strike out on a new course, by making a real flying saucer. It flew over Delft in 1980 to the great consternation of the local population and police. Since then he has been trying to create a new type of nature. To this end he doesn't use pollen or seeds but yellow plastic tubes. more >>
  Steven Berlin Johnson is renowned for his ability to explain complicated and counterintuitive ideas cleverly without overwhelming readers. He is the author of the national bestseller, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience of Everyday Life. Featured on NPR's Fresh Air and in Reader's Digest, the book relates new brain science to our understanding of personality - using Steven's own personality as the test case. more>>
  Todd Kuiken is the Director of the Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The Center focuses on improving the function of artificial arms using neural integration techniques. Todd's research interests include improving the care of amputees, the control of artificial limbs, the study of bioelectromagnetics, prosthetic design & development, and wheelchair mobility systems. more>>
  A resident of Dayton, Tennessee for his whole life, Jesse Sullivan worked for the city's Electric Department for twenty five years. He was seriously injured on the job on May 9th, 2001. Working with Dr. Todd Kuiken and a team at the Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, he has been involved in a major breakthrough in prosthetic technology. more>>
 Post-modern crooner Ethan Lipton writes sidesplitting songs of love, loss and alienation among the invisible classes. Often compared to Tom Lehrer and Randy Newman, Ethan's tunes have thrilled crowds around New York and beyond with their unpredictable wit and unreliable narrators. more>>
  Mark Lynas was born in Fiji in 1973, and grew up in Peru, Spain and the UK. After gaining a first-class honours degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh (where he also edited the university's student newspaper), he joined a web start-up called OneWorld.net - helping turn it into the world's most-accessed internet portal for human rights and sustainable development issues. more>>
  Rebecca MacKinnon is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Law Schools Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she is co-founder of the online citizens media project, Global Voices Online. She speaks and writes frequently on global participatory media as well as on issues related to the internet in China. more>>
  Ivan Marovic is one of the founding members of Otpor, the Serbian political student group. Ivan was an engineering student at Belgrade University and one of the student organizers who helped bring down Slobodan Milosovic. He was one of the most public of the organization's members, speaking often at rallies and marches. He was drafted into the Yugoslav military forces a few days before the September 24 election and served with the equivalent of the coast guard in Belgrade. more>>
  Marcia McNutt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. MBARI is a research laboratory funded by the Packard Foundation to develop and exploit new technology for the exploration of the oceans. The institute's main focus is on designing and building new tethered and autonomous underwater vehicles and in situ sensor packages for increasing the spatial and temporal sampling of the ocean and its inhabitants. more>>
  Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. His first book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found won the Kiriyama Prize, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. more>>
  Bob M. Metcalfe is a high-tech venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, Massachusetts. Bob is a director of Avistar, IDC, IDG, Massachusetts Software Council, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Metro Ethernet Forum, MIT, MITs Technology Review Magazine, Pop!Tech, and St. Marks School. He serves on the boards of Polaris-backed companies Ember, Mintera, Narad, Paratek, and SiCortex. He is chairman of Ember, Paratek, and SiCortex. more>>
  Nicholas Negroponte is the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding chairman of MIT's Media Laboratory. Nicholas helped to establish, and serves as chairman of the 2B1 Foundation, an organization dedicated to bringing computer access to children in the most remote and poorest parts of the world. Most recently Nicholas has launched a new program to develop a $100 laptop, a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. more>>
  Robert Neuwirth lived in shantytowns across the developing world for almost two years to write Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (Routledge, 2005), his controversial new book that argues that squatting is an ancient and legitimate form of urban development. more>>
  Norman Packard has worked in the areas of chaos, learning algorithms, predictive modeling of complex time series, statistical analysis of evolution, artificial life, and complex adaptive systems. Norman is currently working in a new scientific and business direction based on development of evolutionary chemistry in programmable microfluidic technology, and is co-founder of a newcompany, ProtoLife, which aims to develop these ideas in the private sector. more>>
  Carolyn Porco is the leader of the Imaging Science Team on the Cassini mission presently orbiting Saturn, and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission to be launched in early 2006. She is a veteran imaging scientist of the Voyager mission to the outer solar system in the 1980's. She received her PhD in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology. more>>
  Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, which has been praised by publications as diverse as Spin, GQ, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and U.S. News & World Report. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's This American Life, a documentary filmmaker, and the author of the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. Davy lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. more>>
  Sanjit "Bunker" Roy is a product of Doon School and St.Stephen's College, Delhi. Since 1972 Bunker has been living in Tilonia, a village in one of India's largest, driest and poorest states, where he is founder and director of the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), a voluntary foundation better known as Barefoot College. "Barefoot" refers to rural people and the poor. more>>
  Oded Shenkar is the Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management at Ohio State University. His research interests include international business, particularly comparative and international management. His special interests include strategic and managerial issues pertaining to international strategic alliances. Geographically, his main region of interest is East Asia, particularly China. He is the editor of several books, most recently the Handbook for International Management Research and International Business. more>>
  Cameron Sinclair is the founder of Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit set up to seek and promote architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises. For the last 5 years his team has initiated and implemented a number of programs including housing ideas for returning refugees in Kosovo; mobile health clinics to combat HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa; mine clearance programs and playground building in the Balkans; and earthquake recovery assistance in Turkey and Iran. more>>
  Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge. Nassim's interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature and cognitive science, but he has stayed extremely close to the ground, thanks to an uninterrupted two-decade career as a mathematical trader. more>>
  Robert Trivers' work has transformed our understanding of the genetic basis of human behavior. His scientific work has concentrated on two areas, social theory based on natural selection (of which a theory of self-deception is one part) and the biology of selfish genetic elements (which leads to certain kinds of internal genetic conflicts). His early work - offering unifying theories on reciprocal altruism, parental investment, sexual selection, parent-offspring conflict, the sex ratio, and deceit and self-deception - has now been cited more than 7000 times in the scientific literature. more>>
  Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, is a forecaster, design strategist and author, working at the intersection of culture, creativity, technology, and futures research. Andrew specializes in helping people and institutions see, understand and act upon complex change. He runs Z+ Partners, a research, foresight and design thinktank. more>>
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