FutureFest Speakers
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Showing 25 - 36 of 39
or View Speakers by Theme: Earth - Communication - Life - Machine
J.C. Herz
Franny Armstrong
Mahender Singh
Phil Guest
Sylvain Lehmann
Jurgen Borlak
Vinay Gupta
David MacKay
Jon Crowcroft
Barrett Comiskey
Colin Humphreys, CBE
Edward Abrahams
J.C. Herz
National Academy of Science's Standing Committee on Technology Insight (TIGER)
Theme: Communication
J.C. Herz is a technologist with a background in biological systems and computer game design. Her specialty is massively multiplayer systems that leverage social network effects, whether on the web, mobile devices, or more exotic high-end or grubby low-end hardware.
J.C. currently serves on the National Academy of Science's Standing Committee on Technology Insight (TIGER) and was a member of the National Research Council's committee on IT and Creative Practice. She served on the National Science Foundation's Federal Advisory Committee for Education, and is currently a Fellow of Columbia University's American Assembly. In 2002, she was designated a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. She is a member of the Global Business Network, and is a founding member of the IEEE Task Force on Game Technologies. J.C. is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Academics: Prior to moving to Washington DC, J.C. taught at the graduate level at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She has lectured at Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval Strategic Studies Group, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and has spoken at the Technology Entertainment & Design (TED) conference, PC Forum, SIGGRAPH, and the Aspen Institute. She serves on the advisory board of the University of Southern California's Center for Creative Technologies, a research center funded by the Army to explore technologies of mutual interest to the military and the entertainment industry. She is on the advisory board of Carnegie Mellon's ETC Press. J.C. graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies, magna cum laude, in 1993. She was a coxswain on the Harvard men's rowing team.
Publications: J.C. is the author of two books, Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994), an ethnography of cyberspace before the web, and Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little Brown, 1997), a history of videogames which traces the cultural and technological evolution of the first medium that was born digital, and how it shaped the minds of a generation weaned on Nintendo. Her books have been translated into seven languages. As a New York Times columnist, J.C. published 100 essays on the grammar and syntax of game design between 1998-2000. She has also contributed to Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, Rolling Stone, Wired, GQ, and the Calgary Philatelist.
Franny Armstrong
Film Producer/Director
Theme: Earth
Franny is an up and coming film producer/director whose first documentary, 'McLibel', was released to great critical acclaim in 1997. More recently, she directed "The Age Of Stupid" (formerly known as 'Crude') - an ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid starring Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching "archive" footage from 2007 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance? The film is due for release this summer at Cannes.
Franny's films are produced through Spanner Films, an independent TV production company, based in London, which she founded in 1999. Working entirely outside the mainstream TV industry, her films have now been seen by a total of 49 million people.
Franny has spoken at more than 80 film festivals, seminars and colleges around the world. She has been interviewed for TV news and chat shows (inc BBC and ABC Australia) and written articles for books, newspapers and magazines (inc The Guardian).
Mahender Singh
Research Director, Supply Chain 2020
Theme: Machine
Dr. Mahender Singh is a Research Director for the MIT Supply Chain 2020 Project, a multi-year research effort looking into the future of logistics and supply chain management. His research and teaching focus on operations and supply chain management, with particular interest in exploring the underlying structure of complex supply chains.
Dr. Singh has over ten years of experience in the field of supply chain management and has worked on multiple global supply chain projects to analyze and redesign planning systems. He has taught Operations Management at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he received his Ph.D.; he is also a graduate of MIT-CTL's Master of Engineering in Logistics Program.
Phil Guest
Director, Habbo
Theme: Communication
Phil is Director for Habbo, Europe, one of the world's largest and fastest growing virtual worlds for teenagers with 100 million registered avatars in 32 countries on six continents.
Habbo, which attracts over 9.5 million unique visitors every month, is the main product of Helsinki based Sulake Corporation whose aim is to build Habbo into a new type of youth brand, which is anchored in the world's largest online youth community. The Habbo brand has already been extended to include mobile games and content, animation as well as merchandising products.
Phil joined Sulake in 2007 from AOL where he headed up the Commercial Development team. Previously he was Commercial Director (Europe) for Fox Kids TV network, working across TV advertising, online licensing and programming.
Sylvain Lehmann
Head of the Department of Celular and Molecular Pathology, CNRS Institute of Human Genetics
Theme: Life
Prof. Sylvain Lehmann, was trained as an M.D. and a Ph.D. He was the recipient of a Howard Hughes fellowship for physician and spent four years in Washington University, School of Medicine, St. Louis MO, USA. His initial training was in molecular and cellular biology and he became interest in clinical biology and cell therapy through its position as a Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School of Montpellier, France.
His clinical laboratory is working in the biobanking and proteomics fields, looking at biomarkers for the diagnosis and follow up of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. This area of clinical research is of major importance as currently more than 5.7 million Europeans suffer from neurodegenerative disorders. Due to the ageing population in the industrial world, this number is expected to increase forming one of the major public health and medical challenges of the upcoming century. Incidentally, no curative therapies are yet available for neurodegenerative disorders, and an other focus of Prof Lehmann's research is on gene and cell therapy applied these diseases. Hence, his laboratory carries out pre-clinical programs using embryonic and neural stem cells with the ultimate goal to replace damaged neuronal cells and to deliver therapeutic molecules intracerebrally.
Jurgen Borlak
Director, Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine
Theme: Life
Professor Jurgen Borlak is Director of Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Germany. In future, drugs will become even safer and have fewer side effects. In addition, thanks to studies on the genetic variability of a patient, we will be able to predict certain side effects with a high degree of accuracy. In the long run, this will facilitate personalized drug therapy.
Vinay Gupta
Co Founder of the Global Swadeshi Movement,
Theme: Earth
Vinay Gupta is a long term international policy strategist focussing on the transformative power of free and open source appropriate technology systems. He is a close student of Buckminster Fuller and Mahatma Gandhi, and seeks to help people transform their lives at an economic and political level through greater individual self-sufficiency. The crux of this work is bringing integrated appropriate technology solutions to the poorest through designing systems they can use, understand, and afford.
Vinay is best known for the Hexayurt Project, a simple free shelter design which is suitable for mass production after disasters. He has also worked on energy policy and in a variety of roles in the computer industry. A Scot of Indian extraction, Vinay sees his role as being to help cherry pick the best solutions to long term global problems and push them into broad adoption.
He is one of the founders of the Global Swadeshi Movement, a group working to update and modernize Gandhian ideas about long term progress.
David MacKay
Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Theme: Earth
David MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University. He obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests include reliable computation with unreliable hardware, and communication systems for the disabled. He's written a textbook on 'Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms' (2003, Cambridge). He's currently writing another free book on `Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.'
Jon Crowcroft
Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Theme: Communication
Jon Crowcroft has been the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory since October 2001. He has worked in the area of Internet support for multimedia communications for over 20 years. Three main topics of interest have been scalable multicast routing, practical approaches to traffic management, and the design of deployable end-to-end protocols.
Prior to Computer Laboratory he was professor of networked systems at UCL in the Computer Science Department. He isa member of the ACM, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the IEE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a senior member of the IEEE. He was a member of the IAB and was General Chair for the ACM SIGCOMM 95-99. He is on the editorial team for the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networks and Computer Communications as well as on the program committee for ACM SIGCOMM and IEEE Infocomm. He has published five books - the latest is' The Linux TCP/IP Implementation', published by Wiley in 2001.
Barrett Comiskey
Managing Partner, Nicobar Group
Theme: Machine
Barrett Comiskey has deep experience in international
technology transfer, US/Asia partnerships, and building new businesses.
He grew up in New York City; speaks Mandarin, French, Spanish, English,
and lives in Shanghai. He has spent the last ten years in technology
and the last five years building working relationships with
manufacturing and finance organizations throughout Asia, with a focus
on Greater China.
He was a co-founder of E Ink in 1997. After pioneering the original research at the MIT Media Lab,
he led the development and transfer to manufacturing of E Ink's
electronic materials. He then moved to the business side and structured
manufacturing alliances with multi-billion dollar electronics companies
throughout Asia, where he was first exposed to the opportunities and
challenges in setting up East-West partnerships.
He is sole or co-inventor on 40 US Patents, has been
profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fortune, and was
recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer. E Ink
technology has been featured in hundreds of media reports worldwide and
has won dozens of awards such as Industry Week's "Technology of the
Year" and "Display Component of the Year" by the Society of Information
Displays. He has taught in Harlem and the Bronx and was a bike courier
in Manhattan.
Barrett holds a BS from MIT in Mathematics with a minor
in Mechanical Engineering, and an MBA from Stanford where he studied
under Hau Lee and Jin Whang, two of the thought leaders in Supply Chain
Management.
Colin Humphreys, CBE
Goldsmiths Professor of Materials Science, University of Cambridge
Theme: Earth
Colin Humphreys is the Goldsmiths' Professor of Materials Science in the University of Cambridge. He is the Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) in Japan, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) in Singapore. He is the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride, and the Director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre for Aerospace Materials. He has published over 550 research papers, and his research areas include semiconductors and photonic materials, particularly gallium nitride, LEDs, high-temperature aerospace materials, and electron microscopy. He has written a book about the Exodus from Egypt, called "The Miracles of Exodus", which was published in 2003.
Edward Abrahams
Executuve Director, Personalized Medicine Coalition,
Theme: Life
Edward Abrahams, Executive Director of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, a non-profit educational and advocacy group representing diverse members withan interest in advancing medical progress th rough the adoption of personalized medicine concepts and products, brings extensive experience in industry, academia,and government to the position. As former Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Association, Dr. Abrahams managed all aspects of the Association, including public advocacy, media relations, and educational programs, tripling its size and revenues in three years. He also spearheaded the successful effort that led to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's investment of $200 million to commercializebiotechnology in that state.
Previously, Dr. Abrahams had been Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and also held a senior administrative position at Brown University. Before becoming a university administrator, Dr. Abrahams worked seven years for the United States Congress, including as a legislative assistant to Senator Lloyd Bentsen and as an economist for the Joint Economic Committee under the chairmanship of Congressman Lee Hamilton
