Speakers

Darlene Cavalier

Founder

SciStarter

Darlene Cavalier is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s Center for Engagement and Training, part of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Ms. Cavalier is the founder of SciStarter, an online platform for identifying, supporting, and participating in citizen science opportunities. She is also the founder of Science Cheerleader, an organization of more than 300 current and former professional cheerleaders pursuing STEM careers, and a cofounder of ECAST: Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology, a network of universities, science centers, and think tanks that produces public deliberations to enhance science policymaking. She is a founding Board Member of the Citizen Science Association, a senior advisor at Discover Magazine, and a member of the Environmental Protection Agency;s National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology. She is the author of The Science of Cheerleading and co-editor of The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science, published by Arizona State University. Ms. Cavalier holds a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Noshir Contractor

Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences

Northwestern University

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, translational science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds. His research program has been funded continuously for over 15 years by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional current funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Institute, Army Research Laboratory, the Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press, and translated into simplified Chinese in 2009) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. In 2014 he received the National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar Award recognizing a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. In 2015 he was elected as a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He is the co-founder and Chairman of Syndio, which offers organizations products and services based on network analytics.

Professor Contractor has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

R. Luke Dubois

Co-Director and Associate Professor of Integrated Digital Media

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Todd Reynolds, Jamie Jewett, Bora Yoon, Michael Joaquin Grey, Matthew Ritchie, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Maya Lin, Bang on a Can, Engine 27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.

Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his projects reveal the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; Haus der elektronischen Künste, Switzerland; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art; Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; PROSPECT.2 New Orleans; and the Aspen Institute. DuBois’ work and writing has appeared in print and online in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Esquire Magazine, and he was an invited speaker at the 2016 TED Conference. A major survey of his work, NOW, received its premiere at the Ringling Museum of Art in 2014, with a catalogue published by Scala Art & Heritage Publishers.

An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data developed by San Francisco-based software company Cycling’74. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.

DuBois has lived for the last twenty-two years in New York City. He is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

Eric Gordon

Professor

Emerson College

Eric Gordon is the founding director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Eric studies civic media and public engagement within the US and the developing world. He is specifically interested in the application of games and play in these contexts. In addition to being a researcher, he is also the designer of award winning “engagement games,” which are games that facilitate civic participation. He has served as an expert advisor for the UN Development Program, the International Red Cross / Red Crescent, the World Bank, as well as municipal governments throughout the United States. In addition to articles and chapters on games, digital media, urbanism and civic engagement, he is the author of two books: Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell 2011, with Adriana de Souza e Silva) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth 2010). His edited volume (with Paul Mihailidis) entitled Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice was published by MIT Press in 2016

Bernardo Huberman

Stanford University

Bernardo Huberman was until recently an HP Senior Fellow and the Director of the Mechanisms and Design lab at HP labs. He is now in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. His work has centered in the dynamics of information and how distributed intelligence performs as it flows within networks. As part of this research he designed and implemented a globally distributed computer network that allocates resources by auctioning off computons, bundles of cpu, storage and bandwidth. The other aspect of this work involves designing and testing in the laboratory mechanisms for discovering and aggregating widely dispersed information using economic incentives. Examples are the discovery of social networks from patterns in email exchanges, the prediction of uncertain events using groups of people within a market setting, and more recently the economics of attention.

Tom Kalil

Eric and Wendy Schmidt Group

Thomas Kalil is the former Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council. Kalil is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he was Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology. He was responsible for developing major new multi-disciplinary research and education initiatives at the intersection of information technology, nanotechnology, microsystems, and biology. He also conceived and launched a program called “Big Ideas @ Berkeley,” which provides support for multidisciplinary teams of Berkeley students that are interested in addressing economic and societal challenges such as clean energy, safe drinking water, and poverty alleviation.

Previously, Thomas Kalil served as the Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Technology and Economic Policy, and the Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council. He was the NEC’s point person on a wide range of technology and telecommunications issues, such as the liberalization of Cold War export controls, the allocation of spectrum for new wireless services, and investments in upgrading America’s high-tech workforce. He led a number of White House technology initiatives, such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Next Generation Internet, bridging the digital divide, e-learning, increasing funding for long-term information technology research, making IT more accessible to people with disabilities, and addressing the growing imbalance between support for biomedical research and for the physical sciences and engineering.

Ece Kamar

Researcher

Microsoft Research

Ece Kamar is a researcher at the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. She received a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 2010. Her thesis focused on reasoning under uncertainty for successful human-computer teamwork. Ece received a M.S. from Harvard University in 2007 and a B.S. from Sabanci University in Turkey in 2005. Ece works on several subfields of AI; including planning, machine learning, multi-agent systems and human-computer teamwork. She particularly focuses on real-world applications that can benefit from the complementary abilities of humans and machines. Ece also served as a member of the first study panel of AI 100. Their report is available here.

Karen Levy

Assistant Professor

Cornell University

Karen Levy is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy’s research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts, and is contested by, marginalized populations. Dr. Levy is also a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and a J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Dr. Levy previously served as a law clerk in the United States Federal Courts.

Dana Lewis

Founder

#OpenAPS

Dana Lewis is a creator of the “Do-It-Yourself Pancreas System” (#DIYPS), founder of the open source artificial pancreas system movement (#OpenAPS), and a passionate advocate of patient-centered, -driven, and -designed research.

Dana frequently writes and publishes on topics specific to DIY diabetes work and the broader implications of patient-driven and -designed research. Her work has been referenced or featured in Nature, The Lancet, WNYC’s “Only Human” podcast, The Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, WebMD, Diabetes Forecast, and other mainstream media publications. Her own writings also frequently appear elsewhere, ranging from publication such as Clinical Diabetes and Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology to being cited in books like Free to Make. She has been invited numerous times to the White House under the Obama administration to participate in workshops related to the Precision Medicine Initiative, in addition to being invited by the White House to speak on stage at the White House Frontiers Conference. Additionally, Dana collaborates actively with HHS, NIH, and FDA officials on a regular basis in the U.S., in addition to sharing insight with government officials in other countries interested in patient-driven innovation. She also travels and speaks worldwide on the topics of patient DIY-ing, OpenAPS, and the changes coming to health and healthcare as a result of patients having easy access to technology and collaboration tools in their pockets. Dana has keynoted at conferences ranging from the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) to a convenening at European Parliament.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Assistant Professor

NYU Stern School of Business

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf joined New York University Stern School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences in July 2013. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Professor Lifshitz-Assaf’s research focuses on developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of scientific and technological innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. She conducted an in-depth 3-year longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with open innovation online platforms and communities, resulting in a scientific breakthrough. Her dissertation received the best dissertation Grigor McClelland Award at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) 2015.

She investigates new forms of organizing for the production of scientific and technological innovation such as crowdsourcing, open source, open online innovation communities, Wikipedia, hackathons, makeathons, etc. Her work received the prestigious INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation and has been presented and taught at a variety of institutions including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, Wharton, London Business School, Bocconi, IESE, UCL, UT Austin, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. Prior to academia, Professor Lifshitz-Assaf worked as a strategy consultant for seven years, specializing in growth and innovation strategy in telecommunications, consumer goods and finance.

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf earned a doctorate from Harvard Business School, an MBA from Tel Aviv University, magna cum laude, a BA in Management and an LLB in Law from Tel Aviv University, Israel, both magna cum laude.

Lauren McCarthy

Assistant Professor

UCLA Design Media Arts

Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn whose work explores social and technological systems for being a person and interacting with other people. She makes software, performances, videos, and other things on the internet. She is the creator of p5.js.

Lauren has exhibited at Ars Electronica, Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and worked on installations for the London Eye, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.

She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³.

Geoff Mulgan

Chief Executive Officer

NESTA

Geoff Mulgan is Chief Executive of Nesta, and has been in post since 2011. Under his leadership Nesta has moved out of the public sector to become a charity (in 2012), launched a range of new initiatives in investment, programmes and research and has implemented a new strategy involving partnerships with foundations, governments and companies in the UK and internationally.

From 2004-2011 he was the first Chief Executive of the Young Foundation, which became a leading centre for social innovation, combining research, creation of new ventures and practical projects. Between 1997 and 2004 Geoff had various roles in the UK government including director of the Government’s Strategy Unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister’s office under Tony Blair. Before that he was the founder and director of the think-tank Demos. He has also been Chief Adviser to Gordon Brown MP; a lecturer in telecommunications; an investment executive; and a reporter on BBC TV and radio.

From 2016 Geoff is co-chair of a new World Economic Forum group looking at innovation and entrepreneurship in the fourth industrial revolution. He is also member of the board of the French government’s French Digital Agency; a member of an Academy of Medical Science’s review of public health; the Scottish Government’s CAN-DO panel; chair of an international advisory committee for the Mayor of Seoul and member of an advisory committee in the Prime Minister’s office in UAE.

His recent books include The Locust and the Bee (Princeton University Press, 2013); The Art of Public Strategy – Mobilising Power and Knowledge for the Public Good (Oxford University Press, 2008), Good and Bad Power: the ideals and betrayals of government (Penguin, 2006) and Connexity (Harvard Business Press and Jonathon Cape, 1998). His next book, to be published by Princeton UP, is on collective intelligence.

Geoff’s Twitter handle is @geoffmulgan. A summary of ideas Geoff has worked on can be found here.

Daniel Weld

Thomas J. Cable / WRF Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellow

University of Washington

Daniel S. Weld is Thomas J. Cable / WRF Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellow at the University of Washington. After formative education at Phillips Academy, he received bachelor’s degrees in both Computer Science and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1982. He landed a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988, received a Presidential Young Investigator’s award in 1989, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator’s award in 1990, was named AAAI Fellow in 1999 and deemed ACM Fellow in 2005. Dan was a founding editor for the Journal of AI Research, was area editor for the Journal of the ACM, guest editor for Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and was Program Chair for AAAI-96. Dan has published two books and scads of technical papers. Dan is an active entrepreneur with several patents and technology licenses. He co-founded Netbot Incorporated, creator of Jango Shopping Search (acquired by Excite), AdRelevance, a monitoring service for internet advertising (acquired by Nielsen NetRatings), and data integration company Nimble Technology (acquired by Actuate). Dan is a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Context Relevant, the Madrona Venture Group, Spare5, and Voicebox Technologies.