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Ilkka Vuorikuru is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. He works at the Kalevi Sorsa Foundation and he has recently founded the Paja1 Impact Network for Arts, Sciences and Innovations, which seeks to use creative technological solutions in enforcing social justice and human rights. He is one of the co-founders in the Open Ministry project that utilizes crowd-sourcing in the preparation of citizens’ initiatives. He is also writing a book on Finnish Social Entrepreneurship. Ilkka has a background in journalism, and he is also a podcaster in the Virhemarginaali, liberal podcast.
Travis James Leland is a science-fiction writer and poet best known for his short fiction work “Final Adam,” which won the 1998 Cabrini Literary Guild Award. He received his B.A. in English, Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino. He is currently working on his first full-length novel entitled “Singular,” about a young man who becomes the world’s first true posthuman, and how society both accepts and rejects him. Leland currently lives in Llano, California with his wife and son. His Twitter is @TJL2080.
Loraine (Lori) Rhodes, CLA, is the Legal Research/Writing Manager for Terasem Movement, Inc. in Florida, where she focuses her legal knowledge and background in microelectronics on the intersection of law and technology. Lori is also the Managing Editor of Terasem’s Online Journals of Geoethical Nanotechnology and Personal Cyberconsciousness and may be contacted at Lori@terasemcentral.org.
Seth Baum is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), a PhD candidate (graduation date: May 2012) in Geography at Pennsylvania State University, and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. His research covers a broad range of topics, including artificial general intelligence, environmental policy, ethics, economics, education, and astrobiology. He also helps lead the global catastrophic risk research community via GCRI, the Society for Risk Analysis, and other organizations.
Mr. Baum is also active at the interface of academic scholarship and other sectors of society. Through GCRI, he is building ties between global catastrophic risk researchers and other relevant professionals. He is also active in public scholarship through collaborations with artists, entertainers, journalists, and other members of the media. His research has gotten wide media attention including interviews in the Discovery Channel, Fox News, and Talk Radio 702 (South Africa), plus additional coverage in The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, MSNBC, and other publications.
Carol Lloyd is the Executive Editor for GreatSchools.org. Previously she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and education editor at Salon.com. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, This American Life radio show, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times, and the SF Weekly, and she’s been featured on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, PRI’s The World and KQED’s Forum and To the Best of Our Knowledge. Her bestselling book “Creating a Life Worth Living” was published in 1997 by Harper Collins.
Pietro Speroni di Fenizio is a scientist and mathematician who holds a Master degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems and a PhD in Bioinformatics. He has always felt a fascination for the future, and is now trying to discern how the dynamical dialectic between exponential technolgical improvement and the twin crises of Peak Oil and Climate Change will play out. From 2008 he has been researching in e-democracy, developing the website Vilfredo.org to test alternative ways to reach consensus in a participative environment. In his personal life he has an interest in Taoism, Permaculture, Tai Chi. His publications are available from publications.pietrosperoni.it.
Dick Pelletier is a weekly columnist who writes about future science and technologies for numerous publications. He’s also appeared on various TV shows, and he blogs at Positive Futurist.
Breki Tomasson is founder and editor-in-chief of the pop culture website CSICON.org, and the co-creator of The Extropist Manifesto. A native of Iceland, he presently lives in Stockholm.
Tsvi Bisk is director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century (Maxanna Press, 2007). He also is Contributing Editor for Strategic Thinking for The Futurist magazine , the official publication of the World Future Society, and he has published over a hundred articles and essays in Hebrew and in English.
Gabriel Rothblatt is the Pastor and Community Organizer for the Terasem Movement Transreligion, Vice President of the B.O.D. for Terasem Movement Incorporated and Co-director of Worldfuturist.net. He studied Political Philosophy at UVM and was the face of their Bi-centennial commencement. Since then his primary focus has been on family; Gabriel has a wife, four kids and a dog that shamelessly demand his time and attention. An advocate of experiential learning, and DIY solutions, Gabriel has developed a diverse range of skills and experiences. Gabriel’s writing was first featured in NewVoices.org for his perspective on being Black and Jewish in America, his lifetime experiences also include having a transgendered parent. An experienced debater, Toastmaster and improv comedian Gabriel enjoys public speaking in addition to philosophical arguments and creative writing. From his dedicated work in proselytizing reason and skepticism he was dubbed the “Mass Debater.”
Evan Selinger is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Program Faculty Member in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, both at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is a Lincoln Scholar in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University and a member of the Danish run working group, Social Aspects of New Technology. Evan has published extensively in the areas of philosophy of technology, sustainability ethics, and ethics/policy of science and technology. Currently, he is Editor of the journal Philosophy and Technology. To enhance public debate about ethics, Evan supplements his peer-reviewed scholarship with outreach articles in magazines like Slate and The Atlantic and is starting a column with 3 Quarks Daily.
Amara D. Angelica is co-founder and Editor of KurzweilAI.net and its daily Accelerating Intelligence newsletter. She was editor and researcher for two of Ray Kurzweil’s books, The Singularity Is Near and Fantastic Voyage, and was the original Academic Model/Curriculum Lead for Singularity University. Amara’s eclectic background includes positions as operations analyst and human factors engineer for Grumman Aerospace for electronic intelligence and electronic countermeasures systems, aerospace reliability engineer for General Dynamics, USAF electronics instructor, electronics field engineer at Philco Corp., senior systems analyst at Grumman Data Systems, science/technology writer/editor, video script writer for Reeves Communications, high-tech marcom consultant, radio producer/engineer at WBAI-FM, and patent writer/inventor/IP manager in biomedical, biophysics, and nanoelectronics technologies for Technology Innovations Inc., and is a member of the Space Development Steering Committee, American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, and on the board of directors of the National Space Society. Amara holds a BS in psychology/mathematics from the U. of Nebraska, and is an electronic musician, radio amateur operator (KF6TEJ), photographer, and videographer.
Rachel Armstrong is a TEDGlobal Fellow, and a Teaching Fellow at at The Bartlett School of Architecture, in England. She was described as a ‘polymath’, at the TEDGlobal Oxford conference, by TED’s Community Director, Tom Reilly. Her extensive interdisciplinary practice engages with a fundamental driving principle – the fundamental creativity of science. Her work uses all manner of media to engage audiences and bring them into contact with the latest advances in science and their real potential through the inventive applications of technology, to address some of the biggest problems facing the world today.
Lincoln Cannon is a philosopher and programmer, passionate about technology, spirituality, science and religion. He is a professional software engineer, Internet marketer and information technologist, with extensive experience leading technical teams in development and integration of web and mobile systems. In his spare time, he serves as president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He holds a masters degree in business and a bachelors degree in philosophy from Brigham Young University. Lincoln is married with Dorothée Vankrieckenge, a French national, and is father to three bilingual children.
Daniel Hero makes his home with his wife in West Linn, Oregon. Despite his last name, he lives a very ordinary life teaching English, attending to two very needy cats, and writing stories he sometimes finishes.
Janine Donoho, who also writes under pseudonyms Jessie Jayne Smith and J. M. Donoho, is an award-winning author that cannot resist building new worlds. With one foot firmly planted in fuzzy science and the other in fantastic realms, she inhabits WHAT IF. She makes her home in the spectacular highlands of Okanogan County in eastern Washington State. There Donoho writes daily, explores the wilds with her hounds and ponders life’s underpinnings. She holds a bachelors degree in conservation, evolution, and ecology biology from the University of Washington.
Nicholas Owen was born and raised in Hong Kong. He speaks Cantonese and has often enjoyed exploring the differences between European and Chinese attitudes towards the adoption of new technologies. He is widely travelled having lived for some time in Australia, Cyprus and now the UK. After recently graduating from Nottingham University, where he majored in History and Political Science, he has become involved in numerous charities aiding the elderly and ethnic minorities in areas such as arranging adequate housing and finding employment.
He holds several qualifications in computing and teaching English as a foreign language, and has taught foreign student groups in the UK and HK. Since encountering the academic strain of Transhumanism he has sought to expand awareness of the possibilities and surrounding issues into the public sphere by organising and mediating student debates on human enhancement.
Owen is an avid SF fan and a zealous advocate of existential Japanese anime, which he argues has far more evocative power and realism than the great majority of western animation and Hollywood blockbusters. He is active on blogs and websites fighting to keep the Internet open and free, and also strongly advocates issues such as bodily autonomy, the legalisation of drugs, sex work, euthanasia and the right to direct democracy. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys building small scale replicas of 20th century battleships when no one’s around.
Federico Pistono is a scientific educator, social activist, computer scientist, blogger, media expert, and aspiring filmmaker. He has written several articles for newspapers and blogs regarding a variety of topics, from science, technology, Internet communities and social media, artificial intelligence, and climate change. He was interviewed by radio and TV stations in Italy, Denmark, and the U.S. He hosted several hundreds of hours of podcasts covering the impact of technology in society, activism, as well as science-related news. He was invited to speak at universities, symposia and other events around the world.
Federico has a formal education in science and technology, with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Verona, Department of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences. He continued his studies by following courses at Stanford on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, as well as many other subjects. In 2012 he was accepted to the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley. He has a crowdfunding campaign and a book website. You may find him at the following addresses: http://facebook.com/federicopistono.pagehttp://twitter.com/federicopistonohttp://gplus.to/federicopistonohttp://federicopistono.org
Jonathan Dotse is a techno-progressive who seeks to explore, develop, and promote science- and speculative-fiction pertaining to the people of Africa. He is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems at Ashesi University College, in the Eastern Region of Ghana. Jonathan is currently working on his debut novel; a detective mystery/thriller set in the sprawling metropolis of Accra in the middle of the 21st century. He discusses the future of African science fiction on his blog at afrocyberpunk.com.
Alex Lightman has 25 years of management and social innovation experience and 15 years of chairman and chief executive experience. Award-winning inventor with multiple US patents issued or pending and author of over one million published words, including the first book on 4G wireless, and over 150 articles in major publications. Chaired and organized 17 international conferences with engineers, scientists, and government officials since 2002 with intention of achieving policy breakthroughs related to innovation. World-class innovator and recipient of the first Economist magazine Readers’ Choice Award for « The Innovation that will Most Radically Change the World over the Decade 2010 to 2020 » (awarded Oct. 21, 2010, out of 4,000 initial suggestions and votes over 5 months from 200 countries, and from 32 judges). Recipient (post-humous) of the 2nd Reader’s Award (announced 10/21/2011 was Steve Jobs). Winner of the only SGI Internet 3D contest (both Entertainment and Grand Prize) out of 800 contestants.
Currently completing national innovation plan for the US White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy, entitled The Acceleration of American Innovation.
Social innovation work includes repeatedly putting almost unknown technologies and innovation-accelerating policies that can leverage the abilities of humanity into the mainstream of media, business, government, foundations, and standards bodies, including virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet Protocol version 6, and 4G wireless broadband, open spectrum, technology transfer to developing countries, unified standards, crowd-sourcing, and collective intelligence, via over 40 US government agencies, over 40 national governments, and via international entities including the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Political credentials including work for US Senator Paul E. Tsongas (D-MA) and on several state campaigns and US presidential campaigns for Democratic candidates (Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt), presentations to the United Nations, and advisory services to the governments of Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Japan, China, Korea and India, as well as to the US Congress, the White House (viaOffice of Management and Budget), the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DefenseInformation Systems Agency, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a prospective diplomat and policy analyst at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Have raised over $80 million in equity and debt as finder or principal. Currently serve with two boards of directors of US public companies involved in networks and technology and a private privacy company. Formerly with the cleantech nonprofit affiliated with the United Nations, the Intergovernment Renewable Energy Organization (IREO) ; and with H+, a futurist think tank that publishes H+, a digital magazine with 600,000 readers a month. H+ Summit chaired Dec. 5/6 2009 attracted over 412,000 webcast viewers. Most recent conference chaired and organized was H+ Summit@ Harvard University, June 12/13, 2010.
Accomplishments
1. Winner/recipient, The Economist magazine “Readers’ Choice” Innovation Award, for “Innovationmost likely to radically change the world over the decade 2010 to 2020”, for 4G Networks. This is the first and so far only global contest of its kind. Readers from over 200 countries were permitted to give ideas (and they came up with 4,000 initially, reduced by 32 judges to seven candidates) and to vote over a period of five months. Given the award on Oct. 21, 2010 at London Science Museum.
YouTube Video of Acceptance Speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rINUVLSk9A
2. Initiated, organized, and testified at the standing -room-only US Congressional hearings on IPv6 chaired by Cong. Tom Davis (R-VA) that prompted the Office of Management and Budget to require all US federal agencies to be IPv6 enabled by June, 2008, an almost unprecedented success in lobbying the US federal government, which almost never mandates technology for itself. The hearing title,” To Lead or Follow: The Next Generation Internet and the Transition to IPv6”, was based on my April 6Sense Article, “Lead, Follow, or Lose the Great Game: Why We Must Chose a US IPv6 Leader”. Personally chose the government witnesses and the industry witnesses. Industry panel was Microsoft, NTT, ARIN, and me.
3. Raised $60 million for Innofone, more than for all other IPv6 pure play companies in the world combined as of Sept. 2006.
4. Signed first national agreement to create a nationwide 4G wireless broadband network using WiMax with IPv6, Sept. 2006.
5. Signed Memorandum of Agreement with the federal government of the Philippines, via the Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CIST) to collaborate on IPv6 training, wireless broadband, and an ENUM registry.
6. Organized and chaired North American IPv6 Summit 2003, June 23-25, San Diego, CA at SDSU. 385 attendees and 15 sponsors.
7. Led Innofone to become the first M & A company in the IPv6 space, and to acquire InfoWeapons, Mobile Technology Group, and Digital Presence.
8. Settled biggest corporate legal dispute of IPv6 industry to date with $6.2 million to Innofone within 3.5 months afterInfoWeapons breached the acquisition agreement.
9. Organized and chaired US IPv6 Summit 2003, Arlington, VA, December 9-11. 527 attendees and 25 sponsors.
10. Organized and chaired first ever IPv6 Day at Consumer Electronics Show (largest trade show in the US), January 15, 2004.
11. Organized and chaired North American IPv6 Summit 2004, June 14-17, 2004, Santa Monica, CA, with 530 attendees and 27 sponsors.
12. Organized and chaired US IPv6 Summit 2004, Reston, VA, in cooperation with the Dept. of Defense IPv6 Transition Office.
13. Organized and chaired first ever Coalition Summit for IPv6, May 2005, Reston, VA, in cooperation with the Dept. of Defense IPv6 Transition Office, with 500 attendees and 20 sponsors, including participation from over 20 countries.
14. Organized and chaired the US IPv6 Summit 2005, Reston, VA, with 671 attendees and 20 sponsors, in Dec. 2005.
15. Organizing and chaired the first Federal IPv6 Summit, May 17-19, 2006, in Reston, VA.
16. Organizing and chairing the second Coalition Summit for IPv6, March, 2007, Reston, VA, in cooperation with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
17. Organizing and chairing the first Asian IPv6 Summit, October, 2007.
18. Awarded one of the first two contracts to advise the US government on IPv6, via DoD’s DISA.
19. Sole author of one of the two DoD IPv6 transition plans, focused on outreach to multiple stakeholders
20. Presented on US IPv6 at IPv6 and 3G summits in San Diego, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing (2x).
21. Transformed press view of IPv6 from skeptical and sarcastic to enthusiastically supportive, and name for IPv6 to “New Internet”, a term coined by my team.
22. Tripled the tempo, from one summit every 18 months in the US to once every 6 months.
23. More than doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, previous peak attendance at any North American IPv6 event ever organized without my leadership, anywhere.
24. Founding director of The IPv6 Association and The 4G Society.
25. Massively increased corporate, nonprofit and media sponsorships at IPv6 events.
26. Created, edited, and published 6Sense, the first IPv6 newsletter with original content outside of Japan’s IPv6 Style, and published 4 to 10 articles every month from April, 2004 to the present.
27. One of the world’s leading accelerators of IPv6 and 4G diffusion via simplification and amplification of core advantages.
28. Personally accounted for over 70% of all IPv6-related corporate sponsorship, from companies including Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nokia, Nortel, Alcatel, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, Panasonic, and manyothers in first years of IPv6 summits.
29. Earned reputation as the human hub of the emerging global IPv6 business community.
30. Created first profitable IPv6 pure play, IPv6 Summit, Inc.
31. Created first public company focused on IPv6 by reverse merging IPv6 Summit, Inc. : Innofone (OTC BB: INFN)
32. Completed the contract from NATO to do the IPv6 timeline for all 26 national members of NATO
33. Completed the contract from Juniper to do the IPv6 Best Practices World Report
34. Sole keynote speaker out of 70 companies (total) for four of the last four small cap investor conferences attended.
35. Twice in a row was keynote speaker (“Big Three”) at the Bahrain World Economic Summit, Manama, Bahrain, speaking about how the GCC and Middle East can develop their own Silicon Valley.
AWARDS:
Winner, The Economist Magazine, First Reader’s Choice Award for “Innovationthat will most impact the next decade”, for 4G Networks. Awards, announced in London, Oct. 21, 2010
PRISM (PR) prize, Consumer Products, Charmed.com and Shandwick, Wearable Computer fashion show
Winner of SGI Virtual Reality Modeling Language Competition Grand Prize, All Categories, 1998
Winner of SGI Virtual Reality Competition, Entertainment Category, 1998
Chosen as one of the “Top Ten CEOs of the Future”, Chief Executive magazine’s 20th anniversary, 1998
Winner of Johnson Foundation Prize as (one of ten) “America’s Most Innovative Educator”, 1992
John Niman is a J.D. Candidate at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and blogs at boydfuturist.wordpress.com and hplusmagazine.com. He shares his enthusiasm for transhumanism and technology with the law school through presentations as part of the William S. Boyd Health Law Society. John recently completed a lengthy academic paper exploring the legal definition of personhood under United States law in which he argues that personhood is not restricted to human beings currently, and ought to be based on a set of cognitive criteria rather than human DNA and biological events like quickening and birth. He hopes to push this legal argument further in a forthcoming paper where he will further argue that once machines achieve a degree of sentience such that they can meet these criteria, they too ought to be considered people under the law and, potentially, citizens of the United States.
John graduated magna cum laude from UNLV in 2008, earning his B.A. in philosophy with a minor in business law. After law school, he intends to continue exploring the ethics of transhumanist technology and merge his philosophical and legal education with a doctorate in public policy or bioethics.
Nicholas Agar is a professor of ethics at Victoria University of Wellington. His main research interests are in the ethics of the new genetics. He’s also published on environmental ethics, and the philosophy of mind.
Ethically, Agar is described as occupying a position between bioconservatives like Leon Kass and transhumanists. Agar supports reproductive freedom - the right of prospective parents to pursue enhancement technologies for their future children but without forcing them to embrace it. His most recent focus has been the moral and prudential limits on human enhancement.
His most recent publication is Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement.
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is an American theoretical physicist who is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.
As an advocate of scientific skepticism, science education, and the science of morality, he appears in national media and has written editorials for The New York Times. His opposition to intelligent design gained national prominence as a result of his 2004 appearance before the state school board of Ohio. In 2006 and 2008, he was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium, plus he served on Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign science policy committee. In December 2011, Krauss was named as a non-voting honorary board member for the Center for Inquiry.
Krauss newest book - released in Jan 2012 - is entitled A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, with an afterword by Richard Dawkins. This became a New York Times Bestseller within a week of its release. He is one of the few living physicists that Scientific American has referred to as a “public intellectual”, and the only physicist to have received awards from all three major U.S. physics societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.
David Eubanks holds a doctorate in mathematics and works in higher education. His research on complex systems led to his writing Life Artificial, a novel from the point of view of an artificial intelligence.
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. She received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation that was later published as Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture.
In 2002, she was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, and was a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004-2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and from 2007-2009 she was on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
From 1999 to 2008 she wrote a syndicated weekly column called “Techsploitation.” She co-founded other magazine in 2002, which was published tri-annually until 2007. In 2008, Gawker media asked Newitz to start a blog about science and science fiction, which was dubbed io9. Newitz has remained editor-in-chief since its founding, and in 2010, io9 was named one of the top 30 science blogs by The Times.
Newitz’s work has been published in Popular Science,Wired, Salon.com, New Scientist, Metro Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and AlterNet. She has discussed her work on CNN, The New York Times, NPR, G4, BBC, and CBC, and she is a regular lecturer at colleges and conferences.
David Pearce is a British utilitarian philosopher and transhumanist, who promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative details how he believes the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through “paradise engineering.” He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, and the Abolitionist Society in 2002.
Edmund Zagorin is co-founder and CEO of Giant Eel Productions, a stereoscopic 3D company that focuses on bringing narrative presence to mobile media. His research interests include neurovisuality, network-distributed cognition and the incognetum hactenus.
piero scaruffi is an author, cultural historian and blogger who graduated in Mathematics in his native Italy before undertaking a career in the software industry of Silicon Valley, where he directed an Artificial Intelligence Center. In parallel he pursued his interests in the arts. Visiting scholarships at Harvard and Stanford in Cognitive Science and lecturing at UC Berkeley resulted in the book “The Nature of Consciousness” (2006). All along he also continued writing poetry both in Italian (for which he has been awarded several prizes) and in English. His main books on music are: “A History of Rock and Dance Music” (2009) and “A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000” (2007). He also co-wrote the first “History of Silicon Valley” to cover the century from the founding of Stanford University to the boom of social media. All along he also continued writing poetry both in Italian (for which he has been awarded several prizes) and in English. “Synthesis” (2009) collects poems and meditations. His main books on music are: “A History of Rock and Dance Music” (2009) and “A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000” (2007). All his writing is hosted on his website: www.scaruffi.com.
Leo Igwe was the Western and Southern African representative to IHEU, the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He has bravely worked to end a variety of human rights violations, including anti-gay hate, sorcery, witchcraft, ritual killing, human sacrifice, “untouchability”, caste discrimination, “child witch” superstition, and anti-blasphemy laws. He is presently enrolled in a three year research programme on “Witchcraft accusations in Africa” at the University of Bayreuth, in Germany.
R.U. Sirius (real name Ken Goffman) may still be best known as the former editor of the popular early ‘90s cyberpunk magazine, Mondo 2000. He’s author or coauthor of many books, including Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, Cyberpunk Handbook, How To Mutate & Take Over the World, Design For Dying (with Timothy Leary), 21st Century Revolutionary, The Revolution: Quotations from Party Chairman R.U. Sirius, Counterculture Through The Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, True Mutations: Conversations on the Edge of Science, Technology and Consciousness, and Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs.
Popular in the early 1990s, Mondo 2000 was described by the Washington Post as the “first magazine of the new millennium.” An early 1993 Time magazine issue dedicated to cyberpunk was designed by the Mondo 2000 art staff and featured the magazine prominently.
Sirius went on to edit several other publications, including the popular late ‘90s webzine GettingIt and the transhumanist site, H+ Magazine. He currently edits at Acceler8or.com, described as a “thoroughfare for accelerating technoculture and screaming memes” and is currently organizing a literary-and-other-media project under the working title “Use Your Hallucinations: The History of Mondo 2000 and the Cyber Counterculture.”
Sirius’s freelance writing career started in the mid-1980s when he wrote articles about intelligence enhancing drugs and nutrients for Omni Newsletter and Whole Earth Review. Since then, he has written on topics ranging from biotechnology to pop music. He has been a Contributing Editor for Wired magazine and a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, Wired News, and Artforum International. His articles have appeared in Time, Boing Boing, San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Village Voice, Esquire Japan and many other publications. He has lectured internationally about technology and culture, including the keynote address at the Virtual Reality ’95 Conference in Oslo, Norway. He has appeared in several films including “Conceiving Ada” with Tilda Swinton and Karen Black.
Sirius lives in Mill Valley with his sweetheart Eve Berni and their cat Princess. He still hates onions.
Benjamin Abbot is a genderqueer, transgender PhD student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Eir interests include the international anarchist movement during the era of the Mexican Revolution, narratives of gender and sexuality across the Partido Liberal Mexicano and U.S. anarchist-feminist scene, Shulamith Firestone’s thought, technology politics, queer theory, and postcolonialism. Ey blogs at Queering the Singularity.
Professor Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist/futurist at the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan; and the Centre of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, Macquarie University, Sydney. He also an associate with Mt Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, where he co-teaches a bi-annual course titled, “Futures thinking and strategy development.” He is one of 2010 Laurel award winners for all time best futurists as voted by the Shaping Tomorrow foresight network, an association of 2900 foresight professionals. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. In March 2011, he received an honorary doctorate from the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.
Professor Inayatullah has authored/edited thirty books (with titles such as Questioning the Future; the University in Transformation; Youth Futures; Macrohistory and Macrohistorians; Alternative Educational Futures), journal special issues and cdroms and over 350 journal articles and book chapters as well as contributed to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Peace, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Macmillan Encyclopedia of the Future and was the Unesco Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.
Ytasha L. Womack is an award-winning filmmaker/author/journalist and choreographer. She is author/creator of the popfuturist/afrofuturist novel 2212:Book of Rayla, first of the groundbreaking Rayla 2212 series. Her other books include the critically acclaimed book Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity (Lawrence Hill Books). Post Black was hailed as a Booklists’ Top Black History Reader of 2010 and is a popular cultural studies text universities across the US. She also co-edited the anthology Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip Hop (Harlem Moon/Random House). A Chicago native, her film projects include The Engagement (director) and Love Shorts (producer/writer). Ytasha is currently editor of the cultural news site www.postblackexperience.com and a guest editor for NV Magazine. A social media and pop culture expert, she frequently consults and guest lectures for corporations and universities across the world. She received her B.A in Mass Media Arts from Clark Atlanta University and studied Arts, Entertainment and Media Management at Columbia College in Chicago.
Maria Konovalenko is a molecular biophysicist and the program coordinator for the Science for Life Extension Foundation. She earned her M.Sc. degree in Molecular Biological Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Joern Pallensen studied psychology at University of Copenhagen and has had a lifelong interest in philosophy of mind, in particular ontology of self. He blogs at Transhumanisten.com He was introduced to IEET when he was interviewed for the 2011 article, “Happiness, Freedom, Equality, Rudeness - welcome to Denmark!”
P. Tittle (M.A., Philosophy) is the author of Critical Thinking: An Appeal to Reason (Routledge, 2011), Shit That Pisses Me Off (2011), What If…Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy (Longman, 2005), Should Parents be Licensed? Debating the Issues (Prometheus, 2004), Ethical Issues in Business: Inquiries, Cases, and Readings (Broadview, 2000). She also contributed the Ethics unit to the high school philosophy text, Philosophy: Questions and Theories (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2003). Her papers have appeared in Sexuality & Culture: an interdisciplinary journal, The International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Philosophy in a Contemporary World and has been anthologized in At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? and Current Controversies: Child Abuse.
She was a columnist for The Philosopher Magazine’s online philosophy café for eight years and for Philosophy Now for two years. Her columns have also been published on a regular basis in Humanist in Canada , Links, and Academic Exchange Quarterly and on an occasional basis in Inroads, The Nugget, Canadian HR Reporter, Elenchus, Teaching and Learning Literature, University Affairs, South Australian Humanist Post, Forum, and The Humanist.
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is a lecturer in medical ethics at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany. He studied philosophy at King’s College/University of London (BA), the University of Durham (MA), the University of Giessen and the University of Jena (PhD). In recent years, he taught at the Universities of Jena (Germany), Erfurt (Germany) and Klagenfurt (Austria). His main fields of research are Nietzsche, the philosophy of music, bioethics and meta-, post- and transhumanism.
Dr. Sorgner is author of Metaphysics without Truth - On the Importance of Consistency within Nietzsche’s Philosophy (1999, Utz Verlag; Marquette University Press, 2007) and Menschenwürde nach Nietzsche: Die Geschichte eines Begriffs (2010, WBG). He has co-edited the books Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction (2010, University of Chicago Press), Humanbiotechnologie als gesellschaftliche Herausforderung.(2005, Alber Verlag), Eugenik und die Zukunft (2006, Alber Verlag), Human-Biotechnology as Social Challenge (2007, Ashgate) and Geschichte der Bioethik. (2011, Mentis Verlag). He edits two book series “Beyond Humanism: Trans- and Posthumanism/Jenseits des Humanismus: Trans- und Posthumanismus“ for Peter Lang Publishing, and Musikphilosophie for Alber Verlag.
Dr. Sorgner is a member of the editorial boards of the Encyclopedias of Anthropology (Sage) and Time (Sage), the Handbook of 21st Century Anthropology (Sage), the journals Anthropologia Integra and the Journal of Evolution and Technology.
Alex McGilvery is currently living in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada. He is an author and serves as the minister of a thriving United Church congregation. Alex has experience working alongside people of all faiths as well as with secular humanists and atheists. As chaplain in a psychiatric ward, he was asked to do an assessment to determine the difference between faith and delusion, and he has been wrestling with the question ever since. Alex is a strong proponent of solid ethical thinking and an advocate for personal responsibility.
Anthony Werner, a graduate of Cape Town and Oxford Universities, is managing director of Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd in London, where he has built up a list of titles under the heading Ethical Economics.
Peter Wicks has been employed for 16 years at the European Commission, working mainly on environmental policy, on issues ranging from permitting of industrial installations to air quality and the science-policy interface. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, England, where he also obtained a doctorate in fluid dynamics.
Dr. Miriam J.S. Leis is a strategic foresight researcher specializing in the interrelation of emerging technologies, society, politics, and future studies. She has been involved in many foresight projects for business, policy makers, and the European Commission especially focusing on topics related to education, health, innovation policy, and emerging technologies. She is currently working in the management of an international company, specializing in academic editing and publication support services based in Mumbai India (http://www.editage.de, https://twitter.com/#!/EditageGermany )
Kim Solez, M.D., FRCPC, Professor of Pathology at the University of Alberta, and President and CEO of Transpath Inc., is one of the world’s foremost kidney pathologists. He is the father of the Banff classification that sets standards worldwide for how biopsies from kidney and other solid organ transplants are interpreted, and started the post-earthquake disaster relief task force of the International Society of Nephrology.
He is a popular blogger on internetevolution.com, and directs NKF cyberNephrology, a joint venture of the National Kidney Foundation (U.S.) and the University of Alberta. Kim has also created many educational videos for the Lifeboat Foundation.
Having held leadership roles in medicine and technology for over 20 years and directed major music and arts events, Kim is convinced that very useful cross-fertilization can come from mixing these disciplines. The Canadian poet/singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen called Kim a “great master of the surreal,” juxtaposing things others would never think of juxtaposing. Kim hopes that by putting things together in new ways he can stimulate people to think about the future and our increasing association with machines and devices in a new and more positive way.
Currently he is writing a book for the general public on the Technological Singularity with Nikki Olson, and will be teaching a course on the Singularity and the Future of Medicine.
R. Dennis Hansen is currently employed as a planner for a federal resource management agency in Utah. He enjoys traveling and has lived in and/or visited and/or worked in over 40 countries on five continents. He currently lives part time (doing volunteer work) in Uganda, and in the Navajo Nation. His blog, Tired Road Warrior, displays the randomness of his thought processes. Hansen is a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association and Engineers without Borders.
Nikki Olson is a transhumanist writer/researcher authoring unique articles on transhumanist culture and advancing technology. Involved in Singularity research for 4 years as a full-time research assistant, she worked on an upcoming book about the Singularity, aided in the development of the University of Alberta course “Technology and the Future of Medicine”, and produced educational material for the Lifeboat Foundation. She attained a bachelor’s degree in 2007 at University of Alberta, Canada, in Philosophy and Sociology. Her interests lie in scarcity reducing technology, biotechnology, DIY, augmentation technologies, artificial intelligence, and transhumanist philosophy.
Ayesha Khanna is Managing Partner of Hybrid Realities, a consulting firm specializing in scenario analysis, technology trends, future cities, and geostrategy. She is a technology strategy advisor with over ten years of experience working with clients on new product development, market entry, digital branding, customer experience, and operations management. She has advised organizations in the financial services, real-estate, and government sectors. Her clients have included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, American International Group, and Deutsche Bank.
Ayesha is also Founder and Principal of the Hybrid Reality Institute, which explores human/technology co-evolution and its implications for society, business and politics. The Institute is specifically focused on the Hybrid Age – the post-Information era we are entering today where humans live in a world of proliferating, disruptive and increasingly intelligent technologies. Institute fellows examine how individuals and society at large can make informed decisions about how to lead “the good life†in the Hybrid Age.
She is the author of Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and is series editor of The Complete Technology Guides published by Reed Elsevier, which includes the titles Next Generation Datacenter: Driving Extreme Efficiency and Effective Cost Savings (2009), Electronic and Program Trading (2006), and Introduction to Financial Technology (2005). Ayesha has written for diverse publications such as BusinessWeek, Forbes, Strategy+Business, and Foreign Policy. She also blogs with Parag Khanna on human/technology co-evolution at BigThink.
Ayesha is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation and part of the organizing committee of TEDxGotham. In 2010, she advised Congressional candidate Reshma Saujani on innovation and entrepreneurship in New York, and co-chaired the Innovation Advisory Board, which included leading technology entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and New York. She is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of EGO Magazine, a leading arts and culture publication for the South Asian diaspora in New York. She has a BA (honors) in Economics from Harvard University, an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University, and is writing her PhD on smart cities at the London School of Economics.
Cathi Woodward is a Data Solutions Architect with many years experience doing data analysis and database design at the enterprise level. She is also a mom and a full-time student in the University of Life.
James Felton Keith is a Principal at ModeEq, Editor-inChief of journals at the CIIPM, and the author of Integrationalism. He is a former faculty at Michigan State University in economic development and participates in many other for-profit and non-profit initiatives globally. Currently his focus is information and accelerating technologies impact on economic models of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Donnie Maclurcan is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute for Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. He holds a PhD in Social Science, his research having investigated the foreseeable impacts of nanotechnology for global inequity. He is a passionate advocate for paths to global prosperity that do not rely on economic growth.
Rick Moss studied painting, photography and printmaking in his youth and has worked as a designer and producer of video, print, interactive media and web content. He is co-founder and president of the online business community, RetailWire.com. Ebocloud is his first novel.
Steve Burgess is principal of Burgess Consulting & Forensics, a computer forensics and expert witness firm, and is host of the radio program, “Speaking of Technology: Conversations with Tech Experts and Innovators.” Burgess was a creator of the data recovery industry circa 1985, and has founded several businesses, including Committed To Memory, an online data storage company. Burgess is a contributor to Nanotechnology Now‘s Press Kit and Glossary, which are intended to aid in lay understanding of nanotechnology. He writes about electronic discovery and nanotechnology.
Dorothy Deasy is a freelance design researcher. She specializes in the user’s context and strategic qualitative projects using techniques such as immersion, ethnography, observation, and indirect inquiry. She has a Masters of Applied Theology and a BS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. A Christian existentialist, her thesis is on spirituality for a transhuman age.
“Still we struggle against the tides, against the magnets in our genes, which pull us together, reminding us that we are not alone, but the universe itself.” (from the poem Magnets In Our Genes)
Wendell Wallach is a consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He chairs the Center’s working research group on Technology and Ethics and is a member of other research groups on Animal Ethics, End of Life Issues, Neuroethics, and PTSD. Wendell co-authored (with Colin Allen) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press 2009), which maps the new field of enquiry variously called machine ethics, machine morality, computational morality, or friendly AI.
Formerly, he was a founder and the President of two computer consulting companies, Farpoint Solutions and Omnia Consulting Inc. Among the clients served by his companies were PepsiCo International, United Aircraft, and the State of Connecticut.
Wendell also serves on the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford, CT and is an associate editor for the journal TopiCS in Cognitive Science. His hobby/avocation is building stained glass windows. He is presently writing a book on the societal, ethical, and public policy challenges arising from technologies that enhance human faculties by altering the mind/body. Another book in progress explores the ways in which cognitive science, new technologies, and introspective practices are altering our understanding of human decision-making and ethics.
Sascha Vongehr is currently affiliated with the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University (NJU) and the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, NJU.
He obtained his PhD (USC, 2005) on Helium nano-droplet experiments and statistics of nontrivial cluster size distributions but started out in Europe in 1971 (22 years in Germany, 3 in GB) and diffused westwards through America (11 years in the US) until he landed in the very east (4 years in China). He started studying philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics in Germany, obtained his Bachelor of Science in theoretical physics (electromagnetism) and the Master of Science in string theory at the University of Sussex, UK. He worked subsequently on quantum gravity (black holes/two time theory) at the University of Southern California (USC), but left the string community to explore nanotechnology and the brain. He currently collects postdoctoral positions: first on the neuroscience of the visual system (USC, Psychology), second on nanotechnology and cosmology (NJU, Physics), and a third on the philosophy and sociology of science (NJU, Philosophy).
His currently active research is on nanotechnology (theory, simulation) and its critical evaluation, cosmology, basis of quantum mechanics, and its relation to the philosophy of mind, substantialism/relational reductions, and suicidal philosophy. His engagement with the IEET reflects his interest in the fields of cognitive enhancement, future of nanotechnology, and fundamental philosophical considerations related to the aims of the transhumanism / technoprogressive movement.
Richard Loosemore is currently a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Wells College, Aurora, NY, USA. He graduated from University College London, and his background includes work in physics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, software engineering, philosophy, parapsychology and archaeology.
Professor Loosemore’s principle expertise is in the field known as Artificial General Intelligence, which seeks a return to the original roots of AI (the construction of complete, human-level thinking systems). Unlike many AI/AGI researchers, his approach is as much about psychology as traditional AI, because he believes that the complex-system nature of thinking systems make it almost impossible to build a safe and functioning AGI unless its design is as close as possible to the design of the human cognitive system. He considers the safety of intelligent systems to be of paramount importance, and one aspect of his work involves the development of AGI motivation mechanisms that can be guaranteed to be friendly.
Other things that have occupied him at various times: electronics, astronomy, choral singing, cello, experimental parapsychology, sporadic attempts to speak Japanese and Russian, mathematics, Aikido, drawing and painting, cubing, tennis, cat herding, amateur chemistry, contemporary dance, furniture making, wilderness camping, and a renovation war between him and the 1850s Classical Revival farmhouse in which he resides.
Dr. David Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dr. Eagleman’s areas of research include time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action, and is the Founder and Director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Dr. Eagleman has written several neuroscience books, including Incognito: The Brains Behind the Mind (Pantheon, 2011), Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (co-authored with Richard Cytowic, MIT Press), and the upcoming Live-Wired: How the Brain Rewrites its own Circuitry (Oxford University Press, 2012). He has also written an internationally bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 22 languages and was named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, New Scientist, and the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Eagleman writes for Wired, the New York Times, Discover magazine, Slate, and New Scientist, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature.
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a Civil War veteran, American political leader, and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism.
Jeremy Weissman has a master’s from the Philosophy and Social Policy Program at the George Washington University and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. He has held internships with the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and with the Congress Watch Division of Public Citizen.
Curtis D. Carbonell currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology in Bahrain. He has a special interest in the Third Culture and has made it his area of specialization within the Humanities.
Jack Lundee is an engineer by day, and avid follower of all things both green and progressive. With a masters in Communications from NewHouse School of Communications, Jack has been an involved member of the political blogosphere and is pursuing his work in the green sector.
Patrick D. Hopkins, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET, is a philosopher and ethicist who combines a life-long love of science fiction with academic scholarship on very real-world issues of science and technology. After receiving a B.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Mississippi, he worked as a research assistant at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta and later in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Tennessee in Memphis.
While still enamored of science, Hopkins decided he was better suited for studying the cultural, moral, and theological dimensions of science and technology rather than actually doing scientific research. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis and had a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Applied Ethics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He now teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
Professor Hopkins has published a number of articles on biomedical ethics, science and technology studies, gender studies, and religious studies. He has edited a book on gender and technology, Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, and is currently working on a companion volume focusing on race, ethnicity, and technology as well as a book on the relationship between technology and “nature.â€
Melanie Swan, MBA, is an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET. Ms. Swan, principal of the MS Futures Group, is a science generalist, hedge fund manager, and founder of citizen science organization DIYgenomics. Her educational background includes an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University, and recent coursework in bioscience, nanotechnology, physics, and computer science.
Ms. Swan’s career has focused on research, finance, and entrepreneurship, including founding a technology startup company, GroupPurchase, which aggregated small business buying groups. She was Director of Research at Telecoms Consultancy Ovum, and previously held management and finance positions at iPass in Silicon Valley, J.P. Morgan in New York, Fidelity in Boston, and Arthur Andersen in Los Angeles.
Ms. Swan serves as a researcher and advisor to foundations, government agencies, corporations, and startups, and is active in the community promoting science and technology. She designs and runs interactive simulations, including “Live Prediction Markets Workshop,” “Being an Entrepreneur,” and “The Trader’s Pit.” Ms. Swan is the former Treasurer of San Francisco-based non-profit Equal Rights Advocates, an Advisory Board member of the Foundational Questions Institute, Lifeboat Foundation, and Accelerating Studies Foundation, a presenter at the Expanding Your Horizons math and science conference, and co-moderator of the Philadelphia and Boulder Future Salons, free monthly events discussing science and technology innovations and their implications. Ms. Swan speaks French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and is an advisor and faculty member at Singularity University.
Maria Korolov (formerly Maria Trombly) is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She also runs an editorial content company, Trombly International. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld. She has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia, China, India, Afghanistan and Chechnya. Today, she writes about enterprise uses of virtual worlds and other enterprise technology topics.
Hank Pellissier has served as the IEET’s Managing Director since January 2012, after a year and a half as an IEET Affiliate Scholar. He’s the author of two e-books, Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so High? - scientific factors that influence intelligence, and Invent Utopia Now: Transhumanist Suggestions for the Pre-Singularity Era. He is currently writing a third e-book, entitled Omniscient: imagining our future god-like brains.
A journalist, Hank was the “Local Intelligence” columnist for the New York Times (San Francisco edition) and a frequent contributor to GreatSchools.org. Past work includes a daily column for Salon.com (“Naked World”), two columns for SfGate.com (“Urban Animal” and “Odd Barkings”), and a monthly column for SF Metropolitan (“Frisco Utopia”), plus numerous features. Hank has been among the most popular writers for the IEET, and has written for the H+ Magazine, the World Future Society, and other publications, occasionally under his nom de plume, “Hank Hyena.”
Hank is the founder/director of two non-profit organizations, the Hyena Comedy Institute - where he trained stand-ups and produced 80+ shows - and The Kids’ Co-op Inc., a non-profit that launched two SF preschools and donated funds, food, and school supplies to ten foreign locales, primarily The Philippines, where seven hectares of agricultural land were purchased to enable a Mangyan tribal village to self-subsist.
Also a performance artist and poet, the SF Chronicle labeled Hank “San Francisco’s performance art bad boy.” His poetry is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, he’s been a SF Poetry Slam co-champion, and his performance pieces have toured eleven states and six international countries. As an events producer, Hank instigated the SF DADA Festival, the SF Buddhist Festival, the Bay Area Muslim Performance Festival, the world’s first Atheist Film Festival, and North Beach Street Utopia.
Hank’s undergraduate degree is in History and he holds a Masters in Humanities/Religious Studies. His hobbies include traveling and exercising with his triathlete wife and two hyperactive daughters, but mostly, he prefers to just research, write, and argue online with readers who dispute his essay’s contentions. He’s available for freelance writing assignments and speaking engagements.
Kelly Hills is a trained interdisciplinary scholar interested in making science and bioethics an accessible part of people’s daily lives. She is known for her eclectic use of pop culture and technology in the classroom, including a course that paired weekly topics in applied ethics with episodes of the critically acclaimed science fiction show Stargate: SG-1. 

Kelly likes to say she is a bioethics “jill of all trades.” If cornered, she will admit to a strong interest in notions of responsibility, agency, and affect, as well as the ethical, legal and social implications of emerging technologies, DIYbiotech, clinical medicine, and public health.
Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist and commentator and the author of three books, including a New York Times bestseller, The Republican War on Science. Chris co-writes “The Intersection†blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum. He is a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast and guest-hosted a segment of BBC2’s “The Culture Show.â€
In the past, Chris has also been a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and he is currently a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion. He is also a contributing editor to Science Progress and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine.
Chris has been featured regularly by the national media, having appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, CSPAN’s Book TV, and NPR’s Fresh Air With Terry Gross, among others. His work has appeared in Wired, Harper’s, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among many other publications.
Len Sassaman (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET from 2010-2011. He was an internationally acclaimed cypherpunk and privacy advocate, a PhD candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and a researcher with the COSIC research group. He worked on privacy enhancing technologies and anonymous communication systems such as the open source Mixmaster remailer software.
Len worked for Network Associates on the PGP encryption software, was a member of the Shmoo Group, a contributor to the OpenPGP IETF working group, the GNU Privacy Guard project, and often appeared at technology conferences like DEF CON. He was the cofounder of CodeCon along with Bram Cohen, coauthor of the Zimmermann-Sassaman key-signing protocol, and was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov.
Recounting their early work together on crypto-systems Len’s friend Pablos Holman said that they were “reimagining our world, riddled with cryptosystems that would mathematically enforce the freedoms that we treasured. Anonymous remailers to preserve speech without fear of retribution; onion routers to ensure nobody could censor the internet; digital cash to enable a radically free economy.”
Sean Hays Ph.D. is an IEET Affiliate Scholar, and former director of the IEET’s Securing the Future program. He is currently working with Drs. Clark Miller and Jason Robert of Arizona State University’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society to complete an edited volume on nanotechnology and cognitive enhancement, as well as on creating a system for modeling non-linear dynamic technological histories. In addition, his long-term research program continues to involve integrating the insights of the canonical political theorists into STS and science policy, developing new tools for dynamic non-linear historical modeling, and working with CNS at ASU to further develop anticipatory governance, a model for reforming societal institutions so they are better prepared to mitigate any potential negative externalities that attend new technologies.
Dr. Hays has spent the past five years conducting research in science and technology studies and science policy around the topic of emergent technologies. His dissertation was a preliminary analysis of the implications of cognitive enhancement technologies for competition within American political culture. He has already amassed a substantial publication record with three refereed publications pending, two chapters pending in an edited volume, an edited volume of his own due out in late 2010, and a number of other un-refereed publications in prominent publications.
Diana Deca, a former IEET intern, is doing a research MSc in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, and is currently working on the inheritance of mathematical talent in autism at the University of Cambridge. She obtained her BA in Theoretical Philosophy and Logic at the University of Bucharest with a thesis on cognitive enhancement through nanotechnology. Her main interest is bridging the gap between humans and (their) molecules. Her general interests include genetics, neuroscience, cybernetics, and biopolitics.
John Lewis is a mechanical engineer residing in London, England, whose interests include philosophy, theology, science and technology, computing, and music.
Patrick Tucker is a senior editor and writer for THE FUTURIST magazine, an international magazine about technological, environmental, and societal trends. He also writes fiction and produces original artwork for various publications and sites.
Michael Gold has spent more than 25 years as a reporter, writer, editor, technical liaison, and manager at various award-winning publications, in print and online. He is co-founder of ScienceForCitizens.net.
Matthew Cobb is a scientist and writer living in Manchester, UK, where he is in charge of Manchester University’s Zoology degree. He is an evolutionary neurobiologist and also studies the history of science.
John Robb, author, entrepreneur, and former USAF pilot in special operations, has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central/South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. He is the author of the best-selling Brave New War, which was published in April 2007 by Wiley. John has been quoted as an expert analytical source in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal, and has been interviewed on the BBC, Fox, NPR, PRI, and CNBC (as well as many independent radio shows). He received his Bachelor of Science in Astronautical Engineering from the United States Air Force Academy, and his Masters of Public and Private Management from Yale University.
Rocky Rawstern, founder of Access Team, has been involved with nanoscale technologies and in website construction and search engine optimization for over 15 years.
Ana Lita, Ph.D., is the executive and founding director of the Global Bioethics Initiative, an international not-for-profit organization incorporated in the State of New York, and is the former director of the Appignani Bioethics Center. Dr. Lita sits on the Ethics Committee of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering, the NGO HIV/AIDS Committee as well as the Genetics Policy Institute. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics from September 2009 to June 2010.
The author of numerous conference presentations, in addition to scholarly and popular publications, Dr. Lita is an active voice in public and academic discourse. Her teaching and writings have focused on ethics, especially in health care, medicine, and business. She has received a Soros Foundation Fellowship and a National Association Fellowship for International Scholars and was a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 1995. She served as a junior researcher at the Institute for Educational Sciences in Bucharest, Romania from 1991-1995, where she was responsible for a joint research project on Adult Education with UNESCO and the Institute for Education in Hamburg, Germany. She held a tenure track position (2001-2004) as an assistant professor of philosophy at Lincoln University, Missouri.
Dr. Lita earned her B.A. in history of western philosophy from the University of Bucharest, Romania and an M.A. in sociology focused on political culture from the Central European University in Prague. She received her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University specializing in applied ethics and social philosophy. She is fluent in English, Romanian, French, and Italian.
Dr. Patrick Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, based at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is also an assistant professor in Cal Poly’s philosophy department—teaching courses in ethics, political theories, philosophy of law, and technology ethics—and was formerly an ethics fellow at the US Naval Academy. He earned his BA from University of California at Berkeley, with substantial work in the biological sciences, and MA and PhD from University of California at Santa Barbara. He recently finished a three-year post-doctoral appointment at Dartmouth College.
In addition to several journal papers and edited symposiums, Dr. Lin is a co-editor on Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology (Wiley Intersciences, 2007), Nanotechnology & Society: Current and Emerging Ethical Issues (Springer, 2008), and an anthology on robot ethics (MIT Press, in progress). He is a co-author on What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter?: From Science to Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). He is also the lead author on a pair of government-funded reports: Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design (Office of Naval Research, 2008) and Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers (NSF, 2009).
Dr. Lin serves on the editorial and advisory boards for a number of academic and industry journals, including Nanotechnology Law & Business, Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, and NanoEthics. He is currently working on ethics and policy projects related to advanced military technologies, geoengineering, space technologies, virtual reality, synthetic biology, and more.
Erik Baard has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Village Voice, Times of London, Dow Jones Newswires, Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Seed, Time Out New York, Space.com, Wired.com, and other publications. He won the “Deadline Club” best reporting prize and was a finalist in other years. The Village Voice nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize in both Features and Explanatory Journalism categories. He has also worked for Japanese news broadcasters, usually centering on the United Nations.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is co-founder of the Palo Alto Strategy Studio, a futures research group located in Silicon Valley, California. He also is an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and a visiting scholar in Stanford’s HPST program. More information is available on his personal blog, Relevant History.
Samuel H. Kenyon is a lead software engineer at iRobot Corp. in Massachusetts, where he develops mobile robots and human-robot interfaces. In addition, he researches interfaces and cognitive architectures, especially involving emotions, learning, common sense, and collaboration. He has a B.S. from Northeastern University.
Phil Torres is an Affiliate Scholar at the IEET. He earned a BA in philosophy (with Honors) from the University of Maryland, College Park, a MS in neuroscience from Brandeis University, and spent a year as a visiting graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. At present, his primary research interests lie at the intersection of emerging technologies and the philosophy of mind and biology; he also has strong interests in existential risks. He has published papers in several academic journals, including the Journal of Future Studies, the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, and Erkenntnis. He has also published in magazines such as American Atheist. Prior to becoming a researcher, he spent several years writing music for television and film.
Richard Eskow, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET and Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, is CEO of Health Knowledge Systems (HKS) in Los Angeles, which provides services to the healthcare and workers’ compensation industries. Through Eskow and Associates, Richard is also a consultant specializing in healthcare and insurance, IT, strategic planning, and communications. Most clients are in the IT and health-related industries, although Richard has also worked with NGO’s, state and national governments, and in the entertainment industry.
Richard had senior executive positions at several Forture 500 firms and was CEO of two medical management companies before forming HKS. He also served as a senior consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. State Dept/USAID, and government and private entities in over 20 foreign countries. Areas of expertise included health policy, healthcare investment, operations, marketing, and strategic planning.
