The current list of speakers for this session, subject to change, is:
Max More: How to Optimize Disorder in Today’s Organizations and Tomorrow’s Corporate Selves
Max More co-founded the original transhumanist magazine, Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought in 1988, and Extropy Institute in the early 1990s; organized five Extro conferences—the first explicitly transhumanist conferences; founded the English cryonics organization Alcor-UK (originally Mizar); wrote seminal transhumanist essays, including “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy” (1990), “The Principles of Extropy”, “A Letter to Mother Nature: Amendments to the Human Constitution” (1999), “Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy” (1993), “Dynamic Optimism: An Extropian Cognitive-Emotional Virtue” (1992), and more recent papers such as “True Transhumanism” (2009); spoke at dozens of conferences (including several WTA/H+ and Singularity Summit events), and spread transhumanist ideas through numerous newspaper, magazine, and TV interviews.
Michael Vassar: Networks, Hierarchies and the Vingean Singularity
Michael Vassar is the President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and provides overall leadership of the SIAI as it develops its research capabilities and its role as a forum for discussion of the challenges and potential of artificial general intelligence. He is also responsible for the organization of the Singularity Summit. Previously, he was a Founder and Chief Strategist at SirGroovy.com, an online music licensing firm. Prior to that, he held positions with Aon, the Peace Corps, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Patri Friedman: Lifehacking for Rationalists- Old Ideas + New Technology
Patri Friedman is an activist and theorist of political economy, former software engineer, and poker player. He advocates rapid, incremental progress towards increasing human freedom by creating new countries that can experiment with alternative social structures. His preferred method is seasteading, to construct and inhabit floating communities on the open sea. Friedman is Executive Director of the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 with a half-million-dollar investment by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The Institute’s mission is “to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems”.
Ryan Bethencourt: The Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry
Ryan Bethencourt works in the biotech/pharma industry and is the editor of BamH1 and continues to look forward to being a part of the innovation which is driving our industry forward. His background is in biology, genetics and business. He has worked with and founded several start ups in the biotech/tech space and tries his best to follow the Pareto principle.
Tom Munnecke: Accelerating Resilience
After 30 years in the large scale health care information systems field, Tom retired as a VP and Chief Scientist at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in San Diego. He then started GivingSpace, and was accepted as a fellow at the Stanford Digital Visions Program, where he has been developing approaches to humanitarian uplift, webs of trust, and searching for scalable small things which can trigger a “cascade of uplift” through a combination of physical and social networks.
Alex Backer: The Growth, Memory and Democratization of Science
A scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, Alex Backer is founder and CEO of ab|inventio, the invention factory, honored as Most Innovative Company of the Year in North America- Distinguished Honoree by the 2010 International Business Awards, alongside Salesforce.com and a handful of others.
ab|inventio is behind QLess™, an award-winning technology that has saved more than 800,000 users from more than 18 straight years standing in line at DMVs, restaurants, retail stores for Fortune 100 companies, shopping malls, doctors’ offices, colleges and other locations. QLess was named the Best Overall Business Services Company of the Year Under 100 Employees by the American Business Awards in 2010, Best Business Innovation Finalist at the 2009 American Business Awards, one of the ten most promising new technology companies by the inaugural Vator awards, and a finalist in the inaugural PSS Innovation Awards.
In 2010, Alex was honored as one of “40 under 40″ at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel –the location of the first Oscar Academy Awards– for the inaugural 40 Under 40 M&A Advisor Recognition Awards. The Gala Event celebrated the leading forty M&A, Financing and Turnaround professionals who have made great accomplishments before their fortieth year, chosen from international nominees by an independent judging panel of business leaders.
Alex is also the founder of Adapt Technologies™, a pioneer of search engine marketing technology, Whozat™, The People Search Engine™, named one of the 100 hottest start-ups in the world by TechCrunch, a semantic search engine with machine vision, and Social Diligence™, which offers the first resume- or file-based search engine, capable of scouring the web for information related to any document. Alex was appointed by the President to serve in the California Institute of Technology’s Information Sciences and Technology Board of Advisors.
Alex represented his country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics, and holds a degree in Biology and Economics from MIT, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems and Biology from the California Institute of Technology He has held positions at McKinsey & Co., the Department of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Computing at the Center for Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics of Sandia National Labs, and the Biology Division of Caltech.
Alex has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences on science and technology topics around the world. Alex’s work has been featured in Nature, Neural Computation, ACM SAC Artificial Intelligence, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, CNET, Mashable, TechCrunch and many other leading publications.
Bryan Bishop: Personal Manufacturing and the Gada Prize
Bryan Bishop works on projects in do-it-yourself transhumanism and open source hardware out of Austin, Texas. He recently became a Director of Research & Development at Humanity+.
John Hagel: Harnessing Increasing Technological Progress in Business Performance
John Hagel currently serves as co-chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, which conducts original research on emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s management agenda but should be.
Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer. Prior to that, he held significant positions at leading consulting firms and companies. From 1984 to 2000, he was a principal at McKinsey & Co., where he was a leader of the Strategy Practice. In addition, he founded and led McKinsey’s Electronic Commerce Practice from 1993 to 2000. John has also served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and earlier in his career, worked at Boston Consulting Group. He is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups.
John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books and summarizing recent research pursued at the Center for the Edge, making the case that we are struggling as individuals and institutions to adapt to a long-term shift in our business environment that changes the nature of competition. He is also the author of a series of earlier best-selling business books, beginning with Net Gain, published in 1997, and including Net Worth, Out of the Box and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications like The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week.
Gino Yu: Re-Imagining Humans – Using video games to cultivate mind body awareness and natural intelligence
Dr. Gino Yu has taught and established multimedia programs and initiatives at institutions including the University of Southern California, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development in the School of Design at PolyU where he develops meaningful game projects at M-Lab, a commercially oriented digital entertainment laboratory he co-founded that provides consulting, research, instruction and develops new commercial opportunities. He also founded the Asia Consciousness Festival and hosted the 2009 edition of the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference. His main area of research focuses on the application of media technologies to cultivate creativity and promote enlightened consciousness. Dr. Gino Yu received his BS and PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and 1993 respectively and has over 60 conference and journal publications.