David P. Anderson

Dr. David Anderson received a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1985. He taught in the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley ; worked at several startup companies; and then returned to Berkeley as a research scientist. His work focuses on “citizen cyber-science”—using the Internet to involve the global public in scientific research.

Anderson leads the BOINC project, which develops widely used middleware for volunteer computing, and he is also involved in creating new technology for distributed thinking and Web-based education.

Linda Avey

Linda Avey has more than 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry in San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Before starting 23andMe, she developed translational research collaborations with academic and pharmaceutical partners for Affymetrix and Perlegen Sciences. She also spent time at Spotfire, where she helped scientists understand the power of data visualization, and worked at Applied Biosystems during the early days of the Human Genome Project. The formation of 23andMe grew out of Avey's realization that insufficient funding for adequate studies was limiting the potential of high-density genome-wide scanning technologies. Her primary interest is the acceleration of personalized medicine, using genetic profiles to target the right drug to the right person at the correct dose.

Avey graduated from Augustana College with a BA in biology.

Gina Bianchini

Gina Bianchini is the cofounder and CEO of Ning, a social-networking service with a twist: it empowers people to create their own social websites and social networks. Previously, she was cofounder and president of Harmonic Communications, which was acquired by Dentsu. She has also held positions at CKS Group and Goldman Sachs.

Bianchini holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford Business School.

Eric Bonabeau

Eric Bonabeau is the CEO of Icosystem, a technology and services firm based in Cambridge, MA, that focuses on predictive analytics for marketing, decision support, and discovery. Before founding Icosystem in 2000, Bonabeau was an R&D engineer with France Telecom (1990–1996), the Interval Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (1996–1999), and the CEO of consulting firm Eurobios (1999–2000). The author of two books (Swarm Intelligence, Oxford University Press; Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Princeton University Press) and numerous articles, he received engineering degrees from École Polytechnique and Telecom Paris and a PhD in theoretical physics from Paris-Orsay University.

Candida G. Brush

Candida G. Brush holds the Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurship at Babson College and is a visiting adjunct professor at the Norwegian School of Engineering and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She is also a founding member of the Diana Project International and received the 2007 FSF NUTEK Award for outstanding contributions to entrepreneurship research. Her research investigates women's growth businesses and resource acquisition strategies in emerging ventures. She is the author of 100 publications, serves on the board of several emerging ventures, and is an editor for Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.

George Church

George Church helped develop the first direct genomic sequencing method in the course of research for his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology with Walter Gilbert at Harvard University in 1984. As a research scientist at Biogen and a Monsanto Life Sciences Research Fellow at UCSF, he helped initiate the Human Genome Project the same year.

Church invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing and software to Genome Therapeutics resulted in the first commercial genome sequence (of the human pathogen H. pylori) in 1994. His current research focuses on integrating biosystems modeling with personal genomics and synthetic biology.

Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande

Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, a market leader in intelligent optical networking. Prior to Sycamore, Dr. Deshpande was founder and chairman of Cascade Communications, a data networking company that was sold for $3.7 billion in June 1997. Deshpande serves as a member of the MIT Corporation, and his generous donations have made possible MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Dr. Deshpande also currently serves on the board of directors of Airvana, Inc., A123 Systems, and Tejas Networks. Dr. Deshpande holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Ph.D. in Data Communications from Queens University in Canada.

Dan Farber

Dan Farber has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. Before coming to CNET News, part of CNET Networks, he was editor in chief of ZDNet, where led the development of its worldwide network of technology-focused sites. Farber also served as vice president and editor-in-chief at Ziff-Davis's flagship computing news publications, PC Week and MacWeek, and was a founding editor at MacWorld. He is based in San Francisco.

Susan Foley

Susan Foley is responsible for the Working Knowledge, Process Management, and Innovation Research Centers at Babson Executive Education. The Research Centers are a sponsor-driven group of organizations interested in advancing their knowledge and the application of “best practices.” Foley is also the founder of Corporate Entrepreneurs, a firm that helps organizations build new growth businesses. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Entrepreneurs Inside: Accelerating Business Growth with Corporate Entrepreneurs, which is based on research conducted with a group of experienced corporate entrepreneurs across a diverse set of industries. She has held senior positions at Standard and Poor’s, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment, DMR Group (now Fujitsu), and Arthur D. Little.

John D. Halamka

As chief information officer at CareGroup, John Halamka is responsible for all clinical, financial, administrative, and academic information technology serving 3,000 doctors, 14,000 employees, and two million patients. As chief information officer and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School, he oversees all educational, research, and administrative computing for 18,000 faculty members and 3,000 students. As chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), he oversees the administrative data exchange in Massachusetts. As CEO of MA-SHARE, he oversees the state's clinical data exchange efforts. As chair of the U.S. Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), he coordinates the process of electronic standards harmonization among stakeholders nationwide.

Parker Harris

Parker Harris founded Salesforce.com with Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez in the spring of 1999. As executive vice president, Harris oversees the development of all software for the company.

Previously, Harris developed his expertise in Web applications and sales force automation at Left Coast Software, a private consulting company he cofounded, and at Metropolis Software, an early pioneer in field sales force automation subsequently acquired by Clarify.

Harris has more than 12 years of experience in software engineering and management. He graduated from Middlebury College with a bachelor's degree in English literature.

Eric Horvitz

Eric Horvitz leads Microsoft teams doing R&D in machine learning and decision making, search, human-computer interaction, e-commerce, computational theory, and cryptography. He is president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and an associate editor of the Journal of the ACM, and he has served on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group (ISAT), the Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC), and the CMU Machine Learning Advisory Board. He received his PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University.

Kristina Isakovich

Kristina Isakovich is responsible for strengthening the leadership position of Philips Healthcare by developing, driving, and executing successful commercialization, branding, and go-to-market strategies for this $11 billion global leader in diagnostic imaging systems, health-care information technology solutions, patient-monitoring and cardiac devices, and home health-care solutions. She is leading the transition from a product- and technology-driven organization to a more market-driven organization.   

Previously, Isakovich was the VP of marketing at Fisher Scientific International, VP for corporate strategy at Thermo Electron, and a senior engagement manager at McKinsey. She received her PhD in nuclear physics from MIT and a BS in physics and math from Yale University.

Priya Iyer

Priya Iyer joined Anaqua as COO in 2005 and was promoted to president in 2007. She has more than 17 years of experience in the software industry; before coming to Anaqua, she was head of operations at Steelpoint Technologies, where she drove the company from the red to profitable quarter-after-quarter growth, and managing partner at Agency.com, where she founded a financial-services practice that grew to $150 million in less than five years. She has also held senior positions at Bell Labs and Foxboro Systems.

Iyer holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She serves on several boards and executive panels and is a regular guest speaker at Sloan.

Sanjay K. Jha

Sanjay Jha is chief operating officer of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), the world’s top wireless chipset provider and largest fabless semiconductor producer.

Jha began his career at Qualcomm in 1994; in 2002, he led the formation of Qualcomm Technologies and Ventures, where he managed both the technology investment portfolio and the new technology group as senior vice president and general manager. He became executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of QCT in 2003 and was promoted to chief operating officer of Qualcomm in 2006. He is also a member of the Qualcomm Ventures advisory committee.

Before joining Qualcomm, Jha held lead design engineering roles with Brooktree in San Diego and GEC Hirst Research Labs in London. He has also served as chairman of the more than 450-member Fabless Semiconductor Association, the voice of the fabless business model. He holds a PhD in electronic and electrical engineering from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, and received his bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Liverpool, England.

Zoë Keating

Avant cellist Zoë Keating is like a one-woman string orchestra. Using her cello, a computer and a foot pedal, she records layer upon layer of cello, manipulating the live arrangement with her feet. The result is a dramatic, emotional, sweeping epic of sound and has been featured on NPR, PBS and the BBC. Her self-produced album, recorded onto a laptop in her warehouse studio, made it to #2 in the iTunes charts.  

Zoë was a longtime member of the infamous cello-rock group Rasputina. She has recorded and performed with countless artists, including DJ Shadow, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls and Imogen Heap.

James Kim

Jim Kim joined CMEA Ventures in 2007 as a partner. Previously, he was a vice president at GE Commercial Finance, where he led technology venture investments in clean tech, advanced materials, and digital media. Kim helped found the Energy Technology Ventures group at GE Energy Financial Services, where he also worked on domestic and foreign structured finance opportunities in renewable energy. Earlier in his career, he was an analyst with GCI Partners in Boston, an early-stage IT venture capital consulting firm.

Kim holds a BS from MIT in computer science and electrical engineering, another in political science, and an MBA and master's in quantitative methods from Columbia University. He continues to work as a research assistant on projects with Columbia Medical Center and the Earth Institute.

Steven E. Koonin

Steven E. Koonin is the chief scientist of BP, the world's second-largest independent oil company. Koonin is responsible for BP's long-range technology plans and activities, particularly those “beyond petroleum.” He also has purview over BP's major university research programs around the world and provides technical advice to the company's senior executives. In 1975, he joined the faculty of Caltech, where he became a full professor in 1981 and served as provost from 1995 to 2004.

He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. His research interests have included theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics; nuclear astrophysics; and global environmental science. Koonin received his BS in physics at Caltech and his PhD in theoretical physics from MIT.

Dawna S. Levenson

Within MIT’s Professional Education Programs (PEP), Dawna S. Levenson manages the Advanced Study Program (ASP), the Midcareer Acceleration Program (MAP), and a custom program with Accenture. Levenson, who earned a bachelor of science from MIT in 1983 and a master of science in management science in 1984, previously spent 18 years at Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, in its gas and electric utilities practice.

Charles E. Leiserson

Charles E. Leiserson is a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT. His contributions include systolic architectures, the fat-tree interconnection network, the Cilk multithreaded programming language, and cache-oblivious algorithms. Introduction to Algorithms, the textbook he coauthored, is the most cited reference in computer science, according to CiteSeerX. He was network architect for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 supercomputer and led the engineering team that developed a worldwide content-distribution network at Akamai Technologies. He is also founder of Cilk Arts, which provides software to make it easy to program multicore computers.

Susan Lindquist

Susan Lindquist, an expert in the biology of protein folding, is a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute, an MIT biology professor, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She received her PhD from Harvard University and was a professor of molecular biology at the University of Chicago from 1977 to 2001. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and to the Institute of Medicine in 2006. She was named one of Scientific American 's top 50 research, business, and policy leaders for 2006, received the 2007 Nevada Medal for Scientific Achievement, and was named one of the “Harvard 100: Most Influential Alumni” for 2007 by 02138 magazine.

Benjamin Ling

Benjamin Ling oversees product marketing, developer operations, and partner solutions for Facebook Platform. Before joining Facebook, he was general manager of e-commerce at Google, where he founded and led Google Checkout and oversaw Google Product Search. At Google, he managed a cross-functional team that included representatives from product management, engineering, sales, marketing, operations, finance, and legal.

Ling holds a PhD and master's degree in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Kevin Lynch

As chief technology officer and senior vice president, Experience & Technology Group, Kevin Lynch oversees Adobe's experience design and core technology across business units.  This role includes driving Adobe's technology platform for designers and developers, including Adobe® Flash® Player, Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe Flex® and Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the web.  He also oversees Adobe's developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Rich Miner

Rich Miner has been developing innovative communications and interface-intensive applications for more than 20 years.  He is currently group manager of mobile platforms for Google, helping to build the Android platform. He has been with Google since the company acquired Android, a mobile software platforms company he cofounded. 

Previously, Miner was vice president of advanced services at Orange. He came to Orange through the acquisition of another company he cofounded, Wildfire, which made a voice-based personal assistant product that was sold to fixed and wireless carriers. He held various positions at Wildfire, including CTO and MD for Europe. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Craig Mundie

Craig Mundie is a 15-year veteran of Microsoft Corporation, currently serving as Chief Research and Strategy Officer. He is one of two senior Microsoft executives chosen to take over the company's technical leadership when Gates retires from his day-to-day role in July 2008.

Craig's primary focus is on charting Microsoft's 3-10 year horizon—the long-cycle research, innovation and business incubations that will impact the future of technology. He frequently meets with global leaders in government, industry and academia to help shape how computing can positively impact fields such as healthcare, scientific research and education.

Craig's early career contributions at Microsoft included driving the development of non-PC platforms such as the Windows CE operating system; software for the handheld, Pocket and Auto PCs; and early console-gaming products.  He championed the Trustworthy Computing initiative, which has significantly improved security of Microsoft's products.  Before joining Microsoft, Craig was one of three co-founders of Alliant Computer Systems, which developed vector-parallel mini-supercomputers.

David Recordon

David Recordon has played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing key social-media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, he collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in developing OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the Web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that's been endorsed by everyone from open-source hackers to major companies around the world. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O'Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID; he is the youngest recipient in the history of the award.

Dan Reed

Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategist, Microsoft

As Microsoft’s Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategist, Dan Reed is responsible for re-envisioning the data center of the future. Reed is a member of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. He is chair of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association and has also been director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In addition, he was a principal investigator and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid. He received his PhD in computer science from Purdue University in 1983.

Atefeh (Atti) Riazi

The CIO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Atefeh (Atti) Riazi oversees the systems and network supporting one of the world's leading marketing communications agencies. Under her leadership, Ogilvy has consistently been cited by Information Week as possessing one of the most innovative IT functions nationwide. Ogilvy and Mather's client list includes a roster of blue chip brands that include; American Express, BP, DuPont, Ford, SAP, Cisco, IBM, Kodak, Kraft, Motorola and many others.

Atti has over 25 years of experience managing large organizations, private and public, in the manufacturing, engineering, transportation, and advertising sectors. Most recently, as the CIO of MTA New York City Transit, she implemented its $1.5B MetroCard automatic fare system.

A frequent author and speaker, Atti serves on the Board of major financial and marketing organizations.

Mendel Rosenblum

Mendel Rosenblum cofounded VMware with four others in 1998. There, he helped design and build the industry-leading virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms; he is now the chief scientist for VMware and also an associate professor in the departments of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, where he is director of the Computer Systems Laboratory and leads a group focused on operating-systems research. Rosenblum is a recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for creativity and innovation in operating systems research. He received a BA in math from the University of Virginia and a MS and PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Scoble

Active in online communities since the 1980s, Robert Scoble now runs FastCompany.TV, a new online video network aimed at bringing the best technology and business innovators and ideas to you while building new kinds of social networks using Twitter, FriendFeed, Upcoming.org, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Seesmic, Qik, and other technologies. He's worked for big companies—NEC and Microsoft—as well as small startups. Along with Shel Israel , he wrote a book about corporate blogging, Naked Conversations.

Joseph Smarr

Joseph Smarr leads Plaxo's “Open Social Web” initiative, which uses open data-sharing standards to put users back in control of who they know when using socially enabled sites. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built Web applications, including Plaxo's online address book and Web widgets, for many years. He was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool.

Smarr has a BS and MS in artificial intelligence from Stanford University.

Marc Snir

Professor Marc Snir is director of the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is PI for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and codirector of the Intel- and Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). Previously, he spent 15 years at IBM Research, where he led the research on scalable parallel software. He has written more than 100 papers on theoretical and applied aspects of parallel computing. He is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow.

Snir received a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979.

Lisa T. Su

At Freescale Semiconductor, the global leader in embedded processing solutions, Lisa Su is responsible for technology roadmap and global R&D operations. She joined Freescale in June 2007 from IBM, where she was vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center and was responsible for the strategic direction of silicon technologies, joint development alliances, and semiconductor R&D operations.

Su received bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sophie V. Vandebroek

Dr. Sophie Vandebroek is responsible for overseeing Xerox’s research and technology centers around the world.

Previously Xerox’s chief engineer and vice president of the Xerox Engineering Center, she has also served as chief technology officer at Carrier. From 1991 to 2000,she held a number of increasingly responsible roles at Xerox, including director of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada.

Vandebroek was born in Leuven, Belgium. She earned a master’s degree in electromechanical engineering from Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven and a PhD in electrical engineering from Cornell University. She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Werner Vogels

Dr. Werner Vogels is vice president and chief technology officer at Amazon.com, where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision: to continuously enhance innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale.

Before joining Amazon, he worked as a scientist at Cornell University, where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions as VP of technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Eric von Hippel

Eric von Hippel, the T. Wilson Professor of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, is known for his research into open and distributed innovation. He finds that product development is rapidly shifting away from product manufacturers to product “lead users” in the Internet age. The rapid growth of user-centered innovation requires major changes in company business models and government policymaking. Von Hippel’s 2005 book Democratizing Innovation explains user-centered innovation and describes how companies can adapt and profit. This book is available free on the Web at mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm.