Speakers

Itamar Arel
Associate professor, University of Tennessee Is Deep-Layered Machine Learning the Catalyst for an Artificial General Intelligence Revolution?

Itamar Arel is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Tennessee...

Alex Backer
Ph.D. Founder and CEO, ab|inventio Why We Age, How Aging is Good For You, How to Live Two Years Longer Using Your Cell Phone & Beyond

A scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, Alex Backer represented his country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics. Alex holds a degree in Biology and Economics from MIT, and a M.S. and Ph.D...

Ronald Bailey
The Democratic Threat to Transhumanism

Ronald Bailey is the award-winning science correspondent for Reason magazine and Reason.com, where he writes a weekly science and technology column...

Bryan Bishop
Do-it-yourself Transhuman Tech

Bryan Bishop is an advocate and developer of do-it-yourself transhumanism and open source hardware. His primary focus is directing a "triple trick" transhumanist team focusing on accelerating trends like the technological singularity, do-it-yourself biology, and open source technologies...

Ed Boyden
Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab Controlling Brain Circuits with Light

Ed Boyden is the Benesse Career Development Professor at the MIT Media Lab, assistant professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group...

Darlene Cavalier
Science Cheerleader Citizen Scientists: Disrupting Science... In a Good Way!

Darlene Cavalier is the founder of Science Cheerleader.com, a blog that promotes the involvement of citizens in science and science-related policy. She is also the cofounder of ScienceForCitizens.net, a major multi-functional Web site that encourages and enables...

Wendy Diamond
The Future of Pets

Wendy Diamond is the leading Pet Lifestyle expert, Philanthropist, TV Personality and Endangered Animal and Rescue Advocate. She has been dubbed as "the Martha Stewart of the milk and bone dish" by The New Yorker and crowned as the "Canine Queen" by Forbes Magazine...

George Dvorsky
Board of Directors, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies When the Turing Test is not enough: Towards a functionalist determination of personhood and the advent of an authentic machine ethics

Canadian futurist, biopolitical activist and animal rights advocate, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of...

Alexandra Elbakyan
Brain-Computer Interfacing, Consciousness, and the Global Brain: Towards the Technological Enlightenment

Alexandra Elbakyan is a neurotechnology researcher and advocate, and a software developer...

Ben Goertzel
Vice Chairman, Humanity+ The Future History of Artificial General Intelligence: Cognitive Robotics and the Global Brain, 2010-2040

Dr. Ben Goertzel is CEO of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; leader of the open-source OpenCog AI software project; Vice Chairman of Humanity+...

Noah Goodman
MIT, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Reverse) Engineering Intelligence: Logic, Statistics, and Flexible Thought

Noah D. Goodman is a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

Tony Greenberg
Chairman, Ramprate Building a Services Market for the Transhuman Era

An idea generator turning perceptions and industries sideways since he was 17, Tony Greenberg is currently tearing down and rebuilding 2 markets: IT services and wine & spirits...

M.A. Greenstein
CEO, The George Greenstein Institute Sparking our Neural Humanity with Neurotech!

M. A. Greenstein, an internationally recognized commentator, researcher and coach on best and future practices for "opening the doors of perception". Based in L.A. with networked alliances throughout the AsiaPacific region, she founded The Greenstein Institute...

Christopher Harz
Boom! Making a Creative Revolution

Everyone is aware of the growth of entertainment videogames, a global market in excess of $50 billion. Relatively few people outside of the profession are aware of Serious Games, videogames used for non-entertainment purposes, including education and training...

Mark Hatch
CEO, TechShop Boom! Making a Creative Revolution

Mark Hatch is the CEO of TechShop, a focal point in the emerging Maker movement and one of the few physical embodiments of that movement. Like a trade school it teaches members how to use a broad range of high and low-end machinery to design, prototype and produce their ideas...

Kenneth J. Hayworth
Can we extract a mind from a plastic-embedded brain?

Kenneth Hayworth, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, is the inventor of several technologies for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale. He received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California...

Patrick Hopkins
Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College in Mississippi Why Uploading Will Not Work

Patrick D. Hopkins is a philosopher and ethicist who specializes in ethical theory and in applied ethical issues in science, medicine, and technology. He has a B.A. from the University of Mississippi in Experimental Psychology...

James Hughes
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies The Problems of Transhumanism are Problems of the Enlightenment

"Dr. J." Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the former Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association...

Hank Hyena
Global TransHumanism: An Analysis of the Top H+ Nations. Praising Their Achievements and Goals

Hank Hyena has written numerous articles for hplusmagazine, including "Eight Ways in-Vitro Meat Will Change Our Lives," "The Next Global SuperPower will be... Korea?" and "Israel's Value to TransHumanism....

Joseph P. Jackson III
Enlightenment 2.0: Unleashing the Open Science and Open Source Innovation Revolutions

Joseph P. Jackson III is a philosopher, entrepreneur, activist, and organizer in the Open Science Movement. His goal is to assist the emergence of a new political-economic paradigm that enables sustainable prosperity for all...

Kevin Jain
Transhumanism & Education

Kevin Jain is an undergraduate at Harvard University, and is Founder and President of the Harvard College Future Society, a student organization interested in evaluating the impact of future technologies on the human and humanity...

Morris Johnson
HACCP as a lifespan extension management system

Morris Johnson was born in Radville, Saskatchewan 21 Sept, 1955."Citizen scientist" and Chief Technology Officer of Lifespan Pharma Inc. Since 1973, Johnson made a career of farming, trucking, oilfield industry work and entrepreneurial business...

Heather Knight
CTO, Humanity+ Why Robots Need to Spend More Time in the Limelight: People Tracking and Artificial Personality

Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC, which creates socially intelligent robot performances, sensor design and electronic art...

Maria Konovalenko
Science for Life Extension Foundation Regenerative Medicine Roadmap: Guidelines for Science

Maria Konovalenko was appointed as the Program Coordinator of Science for Life Extension Foundation in 2008. After graduating from Molecular Biophysics Department of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology her main scientific interest lies in the field...

Andrea Kuszewski
Intellectual Enhancement: Maximizing Your Cognitive Potential

Andrea is a Behavior Therapist and Consultant for children on the autism spectrum in Boston, MA; her expertise is in Asperger’s Syndrome, or high-functioning autism. She teaches social skills, communication, and behavior intervention in home and community settings, training both children as well as parents...

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Director, Allosphere Research Laboratory Composing in N-Dimensions

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer, Professor of Media Arts and Technology and of Music, and a researcher in multi-modal media systems, content and facilities design. The culmination of Professor Kuchera-Morin’s research efforts is the one-of-a-kind...

John Lester
The Oasis of the Surreal: Synthetic Worlds

John Lester worked at Linden Lab from 2005 to 2010, where he was commonly know by his Second Life avatar name "Pathfinder Linden." At Linden Lab he focusing on cultivating the education market and helping it grow into the vibrant community it is today...

Amy Li
Board of the Directors, Humanity+ UX Rocks: How to be a Citizen Scientist and Convert Research Technology to Awesome Usable Products

Amy Li is a multidisciplinary creative director and designer, specializing in branding, creative marketing strategy, and user experience design for global brands like Yahoo, AT&T, VW, Sony etc. She is also board of directors of Humanity...

Jeff Lieberman
Time Warp, MIT Media Lab A New Kind of Citizen: Where We Haven't Looked

Thirty-year-old Jeff Lieberman is a musician wrapped in a roboticist sculptor wrapped in a photographer. The host of Discovery Channel's Time Warp may already have four degrees (two bachelors of science and two masters) behind him, but that hasn't stopped him...

Patrick Lin
Director, Ethics+ Emerging Sciences Group Military 2.0: Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement and Robotics

Patrick Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group , based at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Most recently, he has led research efforts that culminated in two major reports...

Seth Lloyd
Director, WM Keck Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory Professor, MIT The Democracy of Knowledge

Seth Lloyd received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard, his M.Phil. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University. After working as a postdoc at Caltech and Los Alamos, he joined the faculty at MIT...

Brian Malow
ScienceComedian.com Transhumorist or Like the Future, the Title of This Talk is "To Be Determined (By You)"

Brian Malow is Earth's Premier Science Comedian (self-proclaimed). He has fabricated a career of appearing in places not normally occupied by stand up comedians. When pressed for an explanation, he cites the Pauli exclusion principle and...

Timothy Marzullo
Backyard Brains: Neuroscience for Everyone!

Tim Marzullo received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2008 working with Daryl Kipke studying cortical neurophysiology for neuroprosthetics...

Pieter J. Mosterman
Computation of Things: Challenges and Solutions for the Needs of Humanity

Dr. Pieter J. Mosterman is a Senior Research Scientist in Real-Time and Modeling and Simulation Technologies, The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA (since 2001) and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada...

Ramez Naam
Humanity 2020: The Next 10 Years of Human Development

Computer scientist Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Human Enhancement, and winner of the 2005 H.G. Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism will give a guided tour of the 10 year horizons across the board of human enhancement...

David Pearce
The Fate of the Meat World

David is an independent researcher based in Brighton UK. In 1995, he wrote "The Hedonistic Imperative", a plea for the use of biotechnology to abolish suffering in all sentient life. In 1998, David and Nick Bostrom founded the World Transhumanist Association to promote the use of technology to overcome our biological limitations...

Arturo Pelayo
We are Ocean. Who will you be?

Arturo Pelayo's passion is to interconnect people and empower them to leverage their experiences and interactions through Instructional Design & Social Media. Arturo believes that design is an art of listening, observing and emergent thinking...

Eric Pulier
CEO, ServiceMesh

Eric Pulier is a serial entrepreneur, primarily in technology and media related ventures, and is known as one of the more successful and prolific technology entrepreneurs in Southern California. In 1997, the Presidential Inaugural Committee selected Mr. Pulier to create and execute the Presidential Technology Exhibition in Washington D.C...

Millie Ray
Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital Breakthrough Stem Cell Research

Millie (Mridula) is currently a 3rd year graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School. She is also an associate producer at an online media company, BioBusiness.tv...

Geordie Rose
D-Wave Research Inc. Special purpose superconducting quantum processors for disruptively accelerating machine learning

Dr. Geordie Rose is the founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and superconducting processors, and has been invited to speak on these topics in a wide range of venues...

Heather Schlegel
VP of Product Management, Debtmarket How WE create I: Post-Human Identity, Privacy and Self-Value

Heather Schlegel is a futurist, technologist, and cacophonist. For more than 12 years she has helped build innovative Internet products in Silicon Valley and has more than 50 product launches to her name...

Jessica Scorpio
Co-Founder, Gettaround Inc. Smart Transportation, A Human Revolution

Jessica co-founded Gettaround, a stealth startup applying mobile technology for sustainable transportation. Prior to launching Gettaround, she completed the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University...

Mikhail G. Shapiro
Third Rock Ventures Stepping Stones: Commercial Clinical Applications of Neurotechnology

Mikhail Shapiro is a neuroscientist, engineer and technology entrepreneur focused on building visionary companies. Dr. Shapiro has been at Third Rock Ventures, a leading life sciences venture capital fund...

Lauren Silbert
Princeton Neuroscience Institute Do we click? Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication

Currently a PhD candidate in Neuroscience from Princeton University, Silbert also has a Bachelors from University of Pennsylvania (Biology and Photography)...

John Smart
Co-Founder, Brain Preservation Foundation The Brain Preservation Prize: Why Inexpensively Preserving Our Brains After Death is a Good Thing for Ourselves and Society, And What You Can Do to Help

John M. Smart is an evolutionary developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on...

Michael Smolens
CEO, Founder, dotSUB Removing Language as a Barrier to Cross Cultural Communication Using the Crowd

Michael Smolens had for the first 32 years of his career set up manufacturing facilities doing business in and with high-risk countries including Haiti, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Jordan, Russia and Azerbaijan, creating in excess of 20,000 jobs and directly supporting the livelihood of more than 100,000 people...

Melanie Swan
Principal, MS Futures Group DIYgenomics Citizen Science

Melanie Swan is a genomics researcher, hedge fund manager, and leader in the Health 2.0 movement. Recent publications include “Multigenic Condition Risk Assessment in Direct-to-Consumer Genomic Services, “Engineering Life into Technology,” and “Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models"...

Alexei Turchin
Expert of global catastrophes of Russian Transhumanist Movement Risks of SETI-programs

Alexey Turchin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1973. Alexey studied Physics and Art History at Moscow State University and actively participated in the Russian Transhumanist Movement...

Alex Veytsel
Board Member Taste Corp.

Alex Veytsel is a creator and fine-tuner of markets to maximize innovation. Today his project at RampRate is designing and running a fair market for IT services where the right fit for the job is prized above brand, price, or positioning in a quadrant; where fresh ideas are rewarded...

Natasha Vita-More
Board Member, Humanity Plus Second-Order Enhancement Cybernetics: Brain, Body, Behavior & Design Ecology

Natasha Vita-More, PhD researcher and theorist, is a frequent guest speaker on topics concerning the future in the international arena. She is best known as designer of "Primo Posthuman". Her writings have been published in numerous books...

David Wood
Principal, Delta Wisdom Far Beyond Smartphones: Lessons From Disruptive Technology, Open collaboration, and Breakthrough Mobile products

David Wood spent ten years with PDA manufacturer Psion PLC, and then ten more with smartphone operating system specialist Symbian Ltd, where he was co-founder and executive vice president...

Justyna Zander
Harvard University Computation of Things: Challenges and Solutions for the Needs of Humanity

Dr. Justyna Zander is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Harvard University (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative) in Cambridge, MA, USA (since 2009) and Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin...