THINK EXPONENTIALLY

Salim is a sought after speaker, strategist and entrepreneur ' his last company, Angstro, was acquired by Google in August 2010. Salim spent two years as SU's founding Executive Director and currently serves as its Global Ambassador focusing on its global presence. Prior to that, Salim was a Vice President at Yahoo and the Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo's internal 'ideas factory' where game-changing ideas were brought in, built and launched. He also serves as co-founder and Chairman of Confabb.com , co-founded PubSub Concepts and is also on the board of Breakthrough, a global human rights organization focused on violence against women, racial justice, and immigrant rights. He Twitters his thoughts at @salimismail and blogs infrequently at www.salimismail.com

Raymond McCauley is a scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur working at the forefront of biotechnology,exploring how applying technology to life — biology, genetics, medicine, agriculture — is affecting every one of us. He is co-founder and chief architect for BioCurious (http://biocurious.org/), the hackerspace for biotech, and was part of the team that developed next generation DNA sequencing at Illumina, where he worked in bioinformatics, cancer sequencing, and personal genomics. Past employers are Genomera, Illumina, Ingenuity Systems, TANSTAAFL Media, QIAGEN, Viatel, NASA, and the other federal agencies. Raymond develops and advises a variety of companies and organizations, including Genomera, Vecoy Nanomedicines, Androcyte, and Nanokit. Raymond conducted post-graduate work at Texas A&M University, Stanford and UC Berkeley in electrical engineering, computer science,biophysics, biochemistry, bioinformatics, and nanotechnology.

A Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Stanford University Media X Program, Neil Jacobstein focuses his research on augmented decision systems. He chaired AAAI’s 17th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference and has served as a technical consultant on AI research and development projects for DARPA, NSF, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, the U.S. Army and Air Force, GM, Ford, Boeing, Applied Materials, NIST and others. He was CEO of Teknowledge Corporation and a graduate research intern in Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), as well as a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Jacobstein is a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences workshop and is the primary author of the Foresight Institute Guidelines for the responsible development of nanotechnology. He earned his B.S. degree in environmental sciences, summa cum laude, from the University of Wisconsin, and his M.S. degree in human ecology from the University of Texas.

Larry Keeley is a strategist who has worked for over three decades to develop more effective innovation methods. Larry is President and co-founder of Doblin Inc, an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems that materially improve innovation success rates and innovation return on investment. Doblin is now a unit of DeloitteConsulting LLP, where Keeley serves as a Managing Director. Bloomberg Businessweek named Keeley one of seven Innovation Gurus that are changing the field. Keeley teaches graduate innovation strategy classes at the Institute of Design in Chicago, lectures in executive education programs at Kellogg Graduate School of Management and also lectures at many other business schools worldwide. Keeley was a Senior Fellow of the Center for Business Innovation in Boston and also serves on the board of a number of insitutions and companies.

Joe Paradiso is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) Professor in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Responsive Environments group. He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1981 and a BSEE from Tufts University in 1977, and joined the Media Lab in 1994 after developing spacecraft control systems at Draper Lab and high-energy physics detectors at ETH Zurich. His current research explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. This encompasses wireless sensing systems, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous/pervasive computing and the Internet of Things, human-computer interfaces, and interactive music/media. He has published 300 articles and lectures internationally in these areas.

Bill’s 18+ years with Deloitte have been spent delivering complex transformation programs for clients in a variety of industries—including Financial Services, Healthcare, Consumer Products, Telecommunications, Energy, and Public Sector. Bill is a strategist with deep implementation experience—helping clients anticipate the impact that new and emerging technologies may have on their business in the future, and getting there from the realities of today.
In his role as CTO, Bill is responsible for research, eminence, and innovation—helping to define and execute the vision for Deloitte Consulting LLP’s technology practice, identifying and communicating those technology trends affecting clients’ businesses, and driving the strategy for Deloitte Consulting LLP’s evolving technology services and offerings.

Dr. Chander is a physician and neuroscientist who trained at Harvard, UCSD, UCSF, and the Salk Institute. She has been on the Anesthesiology Faculty at Stanford University since 2008 and Medicine & Neuroscience Faculty at Singularity University since 2010. Her postdoctoral training in optogenetic technology was conducted in the laboratories of Karl Deisseroth and Luis de Lecea at Stanford, where she used light-activated ion channels inserted in DNA to study sleep and consciousness switches in brains. In the operating room, she applies EEG technology to understand what human brains look like when they lose and regain consciousness, and has recently developed a personalized medicine initiative aimed at understanding genetic variability in responses to anesthetic drugs. She is currently working on applications of neural wearable devices to crossover consumer and medical markets.

Aaron is a curious generalist - civil servant by profession; poet by calling; educator and diversity facilitator by choice; all by passion. As the first Head of the government's Centre for Strategic Futures (2010-2011), he came to believe deeply in the value of strategic planning and anticipation, and sees inculcating long-term thinking as the most important thing he can do both in and outside work.

Nicholas Haan has worked at the intersection of science, technology, social challenges, and innovation for the last 25 years. His issues of focus have included disaster relief, food security, environment, energy, public health, education, genetics, and information systems. And his affiliations have included the United Nations, governments, universities, donor agencies and non-governmental organizations. Nick is currently Director of Global Grand Challenges and Team Project Leader at Singularity University. He is the creator of an international standard for classifying the severity of food insecurity and disasters called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Nick is also involved with several Startups, including as strategic advisor to a mobile app company called eMobilis. He has a keen interest in the crowdsourcing movement and is on the regional board of directors for crowdfunder.com

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, futurist, and award-winning author. Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Ramez is also the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (non-fiction).

George is an entrepreneur and investor turned educator. He co-founded the Stanford d.school, leading it for over a decade. Passionate about nurturing the creative potential of others, George spends his time working with students, teachers, and leaders around the world to unlock the latent innovative capacity of their teams and organizations. Under George’s leadership, the d.school grew from a few projects and students to hundreds of projects, thousands of students, and a cutting edge 30,000 sq.ft. facility at the center of campus. George prioritizes learning over expertise, experimentation over planning, and collaboration over individual excellence.

Sanjay Swamy is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Prime (previously AngelPrime), a seed-stage VC firm based out of Bangalore. He leads by helping shape companies that have a specific focus on mobile applications, banking, financial services and mobile payments, with a firm philosophy of partnering with banks and financial institutions. Sanjay played a key role in the Aadhaar (Unique ID) project, where he worked on the authentication platform and its relationship to Payments, Banking, Insurance & Telecommunication services. He has also worked for 11 years in Silicon Valley in various customer facing and marketing roles.

Lalitesh is a pioneer in crowdsourcing. His creation, Google Map Maker, tripled the world's digital maps corpus, mapping 3 billion people in 187 countries. His startup was Google’s first acquisition in 2002. He brought Google to India, co-founding its first international engineering center and subsequently retired Head of India products to build products for the underserved. Lalitesh has since architected India’s Open API, AP’s Fiber Grid and founded Indihood, Swaja Labs. He founded CMU’s Lunar Rover project in 1993. Lalitesh received a PhD and MS from CMU in Robotics and Computer Science, MS from Design Division, Stanford, MS in Aerospace, Iowa State and B-Tech from IIT-Bombay.

Lakshmi Pratury is an entrepreneur, curator, interviewer, and speaker. She is CEO of INK, India’s foremost platform for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas and inspiring stories. She co-hosted TEDIndia in 2009 and has spoken at conferences such as TED, DLD, WIRED and C2MTL. Prior to this, Lakshmi spent two decades in leading roles in the technology, venture capital, and non-profit industries in the U.S. She addresses large corporates and organizations, where she instils her insights on exponential technologies to reshape the future. She also curates keynote sessions and Salon style events to leadership groups across the world. Lakshmi is the director of the SU India Summit and is also an alumnus of SU.

Brock is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with an extensive track record of founding, advising, and investing in disruptive businesses. His level of domain knowledge in gaming, blockchain technology and the digital currency space are unparalleled. He pioneered the market for digital currency in games and has raised more than $200 million for companies he founded. Brock is the founder of IMI Exchange, ZAM and IGE. He is a sought-after speaker who has spoken at the Milken Global Conference, Wired, INK, Stanford, USC, and UCLA.

Matthieu is one of the foremost technical blockchain experts, having architected and implemented most of BlockCypher’s blockchain platform. BlockCypher’s web services enable blockchain applications to be built easily and reliably. He has been the architect of many software systems at MommaZoo, C3, Intalio, BEA, Reef, BNP, and Societe Generale. Matthieu is a member and former VP of the Apache Software Foundation and has founded and mentored many different open source projects, from distributed databases to build tools. He holds a BS and MS in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Ecole des Mines d'Ales.