Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up that uses, promotes and helps develop the open source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work. Solid technically is a new level of standard at the web layer, which adds features never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.

Source: W3 Consortium

Clement (Clem) Bezold, Ph.D., co-founded the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) in 1977 with Alvin Toffler and James Dator to encourage “anticipatory democracy” and foresight. During his four decades of leadership at IAF, he worked for international organizations and national governments, the largest corporations and non-profit
organizations, and communities on six continents.

In the process IAF developed the unique “Aspirational Futures” approach to foresight that stresses vision development and scenarios that explore expectable, challenging, and visionary space.

Source: Website

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he contributes to global policy development and continued standardization and spread of the Internet. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

From 1994 to 2005, Cerf served as the senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Source: Internet Hall of Fame

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a business executive, advisor, and best-selling author. He is best known for his work on platform economics and network effects. He is the co-author of the international best-selling book Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You.

Choudary’s work on platform economics has been featured on four occasions among Harvard Business Review’s top 10 management ideas. It is ranked among HBR’s top 10 strategy publications, alongside the works of Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, A.G. Lafley, and others.

For his contributions to the field of platform economics, Choudary was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2017.

Source: Wikipedia

James Allen Dator is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, and Adjunct Professor in the College of Architecture, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa; Co-Chair and Core Lecturer, Space Humanities, International Space University, Strasbourg, France; Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of Futures Strategy, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Daejeon, Korea, and former President, World Futures Studies Federation.  He is editor-in-chief of the World Futures Review. He also taught at Rikkyo University (Tokyo, for six years), the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the InterUniversity Consortium for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.

He received a BA in Ancient and Medieval History and Philosophy from Stetson University, an MA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Political Science from The American University. He did post-graduate work at Virginia Theological Seminary (Ethics and Church History), Yale University (Japanese Language), The University of Michigan (Linguistics and Quantitative Methods), Southern Methodist University (Mathematical Applications in Political Science).

Peter H. Diamandis (/ˌdiːəˈmændɪs/ DEE-ə-MAN-diss; born May 20, 1961) is an American engineer, physician,and entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, and the cofounder and executive chairman of Singularity University.

He is also cofounder and former CEO of the Zero Gravity Corporation, cofounder and vice chairman of Space Adventures Ltd., founder and chairman of the Rocket Racing League, cofounder of the International Space University, cofounder of Planetary Resources, cofounder of Celularity, founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and vice chairman and cofounder of Human Longevity, Inc.

Source: Wikipedia

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.

Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson’s career now focuses on health and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Source: Wikipedia

Jerome C. Glenn co-founded and directs The Millennium Project, a leading global participatory think tank supported by international organizations, governments, corporations, and NGOs, which produces the internationally recognized State of the Future annual reports for the past 16 years.

Jerome Glenn invented the “Futures Wheel”, a futures assessment technique; Futuristic Curriculum Development, and concepts such as conscious-technology, transinstitutions, tele-nations, management by understanding, feminine brain drain, just-in-time knowledge, feelysis, nodes as a management concept for interconnecting global and local views and actions, and definitions of environmental security, Collective Intelligence, and scenarios.

Bill’s Vision

As an aerospace engineer on Apollo, an Air Force officer, a Silicon Valley manager, professor of technology & innovation, and founder of TechCast, I have always been fascinated with the revolutionary power of technology driving us into a high-tech global order. My work is devoted to helping us figure out where this profound transition is heading, what it all means, and how we can get there.

Source: William Halal and Associates Website

“People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity” is Gerd’s motto, and helping to design The Good Future is his key objective. Gerd is one of the top-rated contemporary futurists worldwide.

He’s presented at over 2000 leading conferences and events over the past 20 years, working with Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, NBC, Visa, Google, the European Commission, L’Oréal, Audi, Deloitte, and IBM. Gerd has influenced and inspired millions to “Imagine and create a better tomorrow”. Wired magazine named him one of the most influential Europeans, and he is listed as #7 in the global ranking of futurists.

Dr. Colin W. P. Lewis, Ph.D. is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, although he prefers to call it Machine Intelligence (MI). Most of his work focuses on understanding human intelligence and creating solutions for artificial intelligence that benefits humanity.

He is also an Adjunct Professor and international business and policy advisor, specialized in the social and economic impact of technological change. With specific knowledge of the evolving conditions of technology for productivity growth, development, labor, (in)equality, and competitiveness

Source: Techerati

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

Source: Website

Paul is a forecaster with over three decades experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. He teaches forecasting at Stanford University and advises organizations worldwide. Paul is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Paul serves on a variety of not-for-profit boards including the Long Now Foundation, and the Millennium Project.

Paul’s essays have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Foreign Policy, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford University.

Source: Website

Max Erik Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher and author.

He is best known for his book Life 3.0 about what the world might look like as artificial intelligence continues to improve. Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute.

Paul Werbos is best known (and most cited) for the original discovery of backpropagation, and for the theorem establishing its validity, as part of his PhD thesis in Applied Mathematics for Harvard in 1974. Even before 1974, he had developed backpropagation as one element of a more general approach to reinforcement learning, which combined a new way to learn to approximate dynamic programming with key insights from Freud’s theory of how learning works in neurons of the brain.

He inaugurated the field which we now know of as RLADP, Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, building on this earlier work, his later papers, and on the research area of Adaptive and Intelligent Systems at NSF which he led from 1988 to 2015. This included neural networks, adaptive fuzzy logic, and a major paradigm shift in how to understand intelligence in the brain, which has passed tests on the best real-time brain data (Werbos and Davis 2016).

Source: Regulating AI