Stephen Abram, MLS is CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Inc. He is the past executive diretcor of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries. He has been an executive with Gale Cengage Learning, SirsiDynix, the SirsiDynix Institute, ProQuest, Micromedia, IHS, and Thomson.

He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association, SLA and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award. He received the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009 and Outstanding Teacher Award from the U of Toronto iSchool in 2010. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.

Source: Internet Librarian

Dr Greg Adamson is a global expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence, he researches eXplainable AI, and is an authority on Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics. As a health informatics specialist he is an honorary Associate Professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. His day job at the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning is Chief Information Security Officer, a field he has worked in for more than three decades. His PhD from RMIT University was on Internet adoption.

He has a Master of Commercial Law from Melbourne Law School, and was an early pioneer in blockchain. He chairs the IEEE Standards Association initiative Dignity, Inclusion, Identity, Trust and Agency. His current projects include a committee on power relations and AI, health informatics, and writing a biography of Justice James Staples of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. He is the Technical Activities vice president of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.

Source: Find an Expert

Dr Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. (Previously, he served as Director of Research for the MIT Libraries, Head/Scientist for the Program on Information Science, Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; and at Harvard University as the Associate Director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center, Archival Director of the Henry A. Murray Archive, and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences.)

Dr. Altman conducts research, provides public commentary, and collaborates in initiatives related to how information technologies change politics, society, and science. He is the author of over one hundred scientific and scholarly articles – as well as a spectrum of books, opinion pieces, databases and software packages. His recently published research establishes requirements for reliable information anonymization and privacy; evaluates the alignment of artificial intelligence and trustworthy science; examines bias in scholarly communication and peer review; critiques the evidence-base for open science; and examines the role of public participation and institutional design in constraining redistricting.

Source: Website

Walid Al-Saqaf is a Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm where he specializes in the use of the Internet and media technology for journalism, access to information, freedom of expresssion and public good. As a dual Yemeni/Swedish citizen, his passion is in promoting a strong and open Internet that netizens can build bridges between cultures and promote democratization and free speech across the globe.

As a computer engineering undergraduate student in the mid 1990s at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, Walid designed YemenTimes.com as the first news website in his home country Yemen. In 2007, he launched YemenPortal.net as the first news aggregator and search engine of its kind in the Arab world to provide Internet users with the ability to get a wide spectrum of perspectives from various news sources on Yemen in Arabic and English. When the website was blocked by the Yemeni government in 2008 due to its open platform that allowed dissident voices to be heard, he developed Alkasir website censorship mapping circumvention solution, which was initially used to access YemenPortal.net, but which soon became widely used by Internet users in many states such as Iran, Syria, China and Saudi Arabia to bypass website filtering in those countries.

Source: Internet Society

Stephan Adelson is the president of Adelson Consulting Services. Based on his publications and presentations, he appears to be an expert in digital public health, particularly in the application of internet-based interventions for health promotion and disease prevention, including HIV and STDs.

He has also been involved in developing national guidelines and providing consultation to various health organizations.

Source: Gemini

Full member of the Club of Rome, President of the Copenhagen based think tank Nordic Bildung, and co-founder of the Global Bildung Network.

I am an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and bildung activist. After studying business economy for three years, I worked as a substitute teacher before I studied theology. During my studies, I wrote entertainment for Danish television until I decided to quit theology, become a fulltime writer and focus on technological development, big history and the future of humanity.

Since 2005, I have written 20 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians’ democracy prize (2012).

Among my books are The Nordic Secret (2017; new edition January 2024), Metamodernity (2019), relaunched 2023 as Polymodernity, Bildung (2020), What is Bildung? (2021), and Libertism (2022).

Source: Website

Professor Victoria Baines FBCS is a leading authority in the field of online trust, safety and cybersecurity. She frequently contributes to major broadcast media outlets on digital ethics, cybercrime and the misuse of emerging technologies, including Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Her areas of research include electronic surveillance, cybercrime futures, and the politics of security.

Victoria has published on cyberspace governance, online surveillance, the future of cybercrime, and the politics of security. Drawing on her Classical education, her book Rhetoric of Insecurity (Routledge, 2021) sheds light on 2000 years of security speak and is a toolkit for understanding why security issues always seem to be so novel, urgent and divisive. She also provides research expertise to a number of international organisations, including Interpol, UNICEF and the Council of Europe.

Source: Gresham webpage

Avi Bar-Zeev has been a pioneer, architect and advisor in Spatial Computing (AR/VR/MR/XR) for nearly 30 years, behind the scenes in the world’s largest tech companies and at large.

In early 2010, he helped found and invent the HoloLens at Microsoft, developing the first prototypes, demos, patents, plans and UX concepts, sufficient to convince his leadership. At Bing, he built first prototypes for developer-facing aspects of AR, sometimes called the “AR cloud.” At Amazon, he helped create PrimeAir as well as Echo Frames. From 2016-2019, he helped Apple on undisclosed projects. In 1999-2001, he co-founded Keyhole, the company behind Google Earth, and helped define Second Life’s core technology. Back in the 1990s, he worked on novel VR experiences for Disney, including “Aladdin’s Magic Carpet” VR Ride, the “Virtual Jungle Cruise” and “Cyberspace Mountain.”

Source: Reality Prime website

Gary A. Bolles is a globally recognized thought leader and consultant focused on the rapidly evolving landscape of work, education, and organizational transformation in the post-pandemic era driven by exponential technologies. He provides invaluable guidance to individuals, companies, communities and nations looking to navigate uncertainty and flourish in the years ahead.

– Chair for the Future of Work for SU
– Partner at the consulting firm Charrette LLC
– Co-founder of eParachute.com
– Currently focus on strategies for the future of work, learning, and the organization. Deeply committed to helping catalyze inclusive capitalism.
– Formerly, co-founder, SoCap:SocialCapitalMarkets and a dozen other impact initiatives.
– Former editorial director of six technology publications
– Former VP Marketing and COO.

Source: Singularity webpage

Greater NYC UX Design Lead at JPMorgan Chase, as well as Medidata, Fidelity, Atmosphere Proximity [BBDO], H4B Chelsea [Havas Health] & Razorfish

Special Interest in AI and machine learning, model visualizations & interfaces (UX designer for JPMC 2019 data science hackathon team, a group I later joined permanently), as well as data-driven, dynamic designs and dashboard analytics displays.

Driven toward innovation through 15 years of NYC industry research projects.

Source: Website

David A. Bray is Chair of the Accelerator at the Loomis Council and a Distinguished Fellow with the Stimson Center. He is also a non-resident Distinguished Fellow with the Business Executives for National Security, and a CEO and transformation leader for different “under the radar” tech and data ventures seeking to get started in novel situations.

He is Principal at LeadDoAdapt Ventures and has served in a variety of leadership roles in turbulent environments, including bioterrorism preparedness and response from 2000-2005.

Dr. Bray previously was the Executive Director for a bipartisan National Commission on R&D, provided non-partisan leadership as a federal agency Senior Executive, worked with the U.S. Navy and Marines on improving organizational adaptability, and aided U.S. Special Operation Command’s J5 Directorate on the challenges of countering disinformation online.

Source: Stimson Center

Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification.

He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

Source: Wikipedia

John Linwood Battelle (born November 4, 1965)  is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing’s direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company’s programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to Sovrn Holdings. He later started NewCo Platform, an “inside out” events company that allowed attendees to visit “new kinds of companies” in more than a dozen cities around the world. In 2019, he co-founded The Recount, which was sold to The News Movement in 2023.

Battelle is the chairman of Sovrn Holdings as well as board director at LiveRamp. He taught at Columbia SIPA from 2018 to 2022, and is currently a Professor of Practice at Northeastern.

Source: Wikipedia

Dennis M. Bushnell is a NASA scientist and lecturer who retired in 2023 after 60 years of service to NASA. As chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center for more than two decades, he was responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation. His work focused mainly on new approaches to environmental issues, in particular to climate issues. Bushnell has received numerous awards for his work. Bushnell has promoted research at NASA into LENR (low energy nuclear reactions, or cold fusion).

In 1998, Bushnell was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for viscous flow modeling and control, turbulent drag reduction, and advanced aeronautical concepts.

Source: Wikipedia

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

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the former President of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Additionally, he is the host of a podcast series titled “Untangling the Web,” where he engages in conversations with thought leaders to explore how the Web is shaping society, and how society in turns is shaping the Web.

Source: Kellogg School of Management webpage