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

Leading female Futurist & Ecocentrist, Author, Keynote, Adviser & Presenter

Renegade futurist and ecocentrist K D Adamson deconstructs the techno-optimist narrative, showing tomorrow isn’t a tech problem, it’s a value problem, and other futures are available.

Source: Gerd Featured Colleagues

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

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023).  He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy.

Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019. Altman’s net worth was estimated at $1.1 billion in January 2025.

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

Yoshua Bengio OC FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute MILA.

Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the “Godfathers of AI”. Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Dr. Mara Di Berardo is a seasoned expert in futures studies, communication, and participatory methodologies. She serves as the Communication Director and Italy Node Co-Chair of The Millennium Project, a global think tank with over 70 Nodes dedicated to improving global foresight and collaborative intelligence. Mara has been a vital contributor to the organization since 2007, leading research, events, and communication initiatives.

A prominent voice in the field, Mara is also the Communication Officer for the Foresight Europe Network, where she connects foresight professionals across Europe through participatory vision-building and strategic action planning. Her research includes an analysis of global futures topics, notably as the Principal Investigator for the 2022 Third Futures Research Grant, resulting in the widely cited study on World Futures Day 2022.

Source: Millennium Project

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

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

Mark Brakel is Future of Life’s Director of Policy, leading our advocacy and policy efforts globally. Previously, Mark was FLI’s regional director for European policy, and served in the Dutch diplomatic service where he was posted to The Netherlands’ Embassy in Iraq.

Mark also authors Not Another Big Tech Stack, a monthly perspective on AI policy (unaffiliated with any of the major AI companies).

Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, and master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He speaks Dutch, English, Arabic and a decent amount of French.

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

Dr. Peter C. Bishop is the Exec Director of Teach the Future, Inc., having retired as an Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight and Director of the graduate program in Foresight at the University of Houston in August 2013.

Before establishing Teach the Future, Dr. Bishop specialized in techniques for long term forecasting and planning, and he has published two books on the subject: Thinking about the Future (2007) and Teaching about the Future (2012), both with co-author Andy Hines.

Source: Website

Tsvi Bisk is a futurist whose approach is historical and strategic –how to get from here to there in order to achieve “desired” futures.  His expertise ranges from specific Jewish issues, to global development and environmental issues, to the spiritual future of humanity in the space age.

Tsvi keynotes conferences and gatherings with the aim of clearing away the rubble of conventional thinking and ways of doing things. He creates workshops and seminars geared to releasing the creative energies inherent in organizations and individuals.

In collaborating with other futurists and consultants who wish to expand the services they provide to their clients, Tsvi can enrich their offerings in a variety of areas:

• Mitigating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its potential effect on the future of the Middle East:
  economically, culturally, socially and constitutionally.
• The future of Israeli-Diaspora relations and its potential impact on the Middle East as well as American
  and European politics.
• Why there are no limits to growth – how science and technology enable a world population of 12 billion
  to achieve an American standard of living with zero negative environ

Source: Website

Howard Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller” by Britain’s Channel4 TV and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine.  Bloom is the author of seven books, including The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and the new Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense threw a symposium on Bloom’s second book, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, and brought in representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. The eleventh president of India, Dr. A.P.J. Kalam called Bloom’s third book, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, “a visionary creation.”  And the Sheikh who runs Dubai named a racehorse—the Beast–after that same book.

Source: The Howard Bloom Institute

Prior to embarking on his career in academia, Jörn held senior leadership positions in a range of commercial enterprises. In these positions, he spearheaded major initiatives such as the formation of entrepreneurial and intrepreneurial business efforts, expansions of enterprise into new markets, and launches of innovative startup companies. His experience includes work with a range of global business icons, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toyota, BMW, and Bang & Olufsen A/S. Working across multiple geographies and cultures has given Jörn a truly international perspective, which informs his thinking about research, process, and execution.

Jörn’s commercial background ensures that his efforts are rooted in human-centered, consumer-focused values and innovations. He has a specific interest in factors that drive new markets, focus on experiential memory constructs and consumption, and leverage co-creation concepts that include various stakeholders.

Dr. Bühring’s current research explores Design Foresight, Strategic Innovation, Vision, and Fiction, within the context of Strategic Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Management. Since 2010, he has conducted several major studies in the sectors of luxury hospitality, omnichannel retailing, and financial services; this includes a series of futures studies in wealth management and private banking to the year 2030.

Source: Website

Dr Marcus Bussey is an educator and futurist with more than 40 years’ experience. He has taught widely throughout Australia having spent 5 years at a yoga based neohumanist school, 4 years in an urban community school run by a parent cooperative, 7 years in Montessori primary and high schools, and 20 years at USC where he currently teaches world history and the philosophy of history. He is also heavily involved with supervision of higher degree students and is deeply committed to the University’s goals of increased research capacity and quality research with high impact. Marcus is also the Deputy Head, UniSC Sustainability Research Centre where he is involved with a range of sustainability and environmental communication research projects.

In 2014 Marcus was awarded a Taiwan Fellowship for 2014. This fellowship allowed him to work with colleagues at Tamkang University and the National Taiwan University on developing futures thinking in undergraduate engineering students. The outcomes of this research engagement appeared in the research paper he publishes with Song, Mei Mei Song and Hsieh (Patrick) Shang-Hsien: Anticipatory Imagination as a Tool for Rethinking Engineering Education which appeared in the Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice.

His most recent article is entitled: Navigating the Ruins of the Future.

Source: University of the Sunshine Coast

Professor Carmel teaches Information Technology (I.T.) at American University in Washington, DC. He is currently working on a number of research areas: Digital identity; Crypto ethics; Future of work.

He received his Ph.D., in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona; his MBA from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Source: American University page

Robin L. Champ is a visionary leader in strategic foresight and strategy management, currently serving as the Vice President, Strategic Foresight at LBL Strategies and an instructor at Harvard Extension School. She is a Certified Strategy Management Professional (SMP) through the International Association for Strategy Professionals (IASP), where she also serves as Co-Chair of the Government Community of Practice (IASP-GovCoP). With a distinguished career spanning key roles in both the Department of Defense and the U.S. Secret Service, Robin brings unparalleled expertise to the table.

Retired as the Chief of the Enterprise Strategy Division at the United States Secret Service, Robin led the organization’s foresight and strategic planning efforts. Notably, she also co-chaired the Federal Foresight Community of Interest, showcasing her commitment to advancing foresight practices across government.

Source: LBL Strategies page

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

The Alternative Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi) conducts horizon scanning, foresight research, and advocacy centered on planetary consciousness. 

This is accomplished under the leadership of our world-class scientific council and by the contribution of a volunteer planetary creative council (groups of individuals and organizations) around the world that connect planetary views and futures research to help expand imagination about the possible futures and build preferred futures. 

What we do and support:

• Networking among authors, artists, researchers, educators and scholars to think together about the planetary futures.

• Designing, developing and using frameworks for the planetary identity, the technological progress, and the scientific worldview.

• Providing inclusive and participatory systems to measure positive planetary change.

• Collecting resources, books and media that primarily explore the planetary futures.

Source: Website