Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee
Principle Researcher
MIT Center for Digital Business

Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects business. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry. He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ and his book on the topic was published in 2009 by Harvard Business School Press. He is the co-author with Erik Brynjolfsson of the ebook Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, which will be published in the fall of 2011. He has been named one of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

Daniel Marovitz

Daniel Marovitz
Founder
Buzzumi

Daniel Marovitz is the founder of buzzumi, a software platform to help people and organizations monetize their communities and a board member of rbidr, and the Professional Diversity Network. He was, until July of this year, Head of Product Management for Deutsche Bank’s Global Transaction Banking business and a member of the board of the $5 billion a year commercial bank. Previously, Daniel served as Chief Information Office for investment banking. He also served as a strategic advisor to the division’s technology banking practice. Daniel joined Deutsche Bank in 2000 as Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the eGCI group at Deutsche Bank, charged with developing and implementing online products for Deutsche Bank’s investment and commercial bank globally. Daniel joined Deutsche Bank from iVillage, the online Women’s Network, then one of the 15 most trafficked sites on the Internet. At iVillage, he was Vice President of Commerce and a member of the management team that took the firm public in, at the time, the 6th largest IPO in history. Before iVillage, Mr. Marovitz worked for Gateway 2000 where he served as the head of Gateway.com- which sold the first PC over the Internet. Prior to this, Mr. Marovitz was the co-founder of Gateway’s Japanese subsidiary in Tokyo. A frequent speaker on the subjects of social media, banking innovation, IT management, and outsourcing, Mr. Marovitz has addressed audiences around the world. In 2001, he co-authored, Three Clicks Away: Advice from the Trenches of eCommerce, published by John Wiley. Daniel Marovitz graduated from Cornell University in 1994.

Bernard Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer
Professor
University of California at Berkeley and Finance University of Moscow

Bernard Lietaer has been active in monetary systems for a period of 25 years in an unusual variety of functions. While at the Central Bank in Belgium he co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system, and served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. He was General Manager, and Currency Trader for the Gaia Hedge Funds, when Business Week identified him as “the world’s top currency trader” in 1990. He is Research Fellow at the Univ. Berkeley, and Visiting Professor at the Finance University in Moscow. He is the author of The Future of Money translated in 18 languages.

Chris Kay

Chris Kay
Managing Director and Head of Ventures and Incubation
Citi Ventures

Chris leads the venturing arm of Citi Ventures. His team identifies emerging new market growth areas, develops new venture concepts in and across these areas, and launches disruptive new corporate ventures in pilot markets globally. Through deep partnerships with VCs, the team invests in start-ups that are at the leading edge of new business models and technologies. Prior to joining Citi in 2007, Chris held several senior leadership positions at Target over a 12-year period, with results ranging from delivering substantial operations savings to heading some of the largest merchandising departments. Chris started his professional career as a corporate lawyer representing Fortune 100 companies across a variety of areas with a specialty in debt and equity based transactions. Chris has a BA with honors in French and Economics from University of Wisconsin, Madison and a JD magna cum laude from University of Minnesota. Chris and his wife Julie, have 5 kids, and are enjoying the networked lifestyle of the millennial generation. Chris is an avid sailor and enjoys singing as well.

Byron G. Auguste

Byron G. Auguste
Director
McKinsey & Company

Byron Auguste is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Washington D.C. He works primarily in the fields of high technology, information- and services-based businesses, education, and economic development. Mr. Auguste also serves as Director of McKinsey’s Social Sector Office, which works with institutions of the private, public, and non-profit sectors worldwide to address major societal challenges. He serves on the board of Hope Street Group, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Yale University, and was appointed in 2010 to the White House Council for Community Solutions. He is a co-author of numerous reports on US competitiveness, including ‘An Economy That Works: Job Creation and America’s Future’, ‘Growth and Renewal in the US: Retooling America’s Economic Engine’, ‘Changing the Fortunes of America’s Workforce: A Human Capital Challenge’, ‘The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools’, and ‘Winning by Degrees: The Stretegies of Highly Productive Higher Education Institutions’. Byron holds a B.A. in economics and political science from Yale University and a M. Phil. and D. Phil. in economics from Oxford University, and worked as an economist prior to McKinsey.

Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson
Professor and Director of MIT Center for Digital Business
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Erik Brynjolfsson is Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Professor at the MIT Sloan School, an award-winning researcher and Director or Advisor for technology-intensive firms. He lectures worldwide on technology strategy, productivity and intangible assets. Businessweek has profiled him one of five “ebusiness visionaries” and a reader’s poll by Optimize ranked him as one of the world’s two most influential academics. Brynjolfsson is the co-author of Wired for Innovation: How IT is Reshaping the Economy. He has Bachelors and Masters Degrees from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT. He blogs at www.economicsofinformation.com and his papers can be found at http://digital.mit.edu/erik

Elizabeth Stephenson

Elizabeth Stephenson
Partner
McKinsey & Company

Elizabeth Stephenson is a Principal in McKinsey & Company’s Strategy Practice, where she serves clients on long-term strategy and strategic growth topics. She co-founded and now helps lead McKinsey’s Global Forces service-line, McKinsey’s center focused on emerging future trends and scenarios. In this role, she has worked with a wide range of corporate and institutional clients, helping evaluate how the shifting global economic, social, and technological landscape is likely to affect both the opportunities and risks those clients are likely to face in the future.

Richard Dobbs

Richard Dobbs
Director, McKinsey Global Institute
McKinsey and Company, Seoul

Richard Dobbs is a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company’s economics and business research arm, and a director (senior partner) of McKinsey based in Seoul. He is an associate fellow of the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. Since joining McKinsey in 1988, he has served clients around the world in a variety of industries, ranging from high tech and financial services to petroleum, utilities, and the public sector.

Richard received a B.A. in engineering, economics, and management from Oxford University, and an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Mariette DiChristina

Mariette DiChristina
Editor in Chief
Scientific American

Mariette DiChristina oversees Scientific American, ScientificAmerican.com, Scientific American Mind and all newsstand special editions. She is the eighth person and first female to assume the top post in Scientific American’s 165-year history. A science journalist for more than 20 years, she first came to Scientific American in 2001 as its executive editor. She was named an AAAS Fellow in 2011. She was also the president (in 2009 and 2010) of the 2,500-member National Association of Science Writers. She is a former adjunct professor in the graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University. DiChristina is a frequent lecturer and has appeared at the New York Academy of Sciences, California Academy of Sciences, 92nd Street Y in New York, Yale University and New York University among many others.
Previously, she spent nearly 14 years at Popular Science in positions culminating as executive editor. Her work in writing and overseeing articles about space topics helped garner that magazine the Space Foundation’s 2001 Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award. In spring 2005 she was Science Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her chapter on science editing appears in the second edition of A Field Guide for Science Writers. She is former chair of Science Writers in New York (2001 to 2004) and a member of the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Society of Environmental Journalists. DiChristina was honored by New York’s Italian Heritage and Culture Committee in October 2009 for her contributions as an Italian American to science journalism and education in New York City. In January 2010, she was honored by the National Organization of Italian American Women as one as one of its “Three Wise Women” of 2009.

Danny Hillis

Danny Hillis
Co-chairman
Applied Minds

Previously, Danny was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. Before that, he co-founded Thinking Machines Corp., which was the leading innovator in massive parallel supercomputers and RAID disk arrays. In addition to conceiving and designing the company’s major products, Danny worked closely with his customers in applying parallel computers to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics. At Thinking Machines, he built a technical team comprised of scientists and engineers that were widely acknowledged to have been among the best in the industry.

Danny is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. Danny is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.

In addition to his leadership role at Applied Minds, he is co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation, Judge Widney professor of engineering and medicine of the University of Southern California, research professor of engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and serves on the board of the Hertz Foundation. He has also served on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute, the Advisory Board of Yale’s Institute for Biospheric Studies, and SETI Institute’s Technical Advisory Committee. Danny is the recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Dan David Prize for shaping and enriching society and public life, the Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the Hopper Award for his contributions to computer science and the Ramanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow in the International Leadership Forum and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.