Richard Saul Wurman has published 80 books over the last 50 years; founded the TED & TEDMED conferences; and founded EG. He studied architecture at Penn and had a deep professional relationship with architect Louis Kahn. Wurman’s oeuvre is outrageously eclectic, but all springs from the same source: his own ignorance. The result has been a series of books ranging from city guides to health manuals to volumes on financial planning and the Olympics. Grants and awards include: NEA, Guggenheim, Graham Fellowships, Chandler Fellowships, the Kevin Lynch Award from MIT, several honorary doctorates (University of the Arts; Art Center College of Design; Art Institute of Boston). And he has taught at universities including Cambridge, CCNY, UCLA, USC, Washington University, and Princeton. In 1958 he was a member of the initial year of exploration and mapping of Tikal in Guatemala. Wurman’s latest project—dubbed 19.20.21.— is an attempt to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to have more than 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century, giving readers, again, tools to easily compare and contrast them. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three biblical yellow labs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

According to post-modern magic stars Penn and Teller, Jamy Ian Swiss "makes one understand what a terrifying art form pure sleight of hand can be." He has performed internationally for presenters ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the Smithsonian Institution. His television appearances include CBS "48 Hours,", PBS "Nova," "The Today Show," and multiple appearances on "The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson." He is the author of two collections of essays: "Shattering Illusions" and "Devious Standards"; "The Art of Magic," the companion book to the PBS documentary; and has contributed to other works including collaborating with Edward Tufte on "Explaining Magic" in the book "Visual Explanations." In a lengthy profile in "The New Yorker," Adam Gopnik writes, "Swiss is thought to have one of the most masterly sleight-of-hand techniques in the world today... like seeing Yo-Yo Ma."

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Carolyn Porco has a Caltech PhD in Planetary Sciences. She participated in the Voyager mission as a member of the imaging team from 1984 through the end of the mission, and now is the leader of the Imaging Team on Cassini. She is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

She has been a member over the years on many NASA advisory committees, including the Mars Observer Recovery Study Team, the Solar System Road Map Development Team, and most recently she served the Vice Chairperson for the Solar System Decadal Survey committee. Carolyn is very active in the public communication of science and the fruits of planetary exploration. She has made many radio and television appearances including appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CBS' "60 Minutes", and many TV documentaries on planetary exploration. She is a frequent CNN guest analyst and consultant on astronomy. Her popular scientific writings and editorials have been published in places like the London Sunday Times, the Guardian, Astronomy Magazine, Arizona Daily Star, the Boston Herald and Sky and Telescope. She recently penned an editorial for the New York Times on NASA's new direction. She and her staff at CICLOPS are responsible for the processing and artful presentation of all those beautiful Cassini images of Saturn and its rings and moons that have been enjoyed the world over for several years now. She also writes the Imaging Team's website's home page greeting, `The Captain's Log'. In late 1999, she was selected by the Sunday London Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch".

Carolyn was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his “cremains” to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.

Son of a Greek shipowner and Olympic skier, Nick grew up in New York, Switzerland, and Connecticut before landing at MIT in the 1960's.  He never quite left. Founder and now Chairman Emeritus of the Media Lab, as well as One Laptop Per Child, much recent technological change has found Nicholas at the epicenter.  In a sense, it's his fault.

Rob Glaser, Founder, Chairman and CEO of RealNetworks, Inc., has long been intrigued with the nexus of media, computing, communication and the Internet. Since founding Real in 1994, Mr. Glaser has played an integral role in the transformation of the Internet into the next great mass medium. In 1995 under Mr. Glaser's direction, Real introduced the groundbreaking RealAudio. Followed by RealVideo, RealPlayer and the systems to distribute audio and video including the Helix technologies, RealNetworks has continued to innovate and bring technologies to market. In 2003, RealNetworks purchased Listen.com and built the Rhapsody music service into the leading music subscription service. With the combination of technology and business systems for monetizing media, RealNetworks and Mr. Glaser are at the forefront of the Internet media revolution. Prior to founding RealNetworks, Inc., Mr. Glaser worked for Microsoft for 10 years in a number of executive positions, including Vice President of Multimedia and Consumer Systems. Mr. Glaser has served on several non-profit boards and committees, including his appointment by President Clinton to the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. Mr. Glaser is a graduate of Yale University, with a B.A. and an M.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Computer Science.

Paola Antonelli is Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. She has produced numerous major exhibits in New York, Italy, France and Japan, authored catalogs and books, and has contributed as author or editor to such publications as Domus, Abitare, Metropolis, I.D., Harper’s Bazaar, Nest, and Harvard Design Magazine. She is a Senior Fellow with the Royal College of Art in London, received an Honorary Doctorate in Design from Kingston University in London, and garnered the Smithsonian’s Design Mind award in 2006. She is trying to get a Boeing 747 into MoMA’s collection.

Golan Levin is Associate Professor of Time-Based Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He creates artifacts and events that explore our expressive relationships with machines, and with each other. His works have been exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia, and are represented by the bitforms gallery in New York.

Ken Knowlton has “been there, done that” — farmhand, student, teacher, advisor, speaker, reader, mathematician, physicist, electron microscopist, computer scientist, researcher, inventor, author, artist, critic, son, sibling, father, husband, grandfather, peace and civil rights activist, agnostic, retiree, liberal, curmudgeon. His formal education slalomed through a one-room country school in western New York, high school in downtown Springville, Physics at Cornell, and "Computer Science" at M.I.T. before such a curriculum existed. Then came the R&D for which he is best known: 20 years at Bell Labs, starting with the first computer language for bitmap movies in 1963, and continuing there and elsewhere in computer graphics and computer art, as a lone practitioner and as a collaborator with scientists and artists. His paper trail consists of many works on computer graphics and techniques, and likewise for "computer" "art", plus several U.S. patents (only 1,063 fewer than Edison!) on software and hardware and combinations. Time also spent as: an ACM lecturer, a visiting professor at UCSC, prizes from art shows, book chapters about his work, computer graphics workshops given, magazine and/or book covers produced, startups that he joined which then failed, states lived in, letters-to-the-editor in support of losing presidential candidates, years working with the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, years as a Quaker before being read out of meeting, and months as Chimesmaster at Cornell. These days, he is developing and using a variety of his own computer-assisted methods for planning artwork, mostly mosaic portraits (www.KnowltonMosaics.com). Many are made of seashells, but other materials from nature or culture serve as tesserae: dominoes, dice, toys, pottery shards, puzzle pieces, and seashore debris. As with other mosaics, his interest concerns vision, perception and interpretation — Why do we see what we think we see? How is our perception cued by distance, by lighting, and by our experience with a specific artwork, with a genre, and/or with a lifetime of really seeing things (or thinking that we're really seeing things)?

Jonathan Winters has made an art of comedy as one of the most inventive minds in the history of American entertainment. Born in Dayton (1925), he attended public school in Springfield and joined the Marine Corps at 17. After two years in the South Pacific, he returned to Ohio and Kenyon College. His interest in art led him to Dayton Art Institute where he studied for over two years and met the girl who would become his wife: Eileen. She encouraged Jonathan to enter a local talent contest, which he did, and won a wrist watch. The performance led him to a job as an early morning disc-jockey on radio station WING in Dayton (1946). And this led to WBNS-TV in Columbus where he worked for three years. In 1953, Jonathan headed for New York for the "big time" with $56.46 in his pocket. As a performer at Manhattan's Blue Angel nightclub, his reputation as a comic began to grow. Gary Moore, who was substituting for Arthur Godfrey on the TV show Talent Scouts, presented Jonathan on the show. Then came the Jack Paar Show, The Steve Allen Show, and The Tonight Show, where Jonathan was able to demonstrate his comic genius and he became a top name in American Comedy. Jonathan and Eileen have been married for nearly 60 years and have two children and five grandchildren. They live in Santa Barbara, where Jonathan paints and writes when he is not performing. He is also currently at work on his autobiography. Jonathan has appeared in dozens of movies, scores of television shows, has produced best-selling books, received Grammys and Emmys and brought smiles and tears to generations of audiences.

A regular Hollywood Square, Bruce has long been Hollywood's E.R. of comedy, and has contributed to everything from the Star Wars Holiday Special to the Academy Awards.