Amy Tan is an award-winning novelist and creative force in television, cinema and (in the fall of 2008), opera. Following the success of The Joy Luck Club, her books have enjoyed translation into dozens of languages and have garnered numerous major awards and accolades. Amy has performed as narrator with the San Francisco Symphony and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra as well as serving as lead rhythm dominitrix for the Rock Bottom Remainders (which has raised more than a million dollars for literacy programs). An amateur gizmo and gadget freak, she can sometimes be seen scooting around Sausalito on a segway with her husband Lou and their beloved Yorkie, Lilly.

Cornell physics professor Keith Schwab studies fundamental quantum behaviors: nano-electro-mechanics, and superfluids: these involve some of the coldest, tiniest and weirdest phenomena known to science.

Nathan Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures after retiring from his position as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. Myhrvold is focused on business interests relating to the funding, creation and commercialization of inventions. During his 14-years at Microsoft, Nathan was responsible for founding Microsoft Research and numerous technology groups that resulted in many of Microsoft's most successful products. He has extensive experience successfully linking research to product development and commercialization. Nathan’s education includes math and physics at Cambridge, where he worked under Stephen Hawking in cosmology and quantum theory. His graduate work was done at Princeton — more math and physics with a dash of economics. Princeton awarded him the James Madison Medal, the university’s top alumni honor. He has more than 20 patents and 200 pending. He is an affiliate at the Museum of the Rockies, where he funds and participates in paleontological research expeditions. In 2000, he partnered with Paul Allen and pledged $1m to the SETI Foundation to fund the development of the world’s most powerful telescope. An avid nature and wildlife photographer, Myhrvold’s work is featured in the books “America 24/7” and “Washington 24/7.” His work has been published in journals including Science, Nature, Paleobiology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Physical Review and he has contributed articles to magazines including Fortune, Time, National Geographic Traveler and the online magazine, Slate. In 2004, he provided the foreword to a book profiling some of the world’s greatest inventors – Juice: The Creative Fuel that Drives World-Class Inventors.

Marvin Minsky is perhaps most widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost pioneers of Artificial Intelligence. He is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T. His research has led to advances in Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics and Psychology. He built the first neural network learning machine; the first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality; and has been a pioneer in robotics and telepresence. Later contributions were made in graphics, symbolic mathematical computation, knowledge representation, computational semantics, machine perception, and both symbolic and connectionist learning. In 1985, he published "The Society of Mind," a book in which 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself. In 2006, Minsky published the sequel, The Emotion Machine.

Career stops: The Fieldston School, New York; Bronx High School of Science; Phillips Academy; US Navy, 1944-45; Harvard University; Princeton University; Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows; Professor of Mathematics, MIT; Founder, MIT Artificial Intelligence Project; Professor of EE, MIT.

Honors: Turing Award; Killian Award; Japan Prize; Rank Prize, Royal Society of Medicine; R.W. Wood Prize, Optical Society of America; Benjamin Franklin Medal; In Praise of Reason Award, World Skeptics Congress; President, American Association for Artificial Intelligence; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEEE, Walt Disney Imagineering.  Board of Advisors, National Dance Institute, National Space Society, American Academy of Achievement. Member, U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Argentine National Academy of Science, League for Programming Freedom.

John Markoff joined The New York Times in March 1988 as a reporter for the business section. He writes about computers and technology issues and is based in San Francisco as a senior writer. Prior to that, he worked for The San Francisco Examiner from 1985 to 1988. Markoff has written about technology since 1977 — for The Pacific News Service, Infoworld, Byte Magazine and The San Jose Mercury. He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism. He is currently an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford University Journalism Department where he teaches a course on reporting on Silicon Valley. He has been a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1987, 1995, 1998 and 2000, and nonetheless has actually received several other awards including the Loeb Award and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Breaking News awards. Markoff grew up in Palo Alto, was educated at Whitman in Walla Walla, and took his graduate degree from U of Oregon.

His books include: The High Cost of High Tech (1985); Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991); Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw; What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005) and Machines of Loving Grace (2015). He is married to Leslie Terzian Markoff and they live in San Francisco.

Andy Lippman: for forty years, Andy has been institutionalized at MIT in capacities ranging from undergrad, to professor, to senior research scientist. He has never had to look for a job in his life. He received his BS and MS degrees from MIT and a PhD from EPFL (Lausanne) while on leave from MIT.

He is one of the founding members of the MIT Media Laboratory, and one of its most ardent spokesmen: he lives by the vision that we create technology in our own image and for our own purposes — the magic lies in enabling that development to occur. He has done that for more than a few generations of MIT graduates, undergraduates and corporations , and in return he has retained his youthful (perhaps irrational) exuberance. Andy has been an elevator operator, a radio engineer and broadcaster, and has sailed across the Southern Ocean on the BT Global Challenge. He is a Diamond Technology Fellow, an Advisor on the boards of WBYE Independence Media and for a startup PRI radio program called "Fair Game." He has received and help grant NSF research proposals, and he works with startups and established companies. He has eleven patents in television, digital image processing and interface technologies.

Ken Libbrecht is a professor and physics department chair at Caltech. After a brief stint at the University of North Dakota, Libbrecht graduated from Caltech in 1980, followed by graduate studies at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Caltech in 1984 and has been there ever since. Ken's research covers a broad range of topics in physics and astrophysics — helioseismology (the study of global oscillations in the Sun), stellar seismology, laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms, diode laser technology, the search for gravitational radiation from astrophysical sources, and the physics of crystal growth. A recent and ever-increasing distraction is a detailed study of how ice crystals grow from water vapor — essentially, the physics of snowflakes. The symmetry and complex structures of snow crystals derive from a number of remarkably subtle processes, some of which remain quite puzzling to this day. This unfundable research is not aimed at any direct practical applications. It simply seeks to clarify the molecular mechanisms governing crystal formation, and to better understand how such complex, beautiful patterns emerge in growing crystals and other seemingly simple physical systems.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.

Andrew Keen is a British-American academic and entrepreneur. With a forte in eastern European history, and a master’s degree in political science from Berkeley, he has taught at Tufts, Northeastern, and UMASS. In Silicon Valley, Andrew was founder and CEO of Audiocafe.com. He is an outspoken critic of citizen media, and recently published The Cult of the Amateur which is highly critical of Wikipedia.

Don Katz is founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Audible, Inc., the Internet's premier audio information and entertainment service. Founded in 1995 and based in Newark, NJ, Audible developed audible.com, the popular ecommerce web destination and the first system for distributing audio via the Internet for playback at or away from the PC. Audible also commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997. Don was a successful author and journalist for twenty years before founding Audible. He is the author of Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America; The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction; and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World. Katz served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men's Journal, and Worth, and his writing won or was nominated for several National Magazine Awards. A two-volume collection of Katz's award-winning magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places was published in 2001. Don graduated from NYU’s honors program in English in 1974. He also attended U of Chicago as well as The London School of Economics. Married and father of three children, he lives in Montclair and is an avid ice hockey player.