Conference Speakers 2012
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Adrian Owen
University of Western Ontario
Over the past 20 years, Professor Adrian M. Owen has been creating breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience. Among other things, his research has reve¬¬aled that individuals who appear to be entirely vegetative have in fact retained the capacity for conscious and awareness. His work has even been able to help some of these individuals to communicate to the outside world.
He is currently the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Cognition and Neuroimaging at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His ground-breaking research has been widely reported in the journals Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine (2010) and The Lancet (2011). It has also attracted widespread media attention on TV, radio, in print and online and have been the subject of several TV and radio documentaries. Since 1990, Prof. Owen has published over 200 articles and chapters in scientific journals and books.
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Aimee Di Marco
Special Registrar, NHS
Still in her early 30’s Aimee has achieved a lot in her time on Earth. She is currently a specialist registrar in general surgery at Imperial College where she is a robot surgeon. She gets to use the cutting edge and eye-wateringly expensive Da Vinci surgical robot. Robotic surgery’s primary advantage is that it is minimally invasive which translates into faster recovery times, reduced risk, shorter hospitalisation and reduced overall patient trauma.
In her spare time Aimee trains at the All Stars Boxing Gym and is the gym’s medical officer as well. Let’s hope they waived her member fees! In 2011, Aimee was recognised by Management Today magazine as one their high flying 35 Women under 35.
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Alan Moore
Founder, SMLXL
Alan is the founder of SMLXL and author of the new book, No Straight Lines: Making Sense of our Non-Linear World. This 7 year project looks at the causes of systemic failure of our industrial society, and describes how we can build a world socially, organisationally and economically that is sustainable, morevibrant and humane. At its heart is aliteracy and logic for transformational innovation.
As a well known writer, thinker and public speaker Alan has addressed, radio, television, and conference audiences globally. Reviews of his books and his articles have been published in manyrespected magazines, journals and newspapers. He is a visiting lecturer at the Cambridge University JudgeBusinessSchool, and at the Oxford University Saïd Business School including Exec Edprograms. Alan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and author of the book Communities Dominate Brands: business & marketing challenges in the 21st Century.
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Alice Taylor
CEO, MakieLab
Alice Taylor is the founder of MakieLab, a startup in the emerging and exciting 3d printing space. She was formerly the Commissioning Editor, Education for Channel 4,[3] where she developed a number interactive entertainment formats. Her work on developing Smokescreen for Channel 4 alongside game studio Six to Start was awarded Best Game at SXSWi in 2010. Before this, she was the Vice President of Digital Content for BBC Worldwide. She has been recognised by Next Generation Magazine as one of the Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women. She also founded and edits the blog Wonderland.
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Aza Raskin
Co-Founder, Massive Health
Healthcare throughout the world is a huge issue measured across almost any dimension. It is extremely expensive and very inconsistently delivered and there’s a growing number of people who think they can change that more easily today than ever before. Aza Raskin is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Massive Health, a startup that will help people improve their health through better design and better data.
He is perhaps best known as the Creative Lead on Firefox and the Head of User Experience at Mozilla. Previous to this he was involved in two other successful startups: Songza and Boxes. His father, Jef, started the Macintosh project at Apple, which has since become a mildly successful computer platform and brand!
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Dave Asprey
VP Cloud Security, Trend Micro
Dave’s ‘day job’ is VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro based in Cupertino just down the road from Apple’s global HQ. He spends most of his time speaking, writing, and thinking about cloud & virtualization security & performance. His cloudywords.com blog was named "Top 100 cloud blogs" by Cloud Expo.
In addition, Dave’s an entrepreneur, investor, speaker and computer security expert. Most recently, though, Dave has become a well-known person within the bio-hacking community and was described by The Financial Times as a "bio-hacker who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation". Dave’s bio-hacks have allowed him to upgrade his brain by 20 IQ points, lower his biological age, and lose 100 lbs without using calories or exercise. He’s spent 15 years and $250,000 on his bio-hacks and keeps The Bulletproof Executive blog which documents some of the hacks he’s discovered along the way.
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Jennifer Gardy
British Columbia Centre for Disease Control
Dr. Jennifer Gardy is a scientist and science communicator from Vancouver, Canada. Her day job is playing disease detective for the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, where she uses next-generation genome sequencing technologies to unravel the origins and transmission dynamics of outbreaks and epidemics of communicable disease. She claims to love all germs equally but does have an especially soft spot for tuberculosis and influenza, and in 2011 her team was the first to use genomics and social network analysis to reconstruct a large TB outbreak. When she's not out chasing microbes, Jenn works in the world of science documentary television. She hosted the 8-part series Project X in 2008 and has regularly hosted episodes of The Nature of Things since then, both for Canada's national broadcaster, CBC. She has suffered various indignities In the name of science television, including being a guinea pig for hypothermia experiments, getting spun round at 5G in the human centrifuge, and wearing a swimsuit on TV.
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Jonathan Forster
European GM, Spotify
Jonathan's another high-flying member of the Geordie global diaspora. He was born, bred & educated in the North East. After graduating from the University of Durham, Jonathan spent eight years at Valueclick in London working across a variety of digital marketing areas.
Upon relocating to Stockholm and joining Spotify five years ago as Global Sales Director, Jonathan has led the advertising business development to agencies and brand owners. Currently he has also assumed the European General Manager role at a critical time in the rapid growth of Spotify.
Spotify currently enjoys more than 10 million users and is active in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and USA.
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Jessica Latshaw
Singer & Actor
Jessica wrote her first song at the age of 14 and has been writing ever since. She studied piano and singing at the University of the Arts. She is currently touring the States with the first national tour of the Revival of A Chorus Line where she plays Kristine. Recently she experienced her 15 minutes of Internet fame when a video of her singing and playing her ukulele on the NYC subway went viral.
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Kevin Slavin
Co-Founder, Starling
If you get a chance to meet Kevin in person you’ll find him as engaging and insightful offstage as he is onstage. Kevin is best known for starting up Area/Code in NYC in 2005. The next-gen game studio worked with companies like Nokia, Nike, Puma, MTV & Disney. Their Parking Wars game was an early Facebook social gaming hit with a billion pages served in 2008. In 2011, they were acquired by Zynga and were rebranded as Zynga New York.
Kevin left Zynga shortly after the acquisition and is busy hatching plans for his next big thing. In the meantime, he’s become a hugely popular speaker on technology. His TEDGlobal 2011 talk on algorithms has garnered more than a million views and was named as one of the top 18 TED Talks of 2011 by Arianna Huffington & Chris Anderson in the Huffington Post.
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Magnus Lindkvist
Owner, Pattern Recognition AB
Magnus Lindkvist is an internationally known speaker, trendspotter and the author of three books – Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of The Unexpected and When The Future Begins. In his work, he challenges our entire way of thinking about and looking towards the future. As Magnus writes, "business is all about focus. But with focus comes myopia and to conquer that, I come in to shake things up."
Based in Stockholm, you’ll find Magnus is blessed with the Scandinavian ability to be analytic, challenging, creative, optimistic and humorous seemingly all at the same time.
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Mikko Hypponen
Chief Research Officer, F-Secure
Mikko Hypponen is a world-wide authority on technology and computer security.
He has fought the biggest virus outbreaks in the net, including Loveletter, Blaster, Conficker and Stuxnet.
Mr. Hypponen has assisted law enforcement in USA, Europe and Asia on cybercrime cases. He has written on his work for Scientific American, The New York Times and CNN.com.
Mr. Hypponen, born in 1969, was selected among the 50 most important people on the web in by the PC World magazine. The Foreign Policy magazine included him on the list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".
He has worked with F-Secure in Finland since 1991 and is currently the Chief Research Officer.
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Nathalie Miebach
Artist & Sculptor
Nathalie Miebach explores theintersection of art and science by translating scientific data related to meteorology, ecology and oceanography into woven sculptures and musical scores/ performances. Her main method of data translation is that of basket weaving, which functions as a simple, tactile grid through which to interpret data into 3D space. The results are both beautiful and mind-bending.
Born to German and French parents, she came to the United States in 1986. She now lives and works in Boston (USA). She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including a TED Global Fellowship.
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Paul Watson
Computer Science, Newcastle University
Paul’s been a longtime friend to Thinking Digital and Codeworks and sits on the Codeworks Connect Advisory Board. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Newcastle and Director of the Digital Institute. He also directs the RCUK Digital Economy Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy. He graduated in 1983 with a BSc (I) in Computer Engineering from Manchester University, followed by a PhD in 1986.
At Newcastle University, he has been an investigator on research projects worth over £30M. His Digital Economy Hub research bid was one of the largest single research grants in the history of Newcastle University. His research interests are in scalable information management including work on cloud computing and e-science. He teaches teaches information management on the Internet Technologies and Enterprise Computing Msc.
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Peter Gregson
Cellist, Royal Society of Arts Fellow
Born in Edinburgh in 1987, Peter Gregson is a cellist and composer "working at the forefont of the new music scene" (The New Yorker) . He has performed widely in Europe and the US, at venues ranging from Kings Place, London to The Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh; from the Twitter Offices in San Francisco to Le Poisson Rouge, New York. He works regularly with world leading technologists, most recently including Microsoft Labs, UnitedVisualArtists and the MIT Media Lab, and has commissioned and premiered works by composers such as Max Richter, Steve Reich, Gabriel Prokofiev and Tod Machover. Performances highlights for 2012 include SXSW, Royal Festival Hall, and La Gaite Lyrique, and future collaborators include Daniel Jones, Pekka Kuusisto, The Britten Sinfonia and Reactify Music.
Peter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and during 2011/12 acts as the Artistic Advisor to the Innovation Forum at The New England Conservatory.
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Richard Banks
Interaction Designer; Microsoft Research
Richard Banks is principle interaction designer at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He's part of the Socio-Digital Systems team that spends most of its time looking at family life, trying to understand the complexities of home, in order to figure out how the digital should fit in appropriately. Richard joined Microsoft after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London. Since then he's worked as a design manager in Seattle on Microsoft's Office, Windows and MSN products before moving home and into research. Richard recently authored "The future of looking back" [MSPress, 2011], a book which speculates on the nature of digital content as a legacy of our lives.
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Simona Francese
Biomedical Sciences, Sheffield Hallam University
Simona holds a Degree in Chemistry awarded by the University of Salerno (Italy) in 2000 and obtained her PhD in chemical sciences from University of Leeds with a Marie Curie fellowship. Simona hasbeen using and developing mass spectrometry methodologies to detect and identify a large variety of molecules in biological systems for 12 years. She became research fellow at the University of Florence, Italy, where she used state of the art mass spectrometry instrumentation to investigate diverse topics ranging from bacterial survival, drug delivery, chemical profiling of insects’ sensorial apparatus to disease systems.
In 2008 she took the post as a Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University, becoming a MALDI MS Imaging expert, working on the development of MALDI MS Imaging methodologies for the analysis of latent fingerprints, demonstrating the possibility to obtainingunprecedented information from fingerprints which could provide important investigative leads. At Sheffield Hallam University she is now Senior Lecturer, member of the HEA and Leader of the Fingermark Research Group, which is currently co-funded by the Home Office.
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Sugata Mitra
Educational Technology, Newcastle University
Newcastle University's Sugata Mitra is a professor of education technology who is perhaps best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiments. Professor Mitra and colleagues literally dug a hole in the wall on the border of a New Delhi slum, embedded an Internet-connected PC into it and sat back and watched what happened.
What they observed was rather amazing. With the right environment and conditions, the children in the slums began to learn and teach themselves and each other. From a very basic foundation, a virtual classroom emerged. The Professor describes it as 'minimally invasive education'.
Professor Mitra's work in education technology has continued to develop off this promising foundation. His latest experiment was based in Gateshead, the home of Thinking Digital, with the launch of The Granny Cloud. Professor Mitra recruited hundreds of grannies in and around Gateshead to go online to help children in India with their education, based on the grandmother method -- stand behind, admire, act fascinated and praise.
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Tom Scott
Sky1 HD, Gadget Geeks
Tom Scott makes things. Or, rather, he bodges things together using lines of code, a load of video editing tools, and a few metres of network cable. In 2012, he's one of Sky 1 HD's Gadget Geeks, building ridiculous things that even manage to work sometimes.
He talks about the internet, about the accelerating pace of change, about how to deal with social media, and occasionally about tea cozies. He's also been an occasional talking head on Sky News, ITV and Al Jazeera English, and has occasionally written for the Guardian's technology blog.
He once got in trouble with the government for mocking one of their web sites; he was a Girl Guide for insurance reasons a couple of years ago; he was a part-time pirate for most of his adult life; and he once got five gold runs on Blockbusters.
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Zita Frith
Singer & Vocal Coach
Zita Frith is a singer, actor and professional voice coach at Gateshead College. She also plays the piano, alto sax and flute. After joining us for Thinking Digital University 2011, she returns in 2012 to run her fun and successful singing workshop.
