Tania Simoncelli works for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as Special Assistant to the Commissioner. She has served as an advisor on cross-cutting initiatives in a number of areas, including menu and front-of-package labeling, food safety, genetically modified foods, scientific integrity, transparency, drug safety communication, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and personalized medicine.

From 2003-2010, Simoncelli worked as the Science Advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, where she guided the organization's responses to cutting-edge developments in science and technology that pose challenges for civil liberties. In this capacity, she spearheaded the development of ACLU's litigation challenging the patenting of human genes, developed a national campaign to oppose expanded uses of DNA by law enforcement and reframe the public discourse around emerging forensic DNA techniques and practices, and advised ACLU leadership and staff on a number of other science policy issues, including human behavioral genetics research, emerging uses of functional MRI for lie detection, the protection of human subjects in research, mandatory vaccination, and post-9/11 restrictions on scientific and academic freedom.

Simoncelli is co-author with Sheldon Krimsky of Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties (Columbia University Press: 2010). She has published articles in a range of scientific, legal and policy journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (JLME) and Genewatch Magazine.

Simoncelli holds a BA in Biology & Society from Cornell University and an MS in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a researcher, analyst, and consultant for a range of nonprofit environmental and social justice organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Center for Genetics and Society, and served for five years as a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Sameer Padania runs macroscope, a consultancy with a portfolio of projects on the future of human rights, media and technology. From 2006 to 2010, he worked for the human rights organisation WITNESS in New York, running the Hub, the world's first website dedicated to human rights video, prior to which he worked at Panos London for six years to support and strengthen radio and online journalism in the developing world.
He has also published policy reports about the internet's impact both on British public interest media and on local radio and journalism in Africa, and has worked as a documentary researcher and as a film writer. He is on the board of New York-based archaeology foundation, Archaeos.

Jerry Michalski is the founder of Rex, the Relationship Economy eXpedition. He is a pattern finder, lateral thinker, Gladwellian connector, facilitator and explorer of the interactions between technology, society and business. From 1987 to 1998, Jerry was a technology analyst, focusing not on quarterly earnings but rather on which technologies would be useful and which would be distractions, what trends and forces create new potential, and where all these forces might take us over a 20-year timeframe. For the last five years of that period, Jerry was the Managing Editor of Esther Dyson's monthly tech newsletter Release 1.0, as well as co-host of her annual conference, PC Forum. He was fortunate to be on duty when the Internet showed up.

Since 1998, Jerry has been an independent consultant, doing business as Sociate, a name he coined because he is skilled at associating ideas and people, and also because he believes that the social changes that we are going through as a result of all the new connectivity (e.g., Internet, mobiles, inexpensive cameras, video sharing, tweeting) will be more profound than the structural and economic changes we have already seen. Early in 2010 Jerry launched REX, a private, collaborative inquiry into the next economy.

Jerry has worked with companies such as Best Buy and Havas Media as well as non-profits such as EDF and the Institute for the Future. He's been widely quoted in the major media and greatly enjoys public speaking. He also acts as a technology advisor to startups, ranging from Twine and CoTweet (acquired by ExactTarget) to EverNote, TheBrain, Socialtext and Seedwiki. During the dot-boom days, Jerry was an advisor to eGroups (now YahooGroups) and Pyra (now Blogger, part of Google).

Prior to writing Release 1.0, Jerry spent five years at New Science Associates, a technology market-research firm similar to Gartner (later bought by Gartner). At New Science, Jerry launched and ran two retainer research services, Intelligent Document Management (which included hypertext and groupware) and Continuous Information Environments (which included wireless communications, voice/data integration and then-hot pen computing). Jerry earned an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA in Economics (mostly econometrics) from UC Irvine. He was raised in Peru and Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish and German -- and pretty passable French.

Sandra Bloodworth, the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority (MTA), commissions public art that enhances the transportation
environment and represents the MTA on station aesthetics and urban design issues. She received the Fund for the City of New York's 2005 Sloan Public Service Award in recognition of her work in the field of public art. She is the co-author of Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit, Sandra has taught Visual Art and Urban Design in the
Department of Art and Arts Professions graduate program at New York University, as well as studio classes in the Fine Arts Department at Florida State University and at the University of Mississippi

Presenters at the conference are brilliant speakers ranging from poets, philosophers and economists, to scientists, artists and futurists. Their insights on emerging trends and cultural paradigm shifts provide actionable roadmaps to the future. Through a systems-thinking approach, speakers and attendees engage in Socratic problem solving exercises providing solutions for our complex, interconnected world. Applied Brilliance informs, inspires, confounds, provokes and transform.

Yehuda Duenyas (aka xxxy) creates immersive environments and transformative experiences. He is an artist interested in the mythic, the intimate, the ridiculous and the sublime. Duenyas's work bridges disciplines and focuses on live experiences that playfully fuse techniques of experimental theater, large-scale installation, architecture, ride design, situational social engagement, physical computing and interactive gaming. Presented nationally and internationally, and with an extensive background as a theater artist and director, Duenyas has custom-built numerous venues and mounted a range of productions and spectacles that re-envision how audiences engage and interact with live experience.

Duenyas's work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), The Drama Review (TDR), Theater magazine, New York magazine, Interview magazine, Time Out NY (Top 10 Theater of 2008, 2007, 2005, 2002), the Village Voice, Paper magazine, NYPress, NPR, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Irish Times and many blogs and online publications including Engadget, The Creators Project, and Kurzweil AI.


Duenyas splits his time between New York and Los Angeles where he engineers attractions and experiences for artistic, economic, entertainment and educational purposes. He holds an MFA in Electronic Arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, contracts with Walt Disney Imagineering on developing next-gen experiences and attractions, and is a founding member of the award-winning underground NYC theater collaborative the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA).

Steve Lambert's father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others; a qualities which prepared him for life as an artist.

Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times Special Edition, a replica of the 'paper of records' announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from the Yes Men to the Graffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).
Steve's projects and art works have won awards from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums nationally and internationally, appeared in over fourteen books, four documentary films, and in the collections of The Sheldon Museum, the Progressive Insurance Company, and The United States Library of Congress. Lambert has discussed his work live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on internationally in outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper's Magazine, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

He was a Senior Fellow at New York's Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology from 2006-2010, developed and leads workshops for Creative Capital Foundation, and is faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve is a perpetual autodidact with (if it matters) advanced degrees from a reputable art school and respected state university. He dropped out of high school in 1993.

His statement on art, 'For me, art is a bridge that connects uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. I carefully craft various conditions where I can discuss these ideas with people and have a mutually meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work.

I want my art to be relevant to those outside the gallery say, at the nearest bus stop to reach them in ways that are engaging and fun. I intend what I do to be funny, but at the core of each piece there is also a solemn critique. It's important to be able to laugh while actively questioning the various power structures at work in our daily lives. I have the unabashedly optimistic belief that art changes the way people look at the world. That belief fuels a pragmatic approach to bring about those changes.

Greg Clayman is the publisher of News Corporation's The Daily, the first national news publication built from the ground up to create original content exclusively for tablet devices. Prior to The Daily, Greg was executive vice president of Digital Distribution & Business Development for MTV Networks, and also ran MTVN Mobile Media. There, he managed digital business across MTVN's channels to develop new opportunities for digital content and strategic partnerships. Before joining MTVN, Greg co-founded Upoc, one of the first mobile media companies in the United States, and ran its marketing, sales and business development groups.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches British and American Romanticism, creative nonfiction, film and literature, and cultural studies. His most recent book is Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). It explores our many and myriad forms of morbid curiosity and argues that macabre fascination, far from perverse, is essential for a good life. The book has been named to March's "must-read" list in Oprah Magazine. It has been favorably reviewed in NPR Books, Booklist, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Boston Globe, The Roanoke Times, and The Barnes and Noble Review. Salon magazine featured a substantial excerpt from the book. Early in 2011, he published My Business Is To Create: Blake's Infinite Writing (University of Iowa Press, 2011). Written for accomplished and aspiring writers and artists, it explores William Blake's vision of creativity and the practices it implies. A year earlier, he released The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace (Northwestern University Press, 2010), which recounts my struggle with and ultimate embrace of my manic depressive illness in the wake of my daughter's birth. In 2008, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008) was published.

This book, which appeared on the bestseller lists of the L.A. Times and the Calgary Herald, was featured on many national and international media venues' including NBC's Today Show, UNC TV's Bookwatch, TVO's The Agenda, NPR's All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, the BBC's Today Programme, and CBC's The Current. Against Happiness also received coverage in several key periodicals - such as Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Charlotte Observer, The Winston-Salem Journal, and The Spectator nd was favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Booklist, Bookforum, the Globe and Mail, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Playboy.com, Publisher's Weekly, the Raleigh News and Observer, and America: The National Catholic Weekly. Against Happiness has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Croatian, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. He has published books on other subjects as well, ranging from ecology to technology to the Gnostic aspects of contemporary film. The titles of these books are The Strange World of David Lynch (Continuum, 2007); Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (Continuum, 2006); The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (State University of New York Press, 2006); Coleridge's Melancholia (University Press of Florida, 2004); The Spiritual History of Ice (Palgrave Macmillan); Romantic Turbulence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and Emerson's Sublime Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). He lives in Winston-Salem with his wife Sandi and daughter Una.

Reif Larsen is a filmmaker, teacher and writer. In May 2009, Penguin Press published his first novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which is also under contract for publication in 23 other countries. Larsen has also shot several documentaries in the U.S., UK and Sub-Saharan Africa about inner-city students working in the arts. This spring, he organized a U.S. tour for a marimba band from the Maru-a-Pula school (Gaborone,Botswana) to raise funds for AIDS orphan scholarships. After graduating from Brown University in 2002, Larsen was part of an international linguistic research team
embedded in several schools across England, and he has taught creative writing workshops across the U.S.

Professor and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Greg received a B.A. in Physics from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSC, he was a JSPS Fellow in Tokyo Japan, and he worked for several years as a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. His current research interests focus on the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets and planet-forming environments, where he is involved in projects ranging from hydrodynamical and atmospheric modeling of planets under a variety of conditions, to studies of planetary orbital dynamics and evolution, to observational searches for planets using Doppler radial velocity and photometric transit techniques. Laughlin has also published extensively on the astrophysics of the extremely distant future, and is co-author of a popular book on this topic, The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity.

Greg has a diverse set of research interests outside of the conventional academic format. He is author of the popular web log Systemic (at www.oklo.org ) which discusses the issues and ramifications that arise from the ongoing discovery of the galactic planetary census. For the past five years he has been a frequent presenter on the History Channel's Universe Series, and has worked extensively with the producers to develop filmed analogies for astrophysical phenonomena.

He has worked on the problem of the emergence of general relativistic effects in high-frequency trading, and he has made an extensive exploration of techniques for data sonification, many of which have been implemented in the development of the Systemic Console software package.

Dylan Thuras is the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura, an online compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica. Projects include the blog Curious Expeditions about traveling through Eastern Europe for a year, the Athanasius Kircher Society and World of Wonders a series of videos and articles about the hidden wonders of South America for Slate magazine. A filmmaker and artist, he is also a co-founder of Observatory (www.observatoryroom.org), an arts and salon space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Dylan lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with his wife.