Australian of the Year

Presentation:
‘In a super-connected world, how important is it for our three great sectors – the Government, business and non-for-profit sectors – to be super-connected?’ (November 17, 9.45am)

Simon McKeon is the 2011 Australian of the Year. He is also Executive Chairman of Macquarie Group’s Melbourne office. Simon is Chairman of CSIRO and Business for Millennium Development. Simon is a Director of VisionFund, World Vision International’s microcredit arm, Global Poverty Project and Red Dust Role Models.

He is an Australia Day Ambassador for the Victorian Government and serves on the Federal Government’s Human Rights Grants Scheme Advisory Panel.

He previously served as Founding President of the Federal Government’s Australian Takeovers Panel, Founding Chairman of MS Research Australia and Founding President of the Federal Government’s Point Nepean Community Trust.

Simon is the helmsman of Macquarie Innovation which in March 2009 became the first sailboat in the world to sustain more than 50 knots and in so doing, peaked at a speed of 100 kmh (54 knots).   He is also a Patron of the Australian Olympic Sailing Team which won 2 gold and a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

USA, World leading philosopher and cognitive scientist

Deep Conversation:
‘Super-connected world – marvel or myth?’ (November 16, 6.30 – 9.00pm)
Presentation:
Prospective gains and losses from the information explosion (November 17, 9.45am)

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine and in 1971 moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). He co-edited The Mind’s I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. In 1998 he published Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin).

Freedom Evolves, was published by Penguin Books in 2003.  Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. His most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon was published in 2006 by Viking Press.

He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.

Daniel is also a sculptor.