Executive Director and Senior Futurist at DaVinci Institute, Author: Communicating with the Future

Deep Conversation:
‘Getting Unstuck! Using innovation to create change in large organizations and government’ (November 28, 12.15-2.15pm)
Presentation:
2 Billion Jobs to Disappear by 2030! Driverless Cars, Teacherless Schools, and Printable Houses: We’re in for a Wild Ride (November 30, 9.00am)

Thomas Frey is the Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, and currently Google’s top-rated futurist speaker. Author of the groundbreaking 2011 book “Communicating with the Future,” Tom serves as a powerful visionary who is revolutionizing our thinking about the future.

As part of the celebrity speaking circuit, he continually pushes the envelope of understanding, headlining events with some of today’s most recognizable figures: Tom Peters, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunus; former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giulliani; Former President of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana; Prime Minister of Spain, Felipe González Márquez; Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz; Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal; and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn.

His keynote talks on futurist topics have captivated people ranging from high level government officials to executives in Fortune 500 companies.

Because of his work inspiring inventors and other revolutionary thinkers, the Denver Post and Seattle Post Intelligencer have referred to him as the “Dean of Futurists”.

Before launching the DaVinci Institute, Tom spent 15 years at IBM as an engineer and designer where he received over 270 awards, more than any other IBM engineer. He is also a past member of the Triple Nine Society (High I.Q. society over 99.9 percentile).

Thomas has been featured in hundreds of articles for both national and international publications including New York Times, Huffington Post, Times of India, USA Today, US News and World Report, The Futurist Magazine, Morning Calm (in-flight magazine for Korean Airlines), Skylife (in-flight magazine for Turkish Airlines), ColoradoBiz Magazine, Rocky Mountain News, and many more. He currently writes a weekly “Future Trend Report” newsletter and a weekly column for FuturistSpeaker.com.

Anthropologist,  Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society

Presentation:
‘The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World’ (November 30, 3.30pm)

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.

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Chief Technology Advocate, Google

Deep Conversation:
‘Now to Next: How will Science and Technology help solve our wicked problems?’ (November 28, 7.00-9.30pm)
Presentation:
The future enters by the back door: How and why learning must change with advancing technology (November 30, 9.00am)

Michael Jones is Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, charged with advancing the technology to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Michael travels the globe to meet and speak with governments, businesses, partners and customers in order to advance Google’s mission and technology. He previously was Chief Technologist of Google Maps, Earth, and Local Search——the teams responsible for providing location intelligence and information in global context to users worldwide. Before its acquisition by Google, Michael was CTO of Keyhole Corporation, the company that developed the technology used today in Google Earth. He was also CEO of Intrinsic Graphics, and earlier, was Director of Advanced Graphics at Silicon Graphics.

A prolific inventor and computer programmer since the 4th grade, he has developed scientific and interactive computer graphics software, held engineering and business executive roles, and is an avid reader, traveler and amateur photographer using a home-built 4 gigapixel camera made with parts from the U2/SR71.

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(Photo: Móric van der Meer)

Partner in Reos Partners, Innovation in Complex Social Systems.

Deep Conversation:
‘Getting Unstuck! Using innovation to create change in large organizations and government’ (November 28, 12.15-2.15pm)
Presentation:
Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future (November 29, 9.45am)

Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners, an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems, and an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address their most complex challenges. He is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities and Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, and Transformative Scenario Planning: Creating New Futures When Things Aren’t Working.

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.

Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University, an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California, and an M.A. in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University.

Leader in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine

Deep Conversation:
‘Now to Next: How will Science and Technology help solve our wicked problems?’ (November 28, 7.00-9.30pm)
Presentation:
How will our bodies keep up with technology and what will that mean to society? (November 29, 11.30am)

Born and raised in New York City, Nadia Rosenthal obtained her PhD in 1981 from Harvard Medical School and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at NIH, then directed a biomedical research laboratory at Harvard Medical School, and served for a decade at the New England Journal of Medicine as editor of the Molecular Medicine series.

In 2001 she moved to Europe to head the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Outstation in Rome, She is an EMBO member, with numerous awards and honors including the Ferrari-Soave Prize in Cell Biology and Doctors Honoris Causa from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and the University of Amsterdam. She spearheaded the election of Australia to EMBL as its first Associate Member, serving as its Scientific Head, and in 2008 she founded the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University and Headquarters for the EMBL Australia Partner Laboratory Network. She is an NH & MRC Australia Fellow and holds a Chair in Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College London.

Professor Rosenthal’s research focuses on muscle and cardiac developmental genetics and the role of growth factors and stem cells in tissue regeneration, with over 160 primary research articles and prominent reviews in high impact international journals, including general reviews for Scientific American. She has attracted sponsored research funding from major pharmaceutical companies including Amgen, Genzyme and Novartis for her translational studies. She delivered the 2006 Howard Hughes Holiday Lectures on Potent Biology: Stem Cells, Cloning and Regeneration, co-edited the “bible” of the field, Heart Development and Regeneration and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Differentiation. She brings a unique and powerful perspective on stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the interface of basic, biomedical and industrial life sciences. She is also an accomplished painter and illustrator, providing artwork for her books, journals and conferences.

Author: The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Deep Conversation:
‘Now to Next: How will Science and Technology help solve our wicked problems?’ (November 28, 7.00-9.30pm)
Presentation:
Why things are not what they seem: the courage to think differently (November 30, 3.30pm)

Iain was a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, medicine and psychiatry.  His latest book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, published by Yale in November 2009, explores the way in which the bihemispheric structure of the brain influences our understanding of the world.

A vast body of research reveals that the brains of birds and mammals, including humans, have evolved to enable us to apply two equally necessary, but mutually incompatible, types of attention to the world.  One is sharply focused, but narrow, certain already of what it will find; the other is broad, open, and receptive to whatever it may find, without preconception. So difficult is it to combine these types of attention in one brain that they have been sequestered to the two distinct cerebral hemispheres. It is the left hemisphere that provides instrumental attention, enabling us to get and manipulate, by focusing sharply on narrowly conceived detail.

It is the right hemisphere that provides what one might call relational attention, enabling us to see the whole picture, to form social bonds, to inhabit and belong to the world we see, rather than simply being detached from it and using it.

Over time there is a tendency for the view of the left hemisphere to entrench itself: it is simpler, more explicit, ignores what does not fit its paradigm and makes us powerful manipulators.  But the price is a baffled incredulity when the world does not seem to work the way it would predict.  The costs include widespread despoliation of the planet, empty consumerism, a belief in theory at the expense of experience and an unwarranted optimism as we shuffle like a sleepwalker towards the abyss.

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