Rodney Brooks is Panasonic Professor of Robotics in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. His most recent book was Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us.

Erik Davis is noted for his study of the history of technology and society and his essays about the fate of the individual in the dawning posthuman era. Although significant aspects of his work include media criticism and technology criticism, his works span across other disciplines to include a larger social history of art, religion, and science, technology, and politics.

David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard and member of the National Council of the Arts. He's the author of several books and many technical articles; also essays, art criticism and fiction. In 1993, Gelernter was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, who at that time was an unidentified but violent opponent of technology, dubbed by the press as "the Unabomber". He recovered from his injuries but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged.

Rick Hind is legislative director of Greenpeace's toxics campaign. Greenpeace has targeted computer manufacturers to reduce e-waste globally. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as much as three quarters of the computers sold in the US are stockpiled in garages and closets. When thrown away, they end up in landfills or incinerators or, more recently, are exported to Asia.

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.

Ray Kurzweil has been an accurate predictor of technology trends for decades. He was was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. His books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology describe the exponential growth of technology and its inevitable transformation of human existence. He foresees a merging of human and machine, with the eventual replication of the human mind in a computer. By reverse-engineering the human brain in a non-human form, Kurzweil looks forward to a life of ever-expanding possibilities including one without death.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. Currently, Lanier served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2. Lanier is probably best known for his work in Virtual Reality. He coined the term "Virtual Reality" and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. His current appointments include Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, CET, UC Berkeley.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. For much of his career, Professor Lessig focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, is CEO of the Creative Commons project, and is on the board of MAPLight and the Sunlight Foundation. He has served on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.

Hugh Loebner is most notable as the sponsor of the Loebner prize, an embodiment of the Turing test. Loebner established the Loebner prize in 1990. He pledged to give $100,000 and a solid gold medal to the first programmer able to write a program whose communicative behavior can fool humans into thinking that the program is human. The competition is repeated annually.

John McCarthy is a computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation. Together with his wife, Megan, Rick has opened the Prelinger Library, an independent, appropriation-friendly, image-rich experimental research library.

Howard Rheingold is a critic and writer; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing). In 2002, Rheingold published Smart Mobs, exploring the potential for technology to augment collective intelligence.

Mikey Sklar, computer expert and electronics artist, implanted himself with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip in 2005. RFID tags are miniscule microchips, around the size of a grain of rice. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. According to Sklar, do-it-yourself RFID human implants are on the rise. There are over sixteen instances of midnight engineers implanting RFID tags in their hands.

David Skrbina is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. His work in the philosophy of technology has led to collaboration with Theodore Kaczynski on a upcoming book.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers.

Demetrie Tyler's generative software queries huge amounts of data to draw large-scale line drawings of the information. What results is a very human looking picture, but created entirely by a computer. His work was recently featured at the MoMA exhibit 'Design and the Elastic Mind.'

US Army UASTB Fort Huachuca is now the home of the world's largest UAV facility. Located in Southern Arizona, this facility houses 125,000 square feet for training soldiers to operate and maintain the Army's growing family of pilotless planes. The training simulators feature three-dimensional imaging, allowing soldiers to bring up actual images of regions such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), sometimes called an unmanned airreconnaissance vehicle, is an unpiloted aircraft. UAVs are currently used in a number of military roles, including reconnaissance and attack. UAVs are often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for manned aircraft.