Rosalind Picard
Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group, MIT Media Laboratory
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab. The author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering research in affective computing and, prior to that, research in content-based image and video retrieval. She is a graduate with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

George Barbasthasis
Singapore Research Professor of Optics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT
Dr. George Barbastathis is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and Faculty Resident with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1993, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 1994 and ’97, respectively. Between 1997-99 he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate with the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Between 2006-2007 he was Visiting Scholar with the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. He has been the recipient of the Nikolaos Kritikos award in Mathematics, the 3M Innovation Award, the NSF Young Investigator Award, and the Esther & Harold E. Edgerton junior chair at MIT. He and his team at the SMART center developed an “invisibility cloak” using a very simple and inexpensive system. This method of using Science to hide objects in plain sight was voted in the top 10 breakthroughs in Physics in 2010.

Jose Gomez-Marquez
Program Director, Innovations in International Health Initiative, MIT
Jose Gomez-Marquez is the program director for the Innovations in International Health initiative at MIT. He leads a team of multidisciplinary team of scientists to design medical devices for developing countries. He is co-inventor of the Aerovax Drug Delivery System, a device for mass delivery of inhalable drugs and vaccines to remote populations and the X out TB program, which aims to increase TB therapy adherence in developing countries using novel diagnostics and mobile technology. Recently, the group has developed the MEDIKit, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their medical technologies.
Jose serves on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is an instructor of MIT’s D-Lab: Health, a course on designing global health technologies at MIT. Jose is a 3 time MIT IDEAS Competition winner, including two Lemelson Awards for International Technology. In 2009, Jose was selected to Technology Review’s T35, which also named him Humanitarian of the Year. In 2011 he was named a TED Fellow. Born and raised in Honduras he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Susan S. Sibley
Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, MIT
Professor Silbey is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Professor Silbey is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (2009), the Harry Kalven Jr. Prize for advancing the sociology of law (2009), Doctor Honoris Causa from Ecole Normale Superiere Cachan, in Paris (2006). She is also Past President of the Law & Society Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Silbey received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and post-graduate training in ethnography in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She has written about the social organization of law in diverse institutional and informal settings including attorney general’s offices, courts, schools, private homes, businesses and scientific laboratories; she has also studied alternative forms of dispute resolution including negotiation and mediation. She has edited Studies in Law, Politics and Society (1990-1997) and the Law & Society Review (1998-2000). In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (with Patricia Ewick) describing the ways in which Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law, in 2003, In Litigation: Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead? (edited with Herbert Kritzer), and in 2008 Law and Science I, Epistemological, Evidentiary, and Relational Engagements, and Law and Science II, Regulation of Property, Practices, and Products.
Silbey’s current research looks at the roles and conceptions of law in scientific laboratories, comparing the place of law in expert communities and popular culture, with special attention to the ways in which complex technological organizations observe and govern themselves. She is supervising an experiment in ethnographic fieldwork on the development of new safety regimes in research labs. In addition, she is completing a six year longitudinal study of engineering education, following a cohort of students through four different engineering schools.