Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is a scholar and teacher of Sufism in the lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He received his B.A. (Hons) in Persian Literature from the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. Pir Zia is founder of Seven Pillars House of Wisdom, an interspiritual, interdisciplinary fellowship dedicated to the unfolding of wisdom in our time, and also of Sulūk Academy, a school of contemplative study with branches in the U.S. and Europe. His forthcoming publication, Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity and the Mystical Quest, will be published by Suluk Press, an imprint of Omega Publications, and is due November, 2012.

Tenzin Gyatso, the XIVth Dalai Lama, is a moral figure and spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born to a farming family on July 6, 1935 in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. He was recognized, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, at the age of two as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the XIIIth Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are believed to be Embodiments of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving humanity. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. Most recently he was awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 in recognition for his “many enduring and outstanding contributions to peace, non-violence, human rights and religious understanding.” He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness.His Holiness is committed to the promotion of the human values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline – what he calls secular ethics – and also promotes religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B. was born in 1926 in Vienna, Austria. He studied art, anthropology, and psychology, receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. Since 1953 he has been a monk of Mount Saviour Benedictine monastery in New York. He was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.
For decades, Brother David has divided his time between periods of a hermit’s life and extensive lecture tours. His audiences included starving students in Zaire and faculty at Harvard and Columbia, Buddhist monks and Sufi retreatants, New Age commune residents and naval cadets, Green Berets and international peace conference participants.
He has contributed to books and periodicals from the Encyclopedia Americana to the New Age Journal. He authored Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and A Listening Heart, both reprinted and anthologized for more than two decades. Brother David co-authored Belonging to the Universe, with physicist, Fritjof Capra, and The Ground We Share on Buddhist and Christian practice with Robert Aitken Roshi. His most recent book is Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles’ Creed.
Brother David co-founded www.gratefulness.org, a website supporting ANG*L (A Network for Grateful Living). It reaches more than 8,000 visitors daily, from over 200 countries.

Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is a Google pioneer, an award-winning engineer, a New York Times bestselling author, a thought leader, and a philanthropist. He is also quite funny.
Meng is Google’s Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny). Like many things in Google, his unusual job title started as a joke, but eventually became real. Meng was one of Google’s earliest engineers. Among many other things, he helped build Google’s first mobile search service, and headed the team that kept a vigilant eye on Google’s search quality. After a successful 8-year stint in Engineering and 2 years as GoogleEDU’s Head of Personal Growth, he now serves with Google’s Talent Team. His current job description is, “Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace”.
One of Meng’s main projects at Google is a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself, which was featured on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. Search Inside Yourself is also the title of Meng’s New York Times bestselling book which has been endorsed by world leaders such as President Carter of the United States and President Nathan of Singapore, business leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google and John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets, and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra. Meng hopes Search Inside Yourself will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.
Outside of Google, Meng is the Founder and (Jolly Good) President of the Tan Teo Charitable Foundation, a small foundation dedicated to promoting Peace, Liberty and Enlightenment in the world. He is a Founder and the Chairman of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). He is a Founding Patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). He is also a Founding Patron of the World Peace Festival, and adviser to a number of technology start-ups.
Meng earned his MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He went to Santa Barbara mainly for the beach, but didn’t mind the graduate degree either. He has won many computing-related awards, including the Championship of Singapore’s National Software Competition. Prior to coming to the United States, Meng had a successful engineering career in Singapore. (He knew it was successful because nobody offered to fire him).

Muriel Médard is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security: Special Issue on Statistical Methods for Network Security and Forensics. She serves as an associate editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Kentaro ToyamaKentaro Toyama (www.kentarotoyama.org) is a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book that argues that the intrinsic growth of people and institutions should be the primary focus of global development. Previously, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he started an interdisciplinary research group to understand how electronic technology could support the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities. The group’s projects – including Digital Green, MultiPoint, and Text-Free UI – have been seminal in ICT4D research, even as Toyama has gone on to be a vocal critic of techno-utopian hype in development. Prior to his time in India, he did computer vision research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.

Manish Bhardwaj is the CEO and co-founder of Innovators In Health (IIH), a non-profit committed to ensuring that the rural poor suffering from
tuberculosis (TB) get care that matches the best in the world. As of early 2012, IIH provided access to care to a catchment of 85,000 residents in rural Bihar, India.
Prior to IIH, Manish was a co-founder and Vice President at Engim Inc., a private venture backed wireless semiconductor startup. Manish has won several awards including the IBM Research Fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council teaching award, and the Compaq Gold Medal. He has Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. A native of India, he has lived in Singapore, Indonesia, Austria and the U.S.

Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of the Minnesota, where he is a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. He also leads the IonE’s Global Landscapes Initiative. Foley’s work focuses on the sustainability of our civilization and the global environment. He and his students have contributed to our understanding of global food security, global patterns of land use, the behavior of the planet’s climate, ecosystems and water cycle, and the sustainability of the biosphere. This work has led him to be a regular advisor to large corporations, NGOs and governments around the world. Foley joined the University of Minnesota in 2008, after spending 15 years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. He and his colleagues have published numerous articles in the scientific literature, including highly cited work in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also written many popular articles and essays, including pieces in the New York Times, Scientific American, SEED, E360, the Guardian, Momentum, and elsewhere. His public presentations on global issues have been featured at hundreds of venues, including the Aspen Environmental Forum, the Quatauqua Institution, and TED. Foley has won numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award; the J.S. McDonnell Foundation’s 21st Century Science Award; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship; and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Shirin Ebadi is a lawyer, human rights activist, and the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her work defending the rights of women and children in Iran, and advocating an interpretation of Islam which is compatible with democracy and human rights. She is the first Iranian and Muslim woman to receive the prize. Ebadi received a law degree from the University of Tehran in 1965, and became one of the first female judges in Iran.
In 1975, she was the first Iranian woman to preside over a legislative court. Following Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ebadi was demoted to the position of a clerk in the court she had presided over because the revolution deemed women unfit to serve as judges. Unable to accept the discrimination against her, she resigned, and although her application was repeatedly rejected, finally obtained a license to open a law firm. For the next two decades, Ebadi devoted her life to the promotion of women’s rights, the defense of children, and political activists. Her organization, the Association for Human Rights Advocates, provides pro bono legal service to political prisoners in Iran. Shirin Ebadi has spoken out strongly against discrimination and injustice in her country, at times despite great risk to her own safety.
In 2000, she spent a month in solitary confinement as a result of defending the family of a student killed by the police in protests in Tehran. Shirin Ebadi’s principal arena is the struggle for basic human rights and the fundamental value that political power in a community must be built on democratic elections. She favors dialogue as the best path to changing attitudes and resolving conflict, and as a conscious Muslim believes there is no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights.
Dr. Ebadi is the founder of three NGOs in Iran, The Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Child, The Association for Human Rights Advocates, and the Organization against Mines in Iran. She is the author of 14 books, including available in English a memoir Iran Awakening; Refugee Law in Iran; and, The Golden Cage.

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.

Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare?
How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker?
What value is video technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?
Interventionist projects in “information and communication technology for development” (ICT4D) seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated excessive hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will present several persistent myths of ICT4D, offer a theory of “technology as amplifier” which explains the gap between rhetoric and reality, and provide recommendations for engineers and scientists interested in contributing to a better world. My hope is to suggest that while technology might not save the world, technologists have much to contribute.
Kentaro Toyama is a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book that argues that the intrinsic growth of people and institutions should be the primary focus of global development. Previously, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he started an interdisciplinary research group to understand how electronic technology could support the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities.