Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. Her research explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of humans and non-human animals, including primates and canines. She is the Director of the Canine Cognition Lab at Yale. She has been a featured TED speaker, and has been listed in Popular Science Magazine as one of their “Brilliant 10” young minds in 2007, and in Time magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity” in 2013. In June 2016, she was named the Head of Silliman College, one of the 14 undergraduate residential colleges at Yale. In January of 2018, her course titled Psychology and the Good Life became the most popular course in Yale’s history, with approximately one-fourth of Yale’s undergraduates enrolled.

Cathy O’Neil is the author of the New York Times bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which was also a semifinalist for the National Book Award.

She earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoctoral fellow in the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quantitative analyst for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks.

Cathy wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a columnist for Bloomberg View.

Clay Shirky is today’s leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the Internet revolution, Shirky provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software and technology’s effects on society. Writing extensively about the Internet since 1996, he is the author of the best-selling “Here Comes Everybody” (Penguin Books, 2009) and “Cognitive Surplus” (Penguin Press, 2010).  In “Here Comes Everybody” – selected by Guardian as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time – Shirky explores how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination. “Cognitive Surplus” reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Shirky is the Vice Provost of Educational Technology at New York University (NYU). He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in 2010.

Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld and Foreign Affairs. In addition to writing, Shirky has a consulting practice focused on the rise of decentralized technologies, such as peer-to-peer, web services and wireless networks, that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a partner at the Accelerator Group, an international investment company. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department’s first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.