Dr. Anders Sandberg’s research as a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute centers on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics, and public policy.
He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE,… read more
Lakshmi Sandhana is a freelance journalist who is passionate about emerging technologies and their impact on the world. She freelances for KurzweilAI, BBC Online, Fast Company, New Scientist, Wired News, The Economist, MIT Technology Review and Homeland Security Today.
Lakshmi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering and a Masters’ in Mass Communication. She worked as a multimedia programmer authoring educational CD’s for children for a few… read more
Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University. His laboratory focuses on three issues: a) how a neuron dies during aging or following various neurological insults; b) how such neuron death can be accelerated by stress; c) the design of gene therapy strategies to protect endangered neurons from neurological disease.
The Sapolsky laboratory was among the first to document that sustained stress can damage the hippocampus, a region of… read more
Robert J. Sawyer, called “just about the best science fiction writer out there” by The Denver Rocky Mountain News and “the leader of SF’s next-generation pack” by Barnes and Noble, frequently writes science fiction about artificial intelligence, most notably in his Aurora Award-winning novel Golden Fleece (named the best SF novel of the year by critic Orson Scott Card, writing in The Magazine of Fantasy… read more
Dr. Schank is the Executive Director and founder of Engines for Education, Inc. He is also the Chairman and CEO of Socratic Arts, Inc. a company that delivers Story Centered Curricula to schools and businesses. He is the Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at the Business Engineering School of LaSalle University in Barcelona, Spain. In an advisory capacity, he is Chief Learning Officer of Trump… read more
Born in Wiesbaden in 1959, Frank Schirrmacher studied German and English literature in Heidelberg, Philosophy and German at Clare College in Cambridge, England, where he received a PhD.
Since 1989 he has been head of the arts and science department at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading and most influential newspapers.
Jürgen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA (since 1995), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (since 2009), and Professor at The University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) (since 2003). He helped to transform IDSIA into one of the world’s top ten AI labs (the smallest!), according to the ranking of Business Week Magazine.
The… read more
William B. Scott recently retired as the Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, based in Colorado Springs, CO. In 22 years with Aviation Week, he also served as Senior National Editor in Washington, and in Avionics and Senior Engineering Editor positions in Los Angeles. He focused primarily on advanced aerospace and weapons technology, business, flight testing and military operations, wrote more than 2,500 stories for the magazine, and received 16 editorial awards. He co-authored the book, Inside the Stealth Bomber: The B-2 Story, with Col. Rick Couch, a test pilot who directed the B-2 test program in its early days.… read more
John Searle is Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind at the University of California at Berkeley and author of many books, including Rationality in Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). He is best know for his Chinese Room analogy, which argues that the mind is not a computer and that the Turing Test is not adequate for determining intelligence. His essay, “I Married a Computer” appears in Are We… read more
Terrence J. Sejnowski, Ph.D. is an Investigator, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Terrence Sejnowski’s goal is to discover the principles linking brain mechanisms and behavior. His lab uses both experimental and modeling techniques to study the biophysical properties of neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons.
R.U. Sirius is a writer, editor and noted digital iconoclast. His books include Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge and How to Mutate & Take Over the World: An Exploded Post-Novel.
His next book, Use Your Hallucinations: MONDO 2000 in 20th Century Cyberculture, is a combination personal memoir and as-told-to history of MONDO 2000 magazine and should see publication some time in 2013.
John M. Smart is a technology foresight educator and a scholar in global processes of evolution, development, and accelerating change.
He is president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Mountain View, CA), a nonprofit research organization that seeks to help individuals better understand and manage accelerating technological change, and co-founder of Evodevouniverse.com, an international research community that explores evolutionary and developmental processes of change at the… read more
Lee Smolin is Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University. As a theoretical physicist, he has contributed several key ideas to the search for a unification of quantum theory, cosmology, and relativity.
Nova Spivack’s life reads like a novel. He has done everything from going into space and launching a business with a record-breaking IPO, to hanging out in Tibetan monasteries and inventing new technology that has changed tech as we know it.
Nova is a long-time serial entrepreneur in the technology industry. In the late 80s and early 90s, he worked with leading technology ventures like Kurzweil Computer Products, Individual,… read more
Don Stein, Ph.D., is a former Dean of the Graduate School and currently Asa G.Candler Professor and Distinguished Professor In the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Stein’s early findings on sex differences in recovery from brain injury led to decades of research on neurosteroids in CNS injury. His laboratory now studies the actions of progesterone and… read more
Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University. He is on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.… read more
Dale J. Stephens brings a unique perspective on the future of education, talent, and innovation. An educational futurist and speaker on issues facing Generation Y, he delivers core insights about learning, technology, and success.
He is a sought-after education expert appearing on major news networks including CNN, ABC, NPR, CBS, Fox, and TechCrunch. His work has been covered by the New… read more
Gregory Stock is the Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. In this role he explores critical technologies poised to have large impacts on humanity’s future and the shape of medical science. His goal has been to bring about a broad public debate on these technologies and their implications, leading to wise public policies surrounding their realization. Of particular interest to the program are the implications for society, medicine, and business of the human genome project and associated developments emerging from today’s revolution in molecular genetics and bioinformatics. The symposium he convened two years ago on the possibilities of manipulating the genetics of human embryos drew international attention as the first major public discussion of this issue among distinguished scientists and opened a global debate on this hitherto taboo topic.… read more
Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Consulting Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. The breadth of his interests and contributions is revealed through the academic departments and programs in which he has held faculty positions in leading liberal arts colleges and research universities: Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Computer Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History. He is a Fellow of the International Association… read more
Charles David George “Charlie” Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy. Stross was born in Leeds.
Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in… read more
Frank W. Sudia’s career has spanned consulting to US federal agencies on social and environmental programs; designing computer systems for official tracking, economic analysis, proxy voting, and bond trading; and venture development and technology licensing. In 1994 he co-founded the Bankers Trust Electronic Commerce department. In 1995-96 he authored the initial proposal for the Identrus digital certificate network, his largest system to date, including its Identity Warranty service. He has received 13 US patents, mainly in the field of online financial security, and is currently working in the area of intellectual asset management.… read more
