Program for the Future Challenge Advisors

John Seely Brown

John Seely Brown is a researcher who specializes in organizational studies and focuses on organizational implications of computer-supported activities in particular. His research interests include the management of radical innovation, digital culture, ubiquitous computing, autonomous computing and organizational learning. JSB is a former Chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and served as Director of the Xerox PARC Research Center. He is currently independent co-chair of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation and a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. (More about John Seely Brown at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seely_Brown)

Hiroshi Ishii

Hiroshi Ishii is Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab where he serves as Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Things That Think consortium and the Tangible Media Group. In the early 1990's Hiroshi's research group at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories invented products such as TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. Hiroshi's work focuses on changing the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information, and has been featured by SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. (More about Hiroshi Ishii at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Ishii)

Joichi Ito

Joichi Ito is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who currently serves as CEO of Creative Commons. Joi founded multiple companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and sits on the board of Machinima.com, EPIC, Technorati, Digital Garage, WITNESS and Global Voices Online, Mozilla, and ICANN. As a venture capitalist he has been an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, and Last.fm. Joi was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" in 2001 and was named as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by Business Week in 2008. (More about Joi Ito at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_Ito)

Thomas Malone

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Thomas predicted many of the major developments in electronic business over the last decade such as electronic buying and selling, electronic markets for many kinds of products, "outsourcing" of non-core functions in a firm, and the use of intelligent agents for commerce as early as 1987. He is author of The Future of Work, has published over 50 articles and is an inventor with 11 patents. Thomas was a research scientist at PARC before joining MIT. (More about Thomas Malone at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Malone)

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal, PhD. is a game designer and games researcher specializing in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. Previously with groundbreaking game design company 42 Entertainment, she worked as Community Lead for the well-known "I Love Bees" campaign. Jane has taught game design and game theory at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, and is Director of Game Research & Development at Institute for the Future, where she developed the Superstruct scenario game. Jane's current work is focused on massively multiplayer online games and collective intelligence. (More about Jane McGonigal at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_mcgonigal)

Paul Saffo

Paul Saffo is a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley. As a Consulting Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, he was named Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research network in 2008. Mr. Saffo was a leading futurist at Institute for the Future for over two decades. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in 1997. Paul is Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, the Long Now Foundation, a columnist for ABCNews.com, and his essays have appeared in publications such as The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. (More about Paul Saffo at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Saffo)

Dorai Thodla

Dorai Thodla is a serial entrepreneur who has built several technology businesses in the areas of learning technologies, databases, and the semantic web, including his current company iMorph, Inc. Dorai specializes in custom built collaborative components and solutions and has built several collaboratories for organizations like Dr. Douglas Engelbart's Bootstrap Alliance, Ameritech and OpenCourse.  In particular, Dorai created the Hyperscope, a Web-based implementation of Engelbart's Augment system. (More about Dorai Thodla at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dorai)