Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is on the board of The Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, an Emergency First Responder instructor and a Divers Alert Network instructor.

Ito was named by Businessweek as 1 of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom

Dr. Rob Carlson is a Principal at Biodesic, an engineering and strategic consulting firm in Seattle that provides services to governments and corporations around the globe.

At the broadest level, Dr. Carlson is interested in the future role of biology as a human technology. He has worked to develop new biological technologies in both academic and commercial environments, focusing on molecular measurement and microfluidic systems. Dr. Carlson has also developed a number of new technical and economic metrics for measuring the progress of biological technologies. Carlson is the author of the book Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life, published in 2010 by Harvard University Press; it received the PROSE award for the Best Engineering and Technology Book of 2010 and was named to the Best Books of 2010 lists by writers at both The Economist and Foreign Policy. Carlson earned a doctorate in Physics from Princeton University in 1997.