Eric Brewer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has led research projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, sensor networks, and security. His current focus is (high) technology for developing regions, with projects in India, Ghana, and Uganda (so far), and including communications, health, education, and e-government. In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation and helped lead it onto the Nasdaq 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! Working with President Clinton, Eric helped to create USA.gov, the official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 2000. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the “most influential person on the architecture of the Internet”, by InfoWorld as one of their top ten innovators, by Technology Review as one of the top 100 most influential people for the 21st century (the “TR100”), and by Forbes as one of their 12 “e-mavericks”, for which he appeared on the cover. He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering and named an ACM Fellow.

John Canny is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1987 Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in robotics, and won the ACM doctoral dissertation award. He then focused on the interaction between computers and the physical world -- robotics, geometry, vision and computational biology. Since the 1990s he has concentrated on the democratization of computing, and what it means to design systems for the everyday. In 2002, he started the Berkeley Institute of Design, an interdisciplinary, human-centered design research lab that now houses 30 researchers from 8 departments. His research priorities are educational technology, information technology for health care, persuasive technology, mobile human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. He won best paper prizes from ACM CHI 2007 and the Persuasive Technology Conference 2008.

Scott McNeil brings 17 years of experience in Silicon Valley startups and international nonprofits to his role as President of the De Novo Group - a social venture incubation unit at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held management positions at companies such as SuSE Inc., VA Linux Systems and IBM, and is experienced in product marketing and channel sales development both in the US and internationally. Scott’s nonprofit experience began with his appointment as the founding executive director of the Free Standards Group. In this role, he gained expertise in leading an international community of IT vendors, enterprise customers and open source software developers. By successfully building consensus among this diverse group, he was able to secure the global adoption of standards for the Linux operating system. Scott has also worked at the United Nations in China where he partnered with educators, government agencies and private industry throughout East Asia in building educational programs based on open source software. Recognized by InfoWorld as a “mover and shaker” in the open source community with “the ideas, the foresight, the connections and the ability to get things done in a timely manner”, Scott brings experienced community building, project management, and proven fundraising success to the De Novo Group.

Ray Umashankar served on the American India Foundation (AIF) Service Corps for 3 years and was the interim director for one year. He was a volunteer at Casa De Los Ninos, a shelter for abused children in Tucson, Arizona. He is the founding Director of the Virtual Development Center (VDC) which uses technology for addressing societal issues such as clean water access and health care education. He is currently Assistant Dean in the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona. Ray Umashankar’s life changed when his 23-year-old daughter returned from India and announced her intention to help children of sex workers and victims of trafficking in their native country. Inspired by her vision, he and his wife looked into the situation and found that most organizations working with these children taught basket-weaving and other low-paying skills that did nothing to offer a way out of the sex trade. Umashankar knew that these children needed marketable skills to land jobs in India’s growing high-tech sector. Along with his wife and daughter, he created the Achieving Sustainable Social Equality through Technology (ASSET) India Foundation, which has centers in Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata, as well as plans for three more Indian cities. Through ASSET, he also designs computer literacy and English training programs for teen children of sex workers. He was awarded the Purpose Prize by Civic Ventures in 2008.

Larry Upton is the founder and president of edioma, a Texas-based startup company that develops cellphone-based games that target English learning among Spanish speakers in the USA and Latin America. Larry founded edioma after having spent the last fifteen years in international business development for a variety of information technology start-ups. Larry has successfully closed business with many Global 1000 consumer electronics firms including Motorola, Sony Corporation, Philips Electronics, and Olympus. As head of business development, Larry has negotiated distribution agreements with Movida Celular, Fusion Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T Mobility and secured a strategic content development partnership with Grupo Cisneros, Latin America’s largest broadcast/online media producer. Larry holds a B.S. in Business Management from Millsaps College and a C.E.E. from the Sorbonne, Paris, France.