Almost two years after the beginning of the global financial crisis, the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting dedicated its 40th anniversary to a discussion on how to improve the state of the world through a unique call to action: Rethink, Redesign, and Rebuild. To this end, the agenda of the over 2500 stakeholders from business, government, the media, science, and civil society focused on inquiries such as how to strengthen economic and social welfare, how to mitigate global risks, and how to ensure sustainability at a global and regional level.
swissnex San Francisco is pleased to host local 2010 WEF participants Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research; Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley; Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic.com; and Paul Saffo (moderator), forecaster, essayist, and visiting scholar at Media X at Stanford University, for a debriefing session on WEF themes.
Bio
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik is professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley. An internationally recognized leader in the study of child development, she was the first to argue that children's minds may help us understand deep philosophical questions.
Gopnik has authored more than 100 articles and several books, including The Scientist in the Crib, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller that was translated into 20 languages. She has spoken extensively on children's minds, including keynote speeches at the WEF, the Organization for Economic Development, and elsewhere. She has appeared on Charlie Rose, Nova, and numerous NPR radio programs.
Loic Le Meur
Loic Le Meur is the CEO behind Seesmic. He founded the company in 2007, with the goal of turning online video into a powerful medium for threaded, interactive video conversations.
A seasoned entrepreneur, Le Meur launched several companies prior to Seesmic including: shared web hosting company RapidSite, (acquired by France Telecom), B2L, an interactive agency (acquired by BBDO) and Ublog (acquired by SixApart), after which Le Meur became Chairman of SixApart Europe.
In addition to his hands-on entrepreneurial expertise, Le Meur serves as a board member of Europe's no.1 dating site Meetic and leading online bank Boursorama. He also acts as a venture partner for Wellington Partners, and he helps bolster innovation in Europe through his conference LeWeb, Europe's leading web conference for businesses and web 2.0 entrepreneurs.
Le Meur took an active role in French President's Sarkozy's campaign, helping galvanize thousands of bloggers to support the candidate. Recently, BusinessWeek Magazine named Le Meur one of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Le Meur was also named "Young Global Leader" by WEF. Originally from the South of France, Le Meur lives in San Francisco, California.
Paul Saffo
Paul Saffo is a forecaster and strategist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He was initiated into the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus in 2000 and is chairman of the Most Important Committee.
Saffo is Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards and advisory panels, including the Stanford Advisory Council on Science, Technology and Society, and the Long Now Foundation, as well as the boards of several public and pre-public companies located the United States and abroad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum, which in the late 1990s named Saffo one of its "100 Global Leaders For Tomorrow."
Jill Tarter
Astronomer Jill Tarter is Director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute's Center for SETI Research, and also holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI. She has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere, and almost all aspects of this field have been affected by her work.
Tarter led for Project Phoenix, a decade-long SETI scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, using telescopes in Australia, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. While no clearly extraterrestrial signal was found, this project was the most comprehensive targeted search for artificially generated cosmic signals ever undertaken. Tarter currently serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array, a massive new instrument that will eventually comprise 350 antennas, each 6 meters in diameter. This telescope will be able to enormously increase the speed, and the spectral range, of the hunt for signals from other distant technologies by orders of magnitude.
member. 
