Bio
Sinan Aral
Sinan Aral‘s research focuses on social contagion, measuring and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks affects information worker productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing. He also studies the role of information and information technology in the productivity and performance of firms. Sinan’s work has been published or is forthcoming in American Journal of Sociology, the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, among many others. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern, holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.P.P. from Harvard.
Prior to MIT, Sinan was a Fulbright Scholar and worked at the European Commission in Brussels and as a technology consultant for several Fortune 500 firms.
Todd Benson
Johanna Blakley
Johanna Blakley, Deputy Director of the Norman Lear Center (a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California), spends much of her time exploring how our entertainment interacts with our political, commercial, and social habits. She is especially interested in the surprising impact of intellectual property rights on innovation, organizing conferences around the lack of creative ownership in fashion as well as technology and the ownership of creative content.
Blakley has worked across a huge variety of media platforms—producing for the web on a large scale, conducting gaming research, coordinating events for film festivals, and executing consumer research on entertainment and politics. Drawing on this vast body of experience, she also lectures at USC and helped develop their masters program in Public Diplomacy.
Brain Brett
Brian Brett is the Executive Director of Customer Research at The New York Times. Prior to joining The Times, Brian was the Director of Customer Research and Insights for Time Warner’s business and financial properties including CNNMoney.com, Fortune.com, Fortune and Money. He began his career at Conde Nast, where he held several positions in their Market Research Group for titles including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired.
Vasant Dhar
Vasant Dhar’s longstanding research has been on building robust automated decision making systems from large databases based on principles and methods from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and related disciplines. The emphasis is on predictive modeling, across areas that span financial markets and other domains including economic networks, news, sponsored search markets, blogs and other user generated content.
His more recent research has been on corporate governance of data and information technologies that balance their simultaneous benefits and risks, and on the transformational aspects of these technologies in business and society. Vasant has written over 70 articles, funded by grants from industry and the NSF. He pioneered the use of machine learning for predictive modeling on Wall Street and teaches courses on Trading Strategies, and IT and Corporate Strategy.
Scott Galloway
Scott is a clinical professor at the NYU Stern School of Business where he teaches brand strategy and luxury marketing and is the founder of L2, a think tank for digital innovation. Scott is also the founder of Firebrand Partners, an operational activist firm that has invested more than $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies. In 1997, he founded Red Envelope, an Internet-based branded consumer gift retailer. In 1992, Scott founded Prophet, a brand strategy consultancy that employs more than 120 professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Scott was elected to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Leaders of Tomorrow,” which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 “whose accomplishments have had impact on a global level.”
Scott has served on the boards of directors of Eddie Bauer (Nasdaq: EBHI), The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), Gateway Computer, eco-America, and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He received a B.A. from UCLA and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley.
Jessica Hagy
Jessica Hagy is an artist and writer best known for her award-winning blog, Indexed (www.thisisindexed.com). A fixture in the creative online space, Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking contributing to international media and events since 2006.
Her work has been described as “deceptively simple,” “undeniably brilliant,” and “our favorite reason for the Internet to exist.” She mixes philosophical concepts with humor and simple visuals, making even the most complex concepts immediately accessible and relevant.
Her next book How to be Interesting will be released in 2013 by Workman Publishing.
Anh Ly
Anh Ly is user experience designer for Bing’s Future Experiences team where she develops radical new ideas for search. Anh graduated from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where she created, among other things, a sandbox where you can physically dig for virtual dinosaurs and a mobile app that uses augmented reality to help people fix cars. Last summer, she worked as an interaction designer for Microsoft Research, developing a mobile platform for people to record and share stories. Prior to that, Anh was a multimedia producer and visual journalist for MSN Money, where she ate her way through stories such as “The $1,000 Sundae” and “The $1,000 Omelete” (it was delicious, but a little rich for her taste). Anh’s background in journalism led her to believe that everybody and every object has a story, so she tries to tell these stories through her designs. A native of the foothills of North Carolina, you’ll catch Anh’s southern twang when she gets overly excited. Anh is a fan of traveling, tango dancing and almost all food, except for papayas.
Eddie Opara
Eddie Opara is a designer whose work encompasses strategy, design, and technology. His projects have included the design of interactive installations, websites, user interfaces and software, brand identity, publications, packaging, and environments, with many of his projects ranging across multiple media.
He has taught at RISD, the Columbia University School of Architecture, and the Yale University School of Art. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and on the board of the New York Chapter of AIGA. Opara was featured in Ebony Magazine’s most recent ‘Power 100 Black American’ list as well as Fast Company’s 2012 ‘100 Most Creative People in Business’.
Opara studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and received an M.F.A. from Yale.
Matt Richardson
Matt Richardson is a student, writer, and freelance creative technologist. As a master’s candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), he created the Descriptive Camera, a concept camera that outputs text descriptions instead of photographs. Matt is also a contributor to MAKE Magazine and Makezine.com, covering creative uses of technology in the maker community. He’s the founder of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy.
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