David Pescovitz is partner and co-editor of Boing Boing, a technology and culture Web magazine. In 2018 he won a Grammy Award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for co-producing The Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition, the first vinyl release of the interstellar message for extraterrestrials. [1]
Pescovitz is co-founder of Ozma Records, a music label and publisher. Pescovitz was a research director at Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Silicon Valley, and still serves as a research affiliate. Pescovitz co-wrote the book Reality Check, based on his column in Wired magazine.
From 2000 to 2007 Pescovitz was the first ever writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. He has also contributed to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Bloomberg Businessweek, MTV, and Encyclopædia Britannica. His writings on technology and culture are featured in the books What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better, Dissident Futures, The Happy Mutant Handbook, and The 'Zine Reader.[ citation needed ]
Pescovitz holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati and a Master's in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
William Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,800 undergraduate and 13,200 graduate students. Berkeley ranks among the world's top universities.
David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL, and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint, a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group and film production company. Most of his artworks are labeled monochrom.
John Linwood Battelle is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing's direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company's programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to Sovrn Holdings.
XLR8R is a website that covers music, culture, style, and technology. It was originally also a print magazine.
Joseph Edward Bussard Jr. was an American collector of 78-rpm records. He was noted for owning more than 15,000 records, principally from the 1920s and 1930s, at the time of his death.
Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Mark Dery is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term 'culture jamming' and is generally credited with having coined the term 'Afrofuturism' in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.
Nicholas B. Dirks is an American academic and the former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. In June 2020, Dirks was named president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.
Eric Paulos is an American computer scientist, artist, and inventor, best known for his early work on internet robotic teleoperation and is considered a founder of the field of Urban Computing, coining the term "urban computing" in 2004. His current work is in the areas of emancipation fabrication, cosmetic computing, citizen science, New Making Renaissance, Critical Making, Robotics, DIY Biology, DIY culture, Micro-volunteering, and the cultural critique of such technologies through New Media strategies.
danah boyd is a technology and social media scholar. She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder and president of Data & Society Research Institute, and a visiting professor at New York University.
Michael Jay Moon is the co-author of Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age, as well as the co-founder and CEO of the consulting and research company GISTICS Inc.
Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Founded by Elon Musk and a founding team of seven scientists and engineers, the company's headquarters is in the Pioneer Building in San Francisco sharing offices with OpenAI. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.
Kal Spelletich is an American contemporary artist. A pioneer of San Francisco's machine art scene, he hand builds complex machines and robots. Current work, in 2018, includes building functional artificial robotic organs as a residence of the Stochastic Labs in Berkeley California. Through a collaboration with audience members who volunteer to control or operate his sculptures, Spelletich's work explores the interface of robots and humans. Early work frequently incorporated fire and "extremely dangerous" situations, to examine the boundaries of fear, control and exhilaration. By the late 1990s Spelletich started incorporating sensors in his sculptures to engage with questions about technology, spirituality, and play.
Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder of covariant.ai, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills, and co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system that has been implemented in over 500 universities nationwide. He is best known for his cutting-edge research in robotics and machine learning, particularly in deep reinforcement learning.