SPEAKER BIOS:

Professor Juliet Floyd, is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, and a philosopher of logic, mathematics, and scientific method. She received her PhD from Harvard University and is Associate Senior Editor, Twentieth Century Philosophy, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and co-editor of the book Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application, and Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing. She also is co-directing a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, Humanities and Technology at the Crossroads, which is currently running through the end of 2018.

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and the best-selling author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE, a Financial Times Business Book of the Month and Finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company’s Bracken Bower Prize. He has been a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, and worked at Google, Facebook, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He holds three degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University.

In his debut book, THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE, Scott Hartley explores the vital role of the Liberal Arts in humanizing our technology. As we move to a world driven by big data, and powered by algorithms, Techies (those who have studied engineering and computer sciences) are of great importance. But as we prioritize Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects, we must also consider the overlooked but valuable role that the Liberal Arts play in our technological world. “Fuzzies” –as arts, humanities and social science students are known at Stanford University– help us apply our new tools with context, consideration, and relevance to the greatest human problems. Moreover, as machines take on more routine tasks within our jobs, what’s left are those human skills honed and refined through broad education. A new generation of entrepreneurs, those who are both fuzzy-and-techie, is fast emerging, and will be at the center of our future economy. We require the Humanities to make technology relevant.

Tony Hey began his career as a theoretical physicist with a doctorate in particle physics from the University of Oxford in the UK. After a career in physics that included research positions at Caltech and CERN, and a professorship at the University of Southampton in England, he became interested in parallel computing and moved into computer science. In the 1980’s he was one of the pioneers of distributed memory message-passing computing and co-wrote the first draft of the successful MPI message-passing standard.

After being both Head of Department and Dean of Engineering at Southampton, Tony Hey was appointed to lead the U.K.’s ground-breaking ‘eScience’ initiative in 2001. He recognized the importance of Big Data for science and wrote one of the first papers on the ‘Data Deluge’ in 2003. He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a Vice President and was responsible for Microsoft’s global university research engagements. He worked with Jim Gray and his multidisciplinary eScience research group and edited a tribute to Jim called ‘The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery.’ Hey left Microsoft in 2014 and spent a year as a Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. He returned to the UK in November 2015 and is now Chief Data Scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

In 1987 Tony Hey was asked by Caltech Nobel physicist Richard Feynman to write up his ‘Lectures on Computation’. This covered such unconventional topics as the thermodynamics of computing as well as an outline for a quantum computer. Feynman’s introduction to the workings of a computer in terms of the actions of a ‘dumb file clerk’ was the inspiration for Tony Hey’s attempt to write ‘The Computing Universe’, a popular book about computer science. Tony Hey is a fellow of the AAAS and of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was awarded a CBE by Prince Charles for his ‘services to science.’

Dr. Steven Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics. He has a doctorate from Caltech, and is the inventor of Mathematica, software for automating calculations and Wolfram|Alpha a knowledge engine that lays behind Siri and other AI interfaces—which is seen as a new interface for computation” that will enable humans and machines to interact at a vastly richer and higher level than ever before. He is the author of A New Kind of Science, published in 2002—where he calls for a revolution in traditional mathematical methods.