Utility + Function

Béla Fleck, (born July 10, 1958, New York, New York, U.S.), American musician recognized as one of the most inventive and commercially successful banjo players of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Fleck became fascinated by bluegrass music during his youth in New York City. He began to play banjo when he was 15 years old, inspired by the music of guitarist-singer Lester Flatt and banjoist Earl Scruggs—the performers of the theme song of the then popular television series The Beverly Hillbillies. Throughout his student years at New York’s High School of Music and Art, he studied banjo privately, experimenting with new sounds, techniques, and genres—particularly jazz. After graduation he joined the Boston-based bluegrass band Tasty Licks and recorded two albums with the group. In 1979 Fleck made his solo recording debut with Crossing the Tracks. He then toured with the Kentucky-based band Spectrum before joining the progressive bluegrass group New Grass Revival (NGR), with which he performed and recorded throughout the 1980s. While with NGR he also produced a number of solo albums, including the highly acclaimed Drive (1988). Following the release of NGR’s final album, Friday Night in America (1989), Fleck recorded The Telluride Sessions (1989), a landmark bluegrass album, with the all-star acoustic group Strength in Numbers. By this time Fleck’s technical proficiency on the banjo and his adventurous musical experimentation had earned him an international following.

Juan Martín Maldacena is a theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory. Maldacena obtained his licenciatura (a 6-year degree) in 1991 at the Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina, under the supervision of Gerardo Aldazábal. He then obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Black holes in string theory" under the supervision of Curtis Callan in 1996, and went on to a post-doctoral position at Rutgers University. In 1997, he joined Harvard University as associate professor, being quickly promoted to Professor of Physics in 1999. Since 2001 he has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and in 2016 became the first Carl P. Feinberg Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Institute's School of Natural Sciences. Maldacena has made numerous discoveries in theoretical physics. Leonard Susskind called him "perhaps the greatest physicist of his generation... certainly the greatest theoretical physicist of his generation". His most famous discovery is the most reliable realization of the holographic principle – namely the AdS/CFT correspondence, a conjecture about the equivalence of string theory on Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, and a conformal field theory defined on the boundary of the AdS space. According to the conjecture, certain theories of quantum gravity are equivalent to other quantum mechanical theories (with no gravitational force) in one fewer spacetime dimensions.

Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues in favor of veganism and his essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality”, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global por. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he stated in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. In 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald placed him among Australia’s ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of The Life You Can Save. Journalists have tagged him as the ‘world’s most influential living philosopher’ as Singer’s work on ethics behind the treatment of animals have been credited to starting the modern animal rights movements. He is a known critic of the sanctity of life ethics in bioethics. Several key figures in the animal movement have said that his book Animal Liberation, led them to get involved in the struggle to reduce the vast amount of suffering we inflict on animals. To that end, he co-founded the Australian Federation of Animal Societies, now Animals Australia, the country's largest and most effective animal organization. He and his wife, Renata, stopped eating meat in 1971. He is the founder of The Life You Can Save, an organization based on his book. It aims to spread Peter’s ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and how we can best do this. You can view his TED talk on this topic here. He has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, Rethinking Life and Death, One World, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek.)

Janna Levin is the Claire Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also the Chair and Founding Director of the Science Studios at Pioneer Works. A Guggenheim Fellow, Janna has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. She is the presenter of the NOVA feature Black Hole Apocalypse, aired on PBS—the first female presenter for NOVA in 35 years. Her previous books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, is the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago. Her most recent book, Black Hole Survival Guide, was published on November 10, 2020.

Vijay Kumar is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kumar served as the Deputy Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2000-2004. He directed the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory, from 1998-2004. He was the Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from 2005-2008. He served as the Deputy Dean for Education in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2008-2012. He then served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2012 – 2013). Dr. Kumar’s research interests are in robotics, specifically multi-robot systems, and micro aerial vehicles. He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR). He is the recipient of the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award, the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (University of Pennsylvania), the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics, the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, a 2012 World Technology Network (wtn.net) award, a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award and the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, and RSS 2013, and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010.

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has been since 2001 a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His main contributions have been so far to the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has been a co-inventor and major contributor to two major directions, loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity. He also contributes to cosmology, through his proposal of cosmological natural selection: a falsifiable mechanism to explain the choice of the laws of physics. He has also contributed to quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, the philosophy of science and economics. He is the author of more than 150 scientific papers and numerous essays and writings for the public on science. He also has written four books which explore philosophical issues raised by contemporary physics and cosmology. These are Life of the Cosmos (1997), Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2001), The Trouble with Physics (2006) and Time Reborn (2013).  Most recently, he coauthored The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time with Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Born in New York City, Smolin attended Hampshire College and Harvard University. After postdocs at IAS Princeton, ITP Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago he held faculty positions at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State University. A Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Society of Canada, Smolin was awarded the 2009 Klopsteg Memorial Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and in 2008 was voted 21st on a list of the 100 most influential public intellectuals by Prospect and Foreign Policy Magazines. He is again on that list in 2015.   This year Marina Cortes and he were also awarded the Inaugural Buchalter Cosmology Prize.  He is also adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Caroline Buckee joined Harvard School of Public Health in the summer of 2010 as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. In 2013, Dr. Buckee was named the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. The Buckee Lab uses mathematical models and data science to understand the mechanisms driving the spread of infectious diseases, with a focus on pathogens like malaria that effect vulnerable populations in low income countries. After receiving a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, Caroline worked at the Kenya Medical Research Institute to analyze clinical and epidemiological aspects of malaria as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work led to an Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, where she developed theoretical approaches to understanding malaria parasite evolution and ecology. In 2013 Dr. Buckee was named one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators under 35, a CNN Top 10: Thinker, and Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers. Her work has appeared in high profile scientific journals such as Science and PNAS, as well as being featured in the popular press, including CNN, The New Scientist, Voice of America, NPR, and ABC.  Dr. Buckee’s group uses a range of mathematical models, experimental and pathogen genomic data, and “Big Data” from mobile phones and satellites to understand how human pathogens spread and may be controlled. A major focus of the group is the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is still a major global killer of children under 5. Dr. Buckees work spans both the within-host processes that determine pathogenesis in individual hosts, and the population processes that sustain transmission and disease, working with vector biologists to understand the impacts of novel vector control approaches, and with mobile phone operators to track the migration patterns of people that import infections and drug resistant parasites when they travel. Dr. Buckee’s group is also interested in how to predict and contain the spatial spread of emerging pandemics.

Dr. James Gimzewski is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles; Faculty Director of the Nano & Pico Characterization Core Facility of the California NanoSystems Institute; Scientific Director of the Art|Sci Center and Principal Investigator and Satellites Co-Director of the WPI Center for Materials NanoArchitectonics (MANA) in Japan.  Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, he was a group leader at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he researched nanoscale science and technology from 1983 to 2001. Dr. Gimzewski pioneered research on mechanical and electrical contacts with single atoms and molecules using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and was one of the first persons to image molecules with STM. In 2001 Gimzewski became Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and in 2009 was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest award in Britain for excellence in Science. He received the 1997 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the 1997 The Discover Award for Emerging Fields, the 1998 “Wired 25” Award from Wired magazine and the Institute of Physics 2001 Duddell Medal and Prize for his work in nanoscale science. He holds two IBM “Outstanding Innovation Awards” and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Chartered Physicist.

Joscha Bach, Ph.D., is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation. He formerly held research positions in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at MIT and Harvard. Joscha’s work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly simulated fabric of our universe. He has been called the leading philosopher of AI today.

Scott Aaronson is a David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. Prior to coming to UT Austin, Aaronson taught for nine years in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and, more generally, computational complexity theory