Frank Lantz is a game designer with a focus on exploring emerging technology to create new kinds of gameplay. His most recent games include Universal Paperclips, Hey Robot, and Babble Royale. He is the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, the co-founder of Area/Code Games (acquired by Zynga in 2011), and the co-founder of Everybody House Games. He has taught game design for over 20 years at New York University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts and has created numerous influential talks and writings on the subject of games. Frank started Area/Code in 2005 with Kevin Slavin. Area/Code produced experimental cross-media, location-based, and social network games as well as the popular abstract puzzle game Drop7. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at This is Pop and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive. Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale real-world games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; Sharkrunners, which allowed players to interact with living sharks in a persistent virtual world, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Simon DeDeo is an associate professor in Social and Decision Sciences and the William S. Dietrich II Career Development Chair in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was previously affiliated with Complex Systems and the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University. Prior to that, Simon was an Omidyar Fellow at SFI. Simon has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. At his Laboratory for Social Minds he and his team undertake empirical investigations, and build mathematical theories, of both historical and contemporary phenomena. The data analyzed range from the centuries-long timescales of cultural evolution to the second-by-second emergence of social hierarchy in the non-human animals, from the editors of Wikipedia to the French Revolution to the gas stations of Indiana. They create synthetic, deep-time accounts of major transitions in political order, with the goal of predicting and understanding our species’ future.

Website: https://sites.santafe.edu/~simon/

Donald Hoffman is a Cognitive Neuroscientist who received his PhD from MIT, and joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine in 1983, where he is a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences. He is an author of over 100 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence, and his new book, The Case Against Reality. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. His writing has appeared in Edge, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Scientific American and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has a TED Talk titled “Do we see reality as it is?” and a podcast with Lex Fridman titled “Reality is an illusion.”

Twitter: https://twitter.com/donalddhoffman 

 Leroy "Lee" Cronin, the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and appointed to the Regius Chair of Chemistry in 2013. He was previously the Gardiner Chair, appointed April 2009. A professor of chemistry, nanoscience and chemical complexity, Lee Cronin and his research group investigate how chemistry can revolutionize modern technology and even create life. Lee Cronin's lab at the University of Glasgow does cutting-edge research into how complex chemical systems, created from non-biological building blocks, can have real-world applications with wide impact.

Dr Craig Heller is a professor of Biology at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in biology from Yale University. Craig is a physiologist and biologist at Stanford and is a world expert on the science of temperature regulation. Dr Heller has a wide breadth of knowledge of biology. He conducts extensive research in exercise physiology, including examining fatigue in athletes and has developed an instrument that allows increased exercise without fatigue.

Dr Heller’s research focus for over 40 years has been in the areas of physiology and neurobiology of temperature regulation, hibernation, sleep, circadian rhythms, and most recently learning and memory. Currently, he is studying neural mechanisms controlling arousal states and arousal state transitions, the function of sleep, and the neural mechanisms of circadian rhythms. Research on human exercise physiology focuses on the effects of body temperature on physical conditioning and performance. The focus on Down syndrome is exploring the mechanism whereby the reduction of GABA activity restores learning and memory in DS mice and also in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mustafa Abbas is an award-winning Emirati writer and director. His film Sunset State played in seven countries including the Dubai International Film Festival, where it premiered at. With his distinct style of filmmaking, Abbas has played a big part in developing the local film scene going back more than a decade. He is known as one of the pioneers in the Emirati film industry and has contributed in not only writing, producing and directing films but also has been on the jury for festivals as well as competitions including the first-ever Nikon Film festival,  and the Community Development Authority which is part of Dubai Government. One of his many highlights was being the guest of honour at a ceremony held by Dubai Customs where he was awarded for his work as an Emirati filmmaker. In 2020, his film The Long Game won over 15 awards in international film festivals and competitions. Most recently, he was once again a judge in the Ajman Film Biennale where films from all over the world were submitted.

Website: https://www.mustafaabbas.com/

Joscha Bach is a German Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence researcher. Joscha has an MA in computer science from Humboldt-Universität Berlin and a PhD in cognitive science from Osnabrück University. Bach has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück. He worked as a visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Joscha then joined AI Foundation, working as VP of Research. He is currently a Principal AI Engineer at Intel Labs Cognitive Computing group. Bach built MicroPsi, a cognitive architecture extending representations of the Psi-theory with taxonomies, inheritance and linguistic labelling; MicroPsi's spreading activation networks allow for neural learning, planning and associative retrieval. He has also worked extensively on novel data compression algorithms using concurrent entropy models.

Dr Ed Caddye is a Medical Doctor & Movement Specialist. Having studied Biochemistry and Medicine for over 12 years in the conventional sense Ed realised that the underlying principles could not be learnt and applied in isolation outside the laws of nature. In his own practices, he advises on well-being and quality of life using the newest science from the fields of chronobiology, evolutionary medicine and exposomics with the help of clinical metabolomics and movement coaching. 

He is on a mission to bring Health Optimization Medicine to the UK and further, introduce people to the concept of evolutionary medicine and cutting-edge clinical practices in health optimisation and maintenance. This framework can build a sustainable and pragmatic approach that aims to bridge all philosophies to move the needle on individual health and reduce suffering.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dredcaddye/

Dr Mark Goulston a retired psychiatrist and former UCLA professor of psychiatry and FBI had a subspecialty focus on suicide prevention and during his 40+ year practice, none of his patients died from suicide. He is the developer of Surgical Empathy an approach that reaches people at the core of their pain and helps break their attachments to destructive mindsets and behaviours. He is the author of nine books translated into 42 languages with his book, “Just Listen,” becoming the top book on listening in the world and was recently named the #4 Best Communication Skills Book of All Time by Most Recommended Books. He recently was honoured with the “Shine the Light Media Award” by the Los Angeles County Medical Association for bringing attention to teen mental health and suicide. He is an Executive Producer of the documentary, What I Wish My Parents Knew, and co-creator and moderator of the documentary, Stay Alive: An Intimate Conversation about Suicide Prevention. He is also a former FBI and police hostage negotiation trainer and host of the My Wakeup Call podcast. 

Website: https://markgoulston.com/

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he chaired the Department of Religion for eight years and helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He is presently serving as Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate Studies in the School of Humanities. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Jeff is the editor-in-chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion (ten volumes) and the author of eight monographs, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022). He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of science and American metaphysical literature for the University of Chicago Press collectively entitled The Super Story.