Imagining Summit Catalyzers

Jonathan Coulton is known for his eclectic catalog of masterful songwriting on subjects from zombies and mad scientists to sad parents and dissatisfied software engineers. He’s written songs for The Good Fight and Braindead TV series, as well as the Portal video games, and SpongebobSquarepants: The Broadway Musical. He was the house musician for the NPR show Ask Me Another and is the host and namesake of an annual floating nerd convention called JoCo Cruise.

Adam Cutler is a founding member of IBM Design and one of the first three Distinguished Designers at IBM. He was responsible for the design and build out of the flagship IBM Design Studio in Austin, TX. For his Distinguished Designer mission, Adam is driving development of IBM’s point of view on the practice of AI Design. He gave a TED talk on creating meaningful human/machine relationships. In addition to leading the creation of IBM’s AI design language, he is providing artifacts and education that integrate AI, design and design thinking to assist others in bringing responsible, human-centered experiences to AI-driven solutions.

Dr. Katie Davis is Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) and Director of the UW Digital Youth Lab. For nearly 20 years, Katie has been researching and speaking about the impact of digital technologies on young people’s learning, development, and well-being. She has published more than 90 academic papers and is the author of three books, all exploring technology’s role in young people’s lives: Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (with Cecilia Aragon), and The App Generation: How Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (with Howard Gardner).

Dave Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality where he combines decades of experience distilling and advancing big technology trends with a superpower for understanding how technology, design, and capital will shape our future. He previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Apple, CRV, Macromedia, Morgan Stanley, Quartz, and ThinkEquity.

Helen Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality where she combines decades of experience innovating across major industries with a superpower for identifying the next emergent scientific breakthrough that will impact our complex world of humans and machines. She previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (which Atlantic Media acquired) and worked at Fonterra, Meridian Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quartz, and Transpower NZ. Helen also serves as a Commissioner on the State of Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission.

Jamer Hunt collaboratively designs open and adaptable frameworks for participation that respond to emergent cultural conditions—in education, organizations, exhibitions, and for the public. He is the Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School (2016-present), where he was founding director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design (2009-2015). He is the author of Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible (Grand Central Publishing, March 2020), a book that repositions scale as a practice-based framework for analyzing broken systems and navigating complexity. He has published over twenty articles on the poetics and politics of design, including for Fast Company and the Huffington Post, and he is co-author, with Meredith Davis, of Visual Communication Design(Bloomsbury, 2017).

Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group's focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. The lab's current main directions are:

• Understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis;
• Creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and
• Using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.

As a Designer, Josh Lovejoy's approach is to address the heart of people’s needs, whether that’s through product development, fundamental research, or organizational practices. He is motivated by a restless curiosity about how our actions as individuals might better align with our values, especially those values that too-often "go without saying”. Josh currently works at Google, where he focuses on the UX of trust in personalization systems. Previously, Josh was Head of Design for Microsoft’s Ethics & Society team, led UX for Google’s People + AI Research initiative, architected Amazon’s unified design system for online shopping experiences, and co-founded a startup focused on eSports journalism.

Don Norman is famous for “Norman Doors”: doors that are confusing to open. He keeps changing fields. First, as an electrical engineer, then a mathematical psychologist, which became Cognitive Psych. But Don thought Cog Psych was too narrow, so he helped start the world's first department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego while consulting at Xerox PARC, publishing papers in the AI journals on what is today known as GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned AI). At UCSD, one of his young postdoctoral fellows in Cog Sci said he was wrong (Don likes it when this happens). While Don busy helping invent Human Computer Interaction, the postdoc, Geoff Hinton, worked with Don's colleague, Dave Rumelhart, to invent the modern neural network and back propagation algorithm. After life as VP of Advanced Technology at Apple he decided to become a designer in order to design designers. He's an educator, impacting students throughout the world through his lectures and books, including Design of Everyday Things and Design for a Better World. That last book compelled him to launch a charity, the Don Norman Design Award and Summit, https://dnda.design, to reward early career practitioners who launch projects for societal needs. In this first year, applications have been submitted from 26 countries.

John Pasmore. John recently founded and launched an Artificial Intelligence resource, Latimer.ai. This large language model (“LLM”) was built to deliver accurate historical information and bias-free interaction for Black and Brown audiences. From 1995 to 2005, John partnered with music impresario Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, to create Oneworld Media, Inc., where he served as CEO. Oneworld produced a magazine of the same name, a TV program with Warner Bros., and entered a multi-year custom publishing relationship with Hearst Magazines. John was also a co-founder and CEO of the venture-backed, video-based travel platform VoyageTV. He was a partner at the Family Office, TRS Capital, and several TRS Capital portfolio companies, including MovitaOrganics, an organic supplement company led by filmmaker Spike Lee's wife, Tonya Lewis Lee.

Elena Sergeeva is Co-founder of Tiamat Labs and a scientist at Tufts and Harvard.

Dr. Shah is currently a Principal Researcher on Salesforce's Responsible AI Team. Previous to that she was a senior researcher at Google - focusing on AI Responsibility, Ethics and Inclusion in Google Search’s GenAI products. She cares deeply about - and has a two-decades long track-record of - advancing responsible tech design, with a strong commitment to understanding harms, abuse, bias, and unintended impacts of technology global populations that are often the most left out of tech discourse. She holds a PhD (2020) from Stanford in Tech Design during which time her work was featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Root and beyond. She has also been a speaker at the White House, UC Berkeley, Aspen Institute, the UN. and more. Dr. Shah writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the opportunities and risks of AI. She is hopeful about the possibilities of AI to improve life for everyone, including the most vulnerable populations. And believes that the time is now to set the course of these powerful tools in a direction that serves everyone.

Steven Sloman has taught at Brown since 1992. He studies higher-level cognition. He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society. Along with scientific papers and editorials, his published work includes a 2005 book Causal Models: How We Think about the World and Its Alternatives, a 2017 book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone co-authored with Phil Fernbach, and the forthcoming Righteousness: How Humans Decide from MIT Press. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition, Chair of the Brown University faculty, and created Brown’s concentration in Behavioral Decision Sciences.

Barbara Tversky studied cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan. She held positions first at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then at Stanford, from 1978-2005 when she took early retirement. She is an active Emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Society for Experimental Psychology, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and a recipient of the Kampe de Feriat Prize. Her research has spanned memory, categorization, language, spatial cognition, event perception and cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, sketching, creativity, design, and gesture. The overall goals have been to uncover how people think about the spaces they inhabit and the actions they perform and see and then how people use the world and the things in it, including their own actions and creations and those of others, to remember, to think, to create, to communicate. Her 2019 book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, overviews some of that work. She has collaborated widely, with linguists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, architects, designers, and artists.