Emerging Technologies Conference 2007: Speaker Bios

Guy Kawasaki:

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Don Norman:

Don Norman lives two lives: theory and applications. As a cognitive scientist, he studies, teaches, and writes about the relationship between technology and people. In his applied life, he helps companies make products that appeal to the emotions as well as to reason.

Business Week calls him a “cantankerous visionary” — cantankerous in his quest for excellence. Upside Magazine named him one of the “Elite 100” for 1999. Dr. Norman brings a unique mix of the social sciences and engineering to bear on everyday products. Although he is a strong advocate of human-centered design and simplicity and perhaps best known for his book, The Design of Everyday Things, he now wants to ensure that products appeal to the emotions as well as to reason.

Dr. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm that helps companies produce human-centered products and services. Norman serves as advisor and board member to numerous companies and non-profit organizations in the area of policy and education. Among others, he serves on the editorial advisory board of Encyclopedia Britannica and on the board of overseers of Chicago’s Institute of Design.

Norman has also been Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer and an executive at both Hewlett Packard and UNext (a distance education company).

Raghu Ramakrishnan:

Raghu Ramakrishnan is VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he heads the Community Systems group. He is on leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Professor of Computer Sciences, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities such as Yahoo! Answers, and provided collaborative customer support for several companies, including Compaq and Sun. His research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data retrieval, analysis, and mining. He has developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and was among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into several commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL:1999.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2001, and has received several awards, including a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering , an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Faculty awards from IBM, Microsoft and Xerox, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.  He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD (Management of Data) , on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment and the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) , an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems , recently served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

Neal Stephenson:

Neal Stephenson is the author of the bestselling Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) as well as the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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