Victor Vina
Victor Vina is an interaction designer working on the intersection of design research, digital craft and open technologies. He has researched about networked objects (Royal College of Art, London), open systems to set up distributed wireless networks (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea), and more recently applications of Internet Zero for architectural applications (MIT CBA, Fab Lab Bcn). He is currently based half of the year in western countries (teaching) and the other half in emergent countries (learning).
Isaac Mao
Isaac Mao is a philosopher on Sharism, social entrepreneur, blogger, software architect and researcher in learning and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology. He is now managing director of Social Brain Foundation, board member to Tor Project, advisory to Global Voices Online and board member to several web 2.0 and new media businesses. As one of the earliest bloggers in the Chinese community, Isaac is not only co-founder of CNBlog.org which is the earliest evangelizing site in China on grassroots publishing, but also the co-chair of Chinese Blogger Conference.
Matt Ratto
Matt Ratto is an Assistant Professor and director of the Critical Making lab in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Past appointments include a postdoctoral position with the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information (NIWI), researcher and founding member of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam (VKS-KNAW), visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam, and a research position in the Humlab, University of Umea, Sweden. His current research focuses on how hands-on productive work. In particular, Ratto’s work addresses the movement of digital media and information from screens and into the material environment. This trend, known as ‘ambient’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing, or more colloquially as the ‘Internet of Things’, is the primary focus of his work and builds upon the new possibilities offered by open source software and hardware, and the developing technologies of 3D printing and rapid prototyping.