Maria Kalman: The humor of the everyday

Maira Kalman is the author and illustrator of numerous books for adults and children including What Pete Ate, Looking at Lincoln, The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker, most known for the NEWYORKISTAN cover created in collaboration with Rick Meyerowitz. 

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David Granger: The Eternal Now

David Granger was named editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine in 1997. Since his arrival, the 82-year-old magazine has entered its most successful era. Between 1998 and 2014, Esquire has been a finalist for more than 70 National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest honors, and has won 16, including the award for General Excellence in 2006. In 2004, the magazine received four National Magazine Awards, the most of any magazine in America. And in 2009, it won three, again the most of any magazine.

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Edith Elliott: People, not just patients

Edith Anne Elliott is the co-founder and CEO of Noora Health, which provides critical support services and training to hospitalized patients and their families, ensuring a smooth transition from hospital to home. Leveraging human-centered design, Noora Health has developed a simple, interactive and low-cost approach to teach basic treatments, encourage proper dietary/lifestyle changes, and recognize early warning signs of medical emergencies.

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Andrew Hessel: Writing chromosomes with code

Autodesk Distinguished Researcher Andrew Hessel is a catalyst in biological technologies, helping industry, academics, and authorities better understand the changes happening in life science. Andrew is a key member of the Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter group at Autodesk Research. He is also the co-founder of the Pink Army Cooperative, the world’s first cooperative biotechnology company, which is aiming to make open source viral therapies for cancer.

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Primoz Kovacic: Development is personal

Primoz Kovacic is the co-founder and director of Spatial Collective, a Nairobi-based social enterprise that uses Geographic Information Systems for community development. Through data collection and visualization, Spatial Collective helps communities to identify available resources and apply this knowledge in development initiatives. 

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Ti Chang: Products for women, by women

Ti Chang is the Co-Founder and VP of Design of CRAVE, a San Francisco-based company specializing in discreet and beautifully designed luxury sex toys. The DUET, Ti’s first design at CRAVE, debuted through a crowd-funding project, which ultimately secured over $100K from over 900 donors and become the world's first crowdfunded sex toy. Since then, Ti has continued to lead the concept and design for the company’s full line of products, including its celebrated foreplay jewelry. 

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Jessica Banks: Real furniture from unreal visions

Jessica Banks is an inventor, roboticist, and entrepreneur. She is the founder of RockPaperRobot, a company specializing in responsive objects that expand the functional and aesthetic versatility of traditional decor. From levitating and transformable tables to robotic chandeliers, RPR aligns time-honored craftsmanship with progressive engineering. She is also a creative and technical consultant on major advertising campaigns, global initiative development for international corporations, and robotic designs for high visibility clients. 

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Marissa Vosper & Lauren Schwab: Positively Negative

At Negative, Lauren Schwab oversees design, product development and production management. She works directly with the brand’s hand-selected factory partner in Medellin, Colombia. The daughter of a fourth generation childrenswear manufacturer, Lauren learned the ins and outs from her father, the former CEO of Little Me and Ralph Lauren Childrenswear.
 
Marissa Vosper was born and raised in Boulder, CO. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in Politics and Spanish, she moved to NYC, where she currently resides in Soho with her husband and fellow entrepreneur. 

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Fred Swaniker: Reimagining university

Ranked among the "top 10 young power men in Africa" by Forbes Magazine, and as one of the top 15 social entrepreneurs in the world by Echoing Green, Fred Swaniker is leading a quiet revolution in Africa. He is training Africa's future decision-makers, politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists and Nobel Prize winners. This serial entrepreneur has founded 5 organizations that aim collectively to groom 3 million high-impact leaders for Africa over the next 5 decades.

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Erika Hall: Asking "why?"

Erika Hall is the author of Just Enough Research. In 2001, she co-founded Mule Design Studio in San Francisco where she is the Director of Strategy. Erika speaks and writes frequently about cross-disciplinary collaboration and the importance of natural language in user interfaces. In her spare time, she battles empty corporate jargon at Unsuck It.

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Raj Jayadev: 1,862 fewer years in prison

Raj Jayadev is the founder and director of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a media community organizing and social entrepreneurial collective based in San Jose, California.
Through De-Bug, Raj started a family and community organizing model, the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project – a methodology for families and communities to impact the outcome of criminal cases involving loved ones, changing the landscape of the power of the court system. 

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Joyce Kim: 6 million financial transactions for just 20 cents

Joyce Kim is the Executive Director of Stellar, a technology that enables money to move directly between people, companies and financial institutions as easily as email. Stellar sees financial access as not the final destination, but rather a necessary precondition for people to fulfill their other basic human needs, such as education, food, healthcare and safety.

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Taylor Downs: Systems that just work

Taylor Downs is the founder of Open[Fn], a non-profit, fully open-source data integration platform that connects the "technology for development" sector.
Open[Fn] strives to make technology tools work more efficiently and effectively in the social sector through a process that ensures easy access to the best technology tools – in a sense, serving as its “app store.”. Beyond accessing the right tools, Open[Fn] also allows users to connect various technologies with clicks, not code. 

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Susana De Anda: Toxic California water

Susana De Anda is the co-founder and co-director of the Community Water Center (CWC), which helps build strategic grassroots capacity to address water challenges in small, rural, low-income communities and communities of color. Since opening its doors in 2006, CWC has worked with local residents from 82 California communities to improve access to safe, clean, and affordable water. CWC has trained over 2,674 residents as clean water advocates, and provided technical assistance to over 15 local water boards struggling to manage efficient and accountable water systems.

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Ed Boyden: Seeing very small things

Ed Boyden is Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and engineering the circuits of the brain. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include 'optogenetic' tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural circuit elements with light, 3-D microfabricated neural interfaces that enable control and readout of neural activity, and robotic methods for automatically recording intracellular neural activity and performing single-cell analyses in the living brain.

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Jill Magid: Art of surveillance

American artist Jill Magid’s work is deeply ingrained in her lived experience, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. Through her performance-based practice, Magid explores the emotional, philosophical and legal tensions between the individual and ‘protective’ institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story.

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