by Ian Khan | Oct 10, 2023 | Futurist Blog
Philip Rosedale – Founder of Second Life and High Fidelity: A pioneer in virtual worlds, Rosedale's Second Life was one of the first platforms to popularize virtual social interactions. His later venture, High Fidelity, delves into shared virtual realities with spatial audio and VR integration.
Brenda Laurel – Virtual Reality Pioneer: Having been part of the early VR movement in the '90s with projects like “Placeholder”, Laurel's understanding of VR's potential in creating social connections is profound. She offers valuable insights on how VR transforms human interactions.
Palmer Luckey – Founder of Oculus VR: Luckey's Oculus Rift reignited the VR movement in recent years. With Facebook's acquisition of Oculus and its push towards “Horizon Workrooms”, the discussion around VR social spaces is more pertinent than ever.
Dylan Flinn – CEO of Shadow Factory: An expert in VR and AR narratives, Flinn's take on virtual social networks often delves into the storytelling and emotional connection aspects, exploring how we relate to each other in virtual spaces.
Isabelle Olsson – Lead Designer for Google Glass: While Google Glass wasn't purely a virtual social network, Olsson's insights into augmented reality's role in social interactions provide an interesting dimension to the conversation.
Yasaman Sheri – VR and AR Designer: Sheri has worked with companies like Microsoft and Google, focusing on how AR and VR can be harnessed for meaningful human connections. She often discusses the ethics and nuances of social interactions in virtual spaces.
Ben Lang – Co-founder of Road to VR: As someone deeply embedded in the VR industry, Lang's takes on the latest advancements in virtual social networking are both insightful and comprehensive, given his vast experience.
Jeremy Bailenson – Founding Director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab: Bailenson's work revolves around studying the nature of human interactions in virtual environments, making his insights grounded in rigorous academic research.
Rony Abovitz – Founder of Magic Leap: While Magic Leap focuses on mixed reality, Abovitz's vision of an interconnected virtual and physical world has significant implications for the future of virtual social networks.
AltspaceVR Team: AltspaceVR is one of the foremost platforms for social VR experiences. The brains behind this platform regularly share insights about the challenges and innovations in virtual social networking.
by Ian Khan | Oct 10, 2023 | Futurist Blog
Jack Dorsey – As the CEO of Twitter and Square, Dorsey has shown interest in decentralizing social media. Under his guidance, Twitter began a project called “BlueSky” aiming to develop an open and decentralized standard for social networks.
Ned Scott & Dan Larimer – As the founders of Steemit, they presented one of the earliest functional decentralized social networks where users can earn cryptocurrency for quality content.
Akon – The world-famous musician and philanthropist announced Akoin and the idea of creating a decentralized city in Senegal, emphasizing the potential of blockchain technology for decentralized applications including social networks.
Bill Ottman – As the co-founder and CEO of Minds, Ottman developed a blockchain-based social networking platform promoting freedom, privacy, and monetization.
Feross Aboukhadijeh – Known for “WebTorrent”, which is a decentralized BitTorrent client, Feross has been exploring the possibilities of a decentralized web, including the potential for decentralized social platforms.
Chad Barraford – The technical lead of the Blockstack project, Barraford has been instrumental in building a decentralized computing platform which includes social networking capabilities.
Jay Graber – Currently leading Project BlueSky (Twitter's decentralized social networking initiative), Graber was also involved in developing Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
Masha McConaghy – As the co-founder of BigchainDB and Ocean Protocol, Masha has been delving into decentralized databases. She has shown interest in how blockchain can be used to give users control over their online identities and social interactions.
Matthew Iles – Founder of the Civil project, Iles aimed at developing a decentralized platform for journalists, thereby reimagining the space of content creation and sharing on a decentralized framework.
Sunny Aggarwal – An active researcher and developer associated with the Cosmos project, Sunny has delved into various aspects of blockchain and decentralization, including its application in social networking.
by Ian Khan | Oct 10, 2023 | Futurist Blog
Dr. Natalie Enright Jerger: A professor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Jerger's research is centered on computer architecture with a focus on interconnection networks, including on-chip networks. Her contributions to the field are significant, having received numerous accolades.
Dr. John Kim: Based at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Dr. Kim's research on novel topologies for on-chip networks and scalable architectures has been foundational.
Dr. Radu Marculescu: A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Marculescu is recognized for his extensive work on design methodologies and architectures for multicore systems and the essential on-chip communication systems.
Dr. Tushar Krishna: Stationed at Georgia Tech, his research spans on-chip interconnects, Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures, and system-level interconnects, offering invaluable insights into the optimization of data movement within chips.
Dr. Li-Shiuan Peh: Currently at the National University of Singapore, Dr. Peh's expertise lies in the architecture of interconnection networks, with special emphasis on energy-efficient and high-performance on-chip networks.
Dr. Yuan Xie: A faculty member at Duke University, Dr. Xie has significant contributions in the fields of computer architecture and VLSI, especially focusing on on-chip interconnection networks.
Dr. Partha Kundu: Working with Intel, Dr. Kundu's research has a significant impact on commercial chip design, especially with innovations in scalable on-chip networks.
Dr. Chita Das: A distinguished professor at Pennsylvania State University, his works on on-chip networking architectures have paved the way for more energy-efficient and scalable multicore systems.
Dr. Davide Bertozzi: Based at the University of Ferrara in Italy, Dr. Bertozzi's research has extensively covered design methodologies for on-chip communication architectures, making strides in improving latency and bandwidth.
Dr. Sudeep Pasricha: A professor at Colorado State University, Dr. Pasricha's multifaceted research on on-chip communication architectures, NoCs, and embedded systems design methodologies has added considerable depth to the field.
by Ian Khan | Oct 10, 2023 | Futurist Blog
Ian Goodfellow: Often referred to as the “father of GANs,” Goodfellow introduced the concept while he was a Ph.D. student. His foundational work has driven the surge of interest in GANs within the machine learning community.
Soumith Chintala: A researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Chintala co-authored the DCGAN (Deep Convolutional GAN) paper which showcased how GANs can be utilized with convolutional networks, pushing the boundaries of image generation.
Alec Radford: A leading researcher at OpenAI, Radford's work on GANs, especially in the development of models like BigGAN and StyleGAN, has been instrumental in refining the capabilities of these networks.
Tero Karras: Affiliated with NVIDIA, Karras has worked extensively on projects like StyleGAN and its subsequent versions, which are known for generating high-resolution, realistic images.
Jun-Yan Zhu: A professor at UC Berkeley, Zhu's work on CycleGAN, a method to transfer styles between unpaired images, has garnered significant attention for its wide range of applications, from art to photo enhancement.
Phillip Isola: Another mind behind CycleGAN, Isola's research endeavors explore the diverse potential of GANs in areas like image-to-image translation, exploring how GANs can convert types of images into other types (e.g., sketches to colored images).
Taesung Park: Known for his involvement in projects like Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, Park's work revolves around the innovative applications of GANs, emphasizing practical utility.
Mario Lucic: A researcher at Google Brain, Lucic focuses on the scalability and robustness of GANs, aiming to develop methods that enhance their efficiency and reliability in real-world applications.
Ishaan Gulrajani: Credited for the “Wasserstein GAN” or WGAN, Gulrajani's approach has been influential in stabilizing GAN training, addressing one of the primary challenges in the field.
Anima Anandkumar: A professor at Caltech and director of ML research at NVIDIA, Anandkumar's insights into GANs cover their mathematical foundations, and she actively explores ways to make them more interpretable and robust.
by Ian Khan | Oct 10, 2023 | Futurist Blog
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton: Often dubbed the “Godfather of Deep Learning,” Hinton's research on backpropagation in neural networks laid the groundwork for the current boom in deep learning. He currently divides his time between Google and the University of Toronto.
Dr. Yoshua Bengio: A leading figure in the deep learning community, Bengio's work focuses on artificial neural networks and machine learning. He's a professor at the University of Montreal and has received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field.
Dr. Yann LeCun: As the Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and a professor at NYU, LeCun's pioneering work in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has significantly impacted image recognition tasks.
Dr. Andrej Karpathy: Currently the Director of AI at Tesla, Karpathy's work on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), particularly for sequence-to-sequence learning, has been influential. His Stanford course on deep learning for computer vision is a renowned resource.
Dr. Ilya Sutskever: As the co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI, Sutskever's research in deep learning covers various neural network architectures, and his work on sequence-to-sequence learning is particularly notable.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Known for her work on ImageNet, a vast visual database that advanced computer vision, Li co-leads Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and is a prominent voice on AI's societal impacts.
Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber: His contributions to recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have been foundational. He co-directs the Dalle Molle Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland.
Dr. Radford Neal: A professor at the University of Toronto, Neal's work on Bayesian neural networks provides a unique angle by combining probabilistic modeling with traditional neural network approaches.
Dr. Ian Goodfellow: Known for inventing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Goodfellow's contributions have opened up novel ways of generating synthetic data. He currently works at Apple as a Director of Machine Learning.
Sara Hooker: An AI researcher at Google Brain, Hooker's work focuses on the interpretability and robustness of neural networks. She's an advocate for democratizing access to AI knowledge and resources.
