Alan is the father of the
personal
computer. He conceived the Dynabook concept which defined the conceptual basics for
laptop and tablet computers and E-books, and is the architect of the modern
overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI). He also defined the concept of
messaging-based object-oriented programming. Alan was one of the original designers
of the current Croquet system.
David
participated in the early
development of TCP/IP (Alan Kay refers to him as the “slash” in TCP “slash” IP) and
was the designer of the UDP protocol. He was one of the co-authors of the
“end-to-end principle”, which is the basis of the Internet. He is also known for
“Reed’s Law”, his assertion that the utility of large networks, particularly social
networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network. David was one of the
original designers of the current Croquet system.
Avi has been a
pioneer,
architect and advisor in AR/VR/MR for 30 years. In 1999, he co-founded the
company
behind Google Earth and subsequently helped define Second Life’s core technology.
Working
behind the scenes in the world’s largest tech companies, he helped found and invent
HoloLens
at Microsoft and he built the first prototypes for what is today called the “AR
cloud.”
Jeffrey Smith
is
an international
CEO,
investor and time-tested entrepreneur, who has delivered three decades of global P&L
leadership in enterprise software, AI, digital imaging and environmental engineering
across
the US, Europe and Asia. In all of his companies, he has achieved impressive
earnings growth
through comprehensive organic expansion and strategic M&A, driving 30+ strategic
transactions in 13 countries. As a CEO and principal, Jeffrey grew and successfully
exited
Flight LanData (sold to NASDAQ: KEYW), Gensym (NASDAQ: GNSM), Praim Technologies
SpA, and
SVI Asia.
Dan is a pioneer
of
object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and
implementer
of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He also invented BitBlit, the
general-purpose
graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, and pop-up
menus.
Ken Perlin was
founding director of
the NYU
Media Research Laboratory and also directed the NYU Center for Advanced Technology
from 1994
to 2004. Perlin has served as the director of the Future Reality Lab since it was
established in 2017. He was the System Architect for computer generated animation at
Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. 1979-1984, where he worked on Tron. He has
served on
the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH, and currently serves
on the
Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association. His invention of
Perlin
noise in 1985 has become a standard that is used in both computer graphics and
movement.
Tony Parisi is a metaverse and virtual
reality pioneer, serial entrepreneur, investor and musician. He is the co-creator of 3D
graphics standards, including VRML, X3D and glTF. Tony is the author of O’Reilly Media’s
books on Virtual Reality and WebGL: Learning Virtual Reality (2015), Programming 3D
Applications in HTML5 and WebGL (2014), and WebGL Up and Running (2012).
Tony has become one of the leading spokespeople for the immersive industry, speaking on
industry trends and technology innovations in virtual and augmented reality at numerous
industry conferences. He was recently named in Next Reality’s 30 People to Watch in
Augmented Reality in 2020.
Most recently, Tony was Head of XR Ads and E-Commerce at Unity, where he oversaw strategy
and product for the company’s real-time 3D brand advertising and commerce solutions.