The HOPE Presenters
This is our initial list of presenters for the schedule so far. Many more are coming soon!
aestetix likes privacy, but really hates the web of trust. He also occasionally causes trouble for governments by holding them accountable.
Amelia Andersdotter (@teirdes) works at CENTR, a trade organization for the Council of European ccTLD registries. She also works on data protection in Sweden with DataSkydd. She was a member of the European Parliament until 2014 and promoted copyright reform, competition, and interplay between technical and legal standards.
Dr. Gillian "Gus" Andrews is not the titular honeypot. The honeypot is her email account. Gus's background spans hacking, education, and software usability. Her latest project, Keep Calm and Log On, is a handbook to help everyday people survive the digital revolution without getting trampled, and is available from MIT Press. Over the past five years, Gus has worked to improve everyday users' understanding of digital security through her work at the Open Internet Tools Project, Simply Secure, and ThoughtWorks. She has served as a user experience specialist at ThoughtWorks and at Linden Lab (home of Second Life). Her work on open-source encryption tools has informed policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the U.S. State Department. She is the creator of The Media Show, a YouTube series aimed at teaching digital and media literacy skills using snarky puppets. As a former panelist on the hacker radio show Off The Hook and organizer for the Hackers On Planet Earth conference, she has been engaged with digital rights and privacy issues for close to two decades.
Mehwish Ansari (@mehwishaansari) is a delegate for the U.K. to the ITU-T, ITU-D, and ITU Council. Previously, Mehwish worked on digital rights issues at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as part of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. She holds an MSc in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford.
Sarah Aoun is the chief technologist at the Open Technology Fund. As a human rights technologist, she works with activists, journalists, and high-risk communities on security and privacy. She has given numerous trainings on operational and digital security, and has worked with several groups and NGOs to set up organizational security practices. Sarah currently sits on the board of the Internet Freedom Festival. She was also a Ford-Mozilla open web fellow, an Internet freedom fellow, and an advisor to GJS Security and to the Human Rights Foundation.
Joel Austin is a spatial practitioner and researcher from London. His independent projects explore experimental modes of practice that prioritize socio-technological agendas and have been selected for exhibition at Manifesta Biennale and Thessaloniki Design Week. His project Agriact tackles the emerging market of temporal agricultural labor in southern Europe and was published internationally. In 2020, he will join the architecture department at MIT as an SMarchS research candidate.
Bruce Barnett (@grymoire) is a security consultant, research scientist, maker, and magician with 45 years experience. He has presented at DEF CON and runs the Hardware Hacking Village for ANYCon.
Emma Best (@NatSecGeek) is an independent journalist and transparency activist who has filed thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests with government agencies. Known for their tenacity and keen eye for the details in documents, they are a ruthless advocate for the truth at any cost. They co-founded the Distributed Denial of Secrets collective and coordinate its operations.
BiaSciLab (@BiaSciLab @GirlsWhoHack @SecureOpenVote) is a 13-year-old hacker and maker, as well as an international speaker. She received national attention when she hacked the voting reporting system at Defcon 26. This work was recently highlighted at the U.S. congressional hearing on election security. She is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Hack, an organization focused on teaching girls the skills of hacking so that they can change the future. She has also started Secure Open Vote and is building an end to end election system. BiaSciLab enjoys inventing things, giving talks, and teaching classes on making, programming, and hacking.
Molly de Blanc is a digital rights activist who draws on her experience of using technology while bipolar. She works for the GNOME Foundation.
Morgen Bromell is a founder and technologist working to make tech more accessible to people of color through justice-based initiatives and tech activism. Apart from being the founder of Thurst, a dating app for the LGBTQIA+ community, they are also deeply invested in community building and documenting queer histories, particularly how queer and trans people use digital resources and online platforms to navigate our world. Morgen began their interest in studying the intersections of queer organizing and digital platforms while both a student and youth activist in Brooklyn. They were fortunate enough to learn from elders and queer trans activists from Stonewall while working at some of the more premier digital media companies and immersing themselves in the NYC startup scene.
Bill Budington is a long-time activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His research has been featured in the The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and has been cited by the U.S. Congress. He is the lead developer of Panopticlick, led HTTPS Everywhere from 2015 to 2018, and has contributed to projects like Let's Encrypt and SecureDrop. He loves hackerspaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.
Dan Calacci is a PhD student and artist at the MIT Media Lab studying how data and algorithms impact community behavior and governance. They are also a co-founder and scientific advisor of Riff Analytics, which works to build AI-powered tools that help people learn how to collaborate more effectively and be more emotionally intelligent. Their recent research involves studying how new sources of data and methods of data governance can help communities and worker collectives advocate for a more just future. Their artwork and research have been exhibited and presented around the globe.
Roni Carta (Lupin) started programming at ten years old and then jumped to hacking at 13. Like everyone else, he was a script kiddie but wanted to quickly understand the whys and the hows. At 16, he hacked his high school for a project and got root in the main servers, and then finished in second place in the CSAW Red Team 2019 competition in Europe. Roni is now working on becoming a pentester.
Casandro is a German engineer in information technology. He is a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and interested in older technology, both from its technological as well as its social side. His article on Bildschirmtext as a potential alternative to web services made the front page of Die Datenschleuder (ds.ccc.de/pdfs/ds101.pdf). His first contact with the teletext family of standards came when his parents got their first teletext-capable TV set. This opened another window into the world, particularly as Austrian television soon carried a teletext course on teletext. In recent years, he has been fixing BTX decoders, has restored pages from tapes, and set up BTX dialup numbers.
Lena Chen (@elleperil) is an artist, organizer, and sex worker whose research examines labor, intimacy, and trauma. In 2018, she founded the expressive arts initiative Heal Her (www.healherproject.com), which has worked with artists, therapists, and survivors of sexual violence to convene trauma-informed storytelling circles in seven countries. She has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, SXSW, and re:publica; featured in international media (including The New York Times, CNN, The Independent, and VICE); and funded by the Puffin Foundation and the Burning Man Global Arts Fund. She received a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is currently pursuing her MFA at the Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art.
Andrew Crocker is a senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team. He focuses on EFF's national security and privacy docket, as well as the Coders' Rights Project. While in law school, Andrew worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Dylan Cruz is a 17-year-old phone phreak from Winter Springs, Florida who has been interested in the telephone for a very long time. He has a particular interest in the U.S. phone network of the 1970s and 1980s, a time he never experienced, yet feels nostalgic for. In early 2018, along with a few friends, he started the NPSTN phone network (npstn.us) for telephone phreaks, collectors, professionals, and hobbyists. From that point he has learned a great deal about the phone network and even started his own company: The Mountain Pacific Telephone Company, registered in the state of Montana. A phone phreak since he was 12, Dylan plans on becoming a registered CLEC.
The Cypurr Collective is a group of cybersecurity fans who love to put on accessible and holistic workshops around privacy and security. Started in 2016, they host regular cryptoparties, social events, and discussions, with the purpose of helping folks learn how to protect their privacy and security online, in the face of peer, corporate, and state actors, focusing on a harm reduction approach to personal safety. They've held digital security workshops at venues such as New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Bluestockings, Babycastles, and the Silent Barn, and they are a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. Their work can be viewed at cypurr.nyc.
Eric (XlogicX) Davisson (@XlogicX) hacks at anything low level. He's unmasked sanitized IP addresses in packets (because checksums) and crafts his own pcaps with just xxd. He feeds complete garbage to forensic tools, AV products, decompression software, and intrusion detection systems. He likes to craft his own length/distance pairs to "compress" his own Deflate data. He made evil strings more evil (with automation) to exploit high consumption regular expressions. Lately he has been declaring war on assembly language (calling it too high-level) and doing all kinds of ignorant things with machine code. He will beat your high score on nearly any boot sector game, in some way or another...
The Doctor is a security practitioner and systems engineer working somewhere on the west coast. When not reading hex dumps, writing agents and bots, or spending time with his family, he spends too much time and money restoring and tinkering with classic 8-bit computers. He occasionally blogs about what he's working on (and sometimes how it nearly blew up in his face). Many of his programming projects recently have been to help people assess the risk of COVID-19 and determine what safety measures to take. A nontrivial fraction of his exocortex is interfaced with the Fediverse.
Mickael E. is a security engineer at Freedom of the Press Foundation and the lead developer of SecureDrop.
Elliot is a motion artist and creative coder who works in interactive, fabrication, and large scale immersive experiences. Elliot blends visual work with an interest in mutual aid, security, and privacy online. Based in Brooklyn.
Christopher M. Flatley has a masters degree in cybersecurity and is currently a full-time instructor at SUNY Rockland for the cybersecurity department where he also coaches a competitive hacking team. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai Jian Qiao University. He is a partner in a cybersecurity firm which specializes in vulnerability and risk assessments for financial institutions and other organizations in regulated industries. In this role, he oversees offensive operations with a specialization in physical entry, wireless exploitation, and network infiltration.
Corbin Frisvold (@QuesoSec) is a 16-year-old hacker and polymath, involved in many fields such as mathematics, physics, computer science, and electrical engineering. He attended his first infosec conference (BSidesDE) at six years old and hasn't looked back. Since then he has worked on many significant projects, including publishing research papers on evolutionary soft robotics, running a village for kids called SpawnCamp, and running a blog at maker.godshell.com. Currently he is working on projects involving machine learning and its applications to robotics.
Jason Garbis has worked in the software industry for over 30 years, in roles that include software engineer, technical consultant, and product manager. This makes him quite old! In addition to his current professional role leading product management for a zero trust network security vendor, he embraces being a lifelong learner and isn't embarrassed to be a beginner at new things, even at his advanced age. He is a published author, and holds a CISSP certification.
Robert W. Gehl is an award-winning author, professor, and a Fulbright fellow. He is currently the F. Jay Taylor endowed chair of communication at Louisiana Tech.
Marjorie George is an educator who has retired from the New York City school system and loves to explore the globe. She and Phillip Scroggins have been traveling the world together (mostly during summer vacations) for over 20 years and, between them, have visited every continent on Earth, over 90 percent of that travel having been done using airline miles.
The_Gibson is the admin/operator of hackers.town, founder of DefCon502, an 80s/90s hacker kid, infosec consultant, and fiery defender of privacy and human liberty. When not advocating for distributed platforms, he likes to plan how to secure enterprises and free the Internet from the clutches of megacorps, you know, just cyberPunk things....
Naomi Gilens, EFF's Frank Stanton fellow, is an attorney specializing in free speech litigation. Prior to joining EFF, she worked on issues of free speech, privacy, and government transparency at the ACLU. Naomi graduated from Harvard Law School and Princeton University, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable David J. Barron of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the Honorable Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a contributor to free software projects including Debian, notmuch, GnuPG, and Enigmail, and a technologist for the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He is also a participant in the IETF, where he focuses on security, privacy, and other protocol features that impact civil rights and liberties.
Randy Gingeleski is an application security engineer for WarnerMedia. He tends to bot online games if their makers don't watch closely, and was a "consultant" in another life.
Joe Gray joined the U.S. Navy directly out of high school and served for seven years as a submarine navigation electronics technician. He is currently a senior OSINT specialist at Qomplx, Inc. and previously maintained his own blog and podcast called Advanced Persistent Security. Joe has contributed material for the likes of Tripwire, AlienVault, ITSPmagazine, CSO Online, Forbes, and Dark Reading, as well as his own platforms. He is the author of a few OSINT tools, such as WikiLeaker and the forthcoming tools Decepticon and Intercepticon.
Bill Graydon is a principal researcher at GGR Security where he hacks everything from locks and alarms to critical infrastructure. This has given him some very fine-tuned skills for breaking stuff. He's passionate about advancing the security field through research, teaching numerous courses, giving talks, and running DEF CON's Lock Bypass Village. He's received various degrees in computer engineering, security, and forensics and comes from a broad background of work experience in physical and cyber security, software development, anti-money laundering, and infectious disease detection.
Dana Gretton is a maker, programmer, artist, and informal learning enthusiast. He has some radical ideas about what education can be and what it is not. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering and computer science, and a current graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. His current work is in robotic biological process automation and cryptographic systems to make DNA synthesis safer.
Dr. Matthew Guariglia is a policy analyst working on issues of surveillance and privacy at the local, state, and federal level at EFF. Matthew received a PhD in history at the University of Connecticut where his research focused on the intersection of race, immigration, U.S. imperialism, and policing in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to the Freedom of Information-centered outlet Muckrock, and he is a visiting scholar in the Department of History at UC Berkeley.
Christopher Guess has been the lead technologist at the Duke University Reporters' Lab for the past five years where he helps lead a team dedicated to automating fact checking and making fact checking more accessible to the audience via policy, technology, and reporting. Previously, Christopher worked on organized crime and money laundering in Eastern Europe with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as a technologist for two years based in Sarajevo. In addition, he has been a working reporter in the U.S. and abroad, as well as founding multiple tech startups in his current base of operations in New York City.
Phillip Hallam-Baker is a member of the CERN team that designed the World Wide Web, He has made seminal contributions to the design of HTTP, SAML and web services security. As principal scientist of VeriSign and Comodo, he was a formative influence on the deployment of X.509v3 to form the WebPKI. Along the way, he once deployed an email server in the Executive Office of the President for use by the Clinton administration.
Alexis Hancock works to secure the web by working on HTTPS Everywhere (www.eff.org/https-everywhere). She has previously been a web developer and system administrator for seven years and a statistician in the education realm. She has earned degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology in media arts and technology (B.Sc.) and The New School in organizational change management (MS). She is very passionate about encryption and tech equity for all, and has been assisting activists and educators with their tech needs for almost ten years.
Russell Hanson is a well-known biohacker and scientist pushing the envelope in neuroscience, AI, and biosensors and applications. His work in neurohacking and applications of AI to neuroimaging has been published in Nature and other specialty journals. After training in Boston at the Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he joined the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He serves as a founding partner or advisor to several biotech companies including Ligandal, Aptavid, and Brain Backups. His work has been featured in Wired, the Chaos Computer Club, and Vice. In his spare time, he likes to go paragliding.
Abi Hassen is an attorney, technologist, and co-founder of the Black Movement-Law Project (BMLP), a legal support rapid response group that grew out of the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. He is currently a partner at O'Neill and Hassen LLP, a law practice focused on indigent criminal defense. Prior to his current work, he was the mass defense coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. Abi has also worked as a political campaign manager and strategist, union organizer, and community organizer. Abi conducts training, speaks, and writes on topics of race, technology, (in)justice, and the law.
Harlo Holmes is the director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within the ir newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist; and is an adjunct professor at New York University.
Cedric Honnet is a research engineer with a background in embedded systems. He explores the connections between interactivity and the arts by traveling the world of research labs and hackerspaces. He worked as a firmware engineer and "InterHacktivist," co-founded a couple of companies developing tangible interfaces, and created interactive systems/installations worldwide. He has worked on eTextile music controllers, augmented immersive systems, interactive art pieces, modular implants, 3D positioning systems, and many other open source projects.
Attilla de Groot (@packet_ninja) has spent the last 15 years at the cutting edge of networking, having served time with KPN, Amsterdam Internet Exchange, and HP, with exposure to technology from Cisco, HP, Juniper, and Huawei. He now works for NVIDIA Networking (formally Cumulus Networks), the creators of open networking, where he is able to continue his interest in open architecture desivgn and automation.
David Hétu leads the scientific research operations as chief research officer at Flare Systems. A PhD in criminology from the Université de Montréal, he focuses his research on illicit markets on the Internet and the "darknet." His findings, published in over 40 articles over the last ten years, have provided insights into the structure and inner workings of the criminal underground.
John Huntington is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology, also known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY (City University of New York). Through his company Zircon Designs, John freelances as an author, entertainment and show control systems consultant, and sound engineer. He is also an award-winning photographer. He studied technical design, production, theatre engineering, and sound at the Yale School of Drama (MFA) and Ithaca College (BFA). He lives in New York City and is a member of Local #1 IATSE. He is also a whitewater and sea kayaker, mountain and road biker, and storm chaser.
Harri Hursti was featured in the HBO documentary Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections, which explored the sad state of affairs of how little improvement has occurred during the last 15 years, and how many new exposed surfaces have emerged. Harri has been an official election observer at ground zero from New Hampshire to Georgia, observing the issues firsthand and he co-organizes the Voting Machine Hacking Village at DEF CON.
Dr. Harry Jackson has over 15 years of federal government experience in information system security. He has considerable experience implementing federal cybersecurity compliance. He has comprehensive and detailed knowledge of information system security project planning, strategies, policies and regulations, systems integration and administration, change management impacts, and security awareness training/support. He is currently an IT consultant specializing in support to the intelligence community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DoD). Dr. Jackson is the former information systems security manager for DHS BioWatch and is a whistleblower regarding fraud, waste, abuse, gross mismanagement, and mishandling of classified information within the BioWatch program.
Javaman is a security company founder and a fundraiser for Cult of the Dead Cow member and former presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke. He will outline the role he and others have taken to protect campaigns from being hacked and to coordinate support for underdog candidates nationwide.
Shee Jin has passion in computer security, electronics, the maker community, and the Internet of Things.. He has work experience from Dell, Apple, AirAsia, and Symantec as a consultant. Jin moved on to help the public create makerspaces and ran a few maker-centric events. IoT and low powered connectivity has always been a personal challenge to create affordable and customized devices to track everyday objects and solve daily problem with AI. Jin currently works with Mereka makerspace as their electronic tech expert and has helped run a few community programs during the COVID-19 crisis to assist the front lines, such as RumahKita (a back-end logistic service for COVID-19) and the Mereka Faceshield and PPE program.
Jamie Joyce is the founder and executive director of the Society Library, a non-profit organization that mines arguments, claims, and evidence from various forms of media to create a library database of a given society's ideas. The Society Library dives headfirst into highly polarized, persistent, and high-impact subjects to create new communication strategies to reintegrate the societies fracturing from polarization, narrative warfare, and manipulative partisan marketing.
Karamoon is a British hacker based in Tokyo. His main interests are intertwingularity, deep hypertext, Raspberry Pi, and Amiga games. His life changed dramatically when he picked up a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly in late 2001. In 2016, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived to hack, now he now hacks to live.
Dr. Tom Keenan taught Canada's first computer security course in 1977 and, since then, has been a systems programmer, computer science professor, expert witness in technology cases, and the author of the best-selling book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. He has spoken about hacking related topics on five continents. Tom was educated at Columbia University, earning four degrees in philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and education. He is a currently a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at the University of Calgary, where he teaches courses on smart communities. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science where he teaches courses in computer security and cyberwarfare. He is a fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and board chair of the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada. He was also one of the folks who attended the early 2600 meetings in Manhattan where people ran to the bank of telephones in the Citicorp Building to try phone hacks they had just learned.
Jason Kelley is a digital strategist at EFF who has assisted in and led various campaigns fighting back against face recognition and surveillance, as well as campaigns promoting privacy. Along with Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, Jason helped guide the research and creation of the Who Has Your Face website, including compiling previously gathered public records, submitting new public records requests, and assisting in the design and organization of the quiz's presentation.
Josh King is the co-founder of Throneless Tech, a DC-based tech worker cooperative. He has over a decade of experience in software development, software architecture, network engineering, and systems administration for social justice. He develops community-oriented technology and secure communication platforms to enable the work of organizers, activists, and journalists globally.
Kody Kinzie is a security researcher at Varonis, with a background in Wi-Fi security and low-cost hacking tools. He hosts the Cyber Weapons Lab show on Null Byte's YouTube channel, a soon to be released show for Hak5, and the Varonis Security Tools podcast. Aside from Wi-Fi hacking, Kody also teaches about open-source intelligence, Python programming, and Arduino-based hacking tools.
Mallory Knodel (@malloryknodel) is the CTO for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington DC. She advises the Freedom Online Coalition on human rights respecting cybersecurity policy and is the co-chair of the Human Rights and Protocols Considerations research group of the IRTF.
Nicholas Koch is a cybersecurity student at Pensacola State College. He is also the president of Information Security Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to information security education and training in the Gulf Coast. He has worked for over five years as an operator for a UL listed central station, monitoring burglary and fire alarms.
Tom Kranz is a director and cybersecurity consultant who helps organizations to understand and address cybersecurity threats and issues. Tom's career started over 30 years ago, armed with a BBC Micro and illicit access to Prestel (and other U.K. systems). After a successful consulting career helping U.K. government departments and private sector clients (including Betfair, Accenture, Sainsburys, Fidelity International, and Toyota), he now advises and supports organizations across Europe on their cybersecurity strategy and challenges. Tom lives with his partner in Italy, where they rehabilitate their collection of rescue dogs and cats, as well as managing their many opinionated ducks.
Oryx/Sarah Kraynick is a self-created hacker that roams the world in search of hacker enlightenment. Currently she is holed up in her off-grid cabin prepping for the zombie apocalypse, or better known as the provincial election. Her day job is hacking systems and advising various clients, in other words, a consultant. She currently is leading the vetting efforts for the Saskatchewan Green Party and designing the party's policies on cyber security and privacy. In her off time, whenever that is, she is a Muay Thai fighter and contributes to open source projects.
Michael Kreil is an award-winning journalist and data scientist. He has been specializing in handling and researching large amounts of data for over two decades. In the last three years, he has scraped about five billion tweets and uses the data to review numerous research papers on social bots.
Liam Kurmos is founder of the Astralship hackbase project in Snowdonia, Wales. Launched as Astralship.org in January 2017, the project has been converting a 19th century Welsh chapel into a hacker pirate ship.
Sean Lawson is associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at the Marine Corps University.
leethacks is a computer science professor at an undisclosed university in the United States.
Kwan Q Li is a Hong Kong interdisciplinary artist, weedist, occupational realist, and more. Coalesced with performance and writing, her research-based practice explores post-colonial intricacies and ideological alternatives within the neoliberal context. Former exhibitions include performances and lectures at the Ashmolean Museum, the AI & Society Journal conference, and IdeasCity residency. Queenie is from the ACT Class of 2022 at MIT.
Dave Maass (@maassive) is a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is part of EFF's Threat Lab, which conducts deep-dives into how surveillance technologies are used and abused to target vulnerable populations. He is also the visiting Reynolds professor of media technology at the University of Nevada, Reno's Reynolds School of Journalism, teaching cybersecurity, data journalism, and filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Maddalena (@maddalenaesp) has a background that spans from linguistics to technology and human rights. After completing her MA, Maddalena went on to volunteer as a policy researcher for Big Brother Watch, focusing on online harms. However, Maddalena's research interests are broader - she is currently looking at abuse, labor and exploitation in technology.
Naz Markuta is a cybersecurity researcher, focusing on web applications, vulnerability research, and mobile telecoms. Active in multiple public and private bug bounty programs, his current research projects include: building a LTE IMSI catcher, spoofing public emergency alert messages, 5G mobile network and infrastructure, and product and software security testing.
George Maschke is a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org, a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending polygraph-related waste, fraud, and abuse. He is a former U.S. Army interrogator and reserve intelligence officer, and a student of the Arabic and Persian language.
Carlos Martinez (cacu, carlosm2) was born in Mexico City and has extensive experience organizing digital security workshops, as well as a lot of work with human rights organizations, journalists, software developers, and activists around Latin America. For ten years, he has been involved in Free Software, social movements, and privacy. Carlos is part of Hacklab Autonomo, Hackerspace Rancho Electrónico, and Tierra Comun Tech Cooperative.
Freddy Martinez is a technologist and expert on surveillance. He was previously a Ford-Mozilla open web fellow at Freedom of the Press Foundation. During his fellowship, he worked on democratizing access to public records requests with a focus on police accountability and transparency. A longtime Chicagoan, his focus for the future include issues around cell phone privacy, working with marginalized communities, and the intersection of digital rights and activism.
Takasu Masakazu has a great deal of experience at various Maker Faires in Asia, including Maker Faire Shenzhen, Maker Faire Singapore, Shanghai Maker Carnival, and others. He is now based in Shenzhen. His company Switch Science is among the most well known for maker tool platforms and DIY indie products in Japan. He wrote the book Ecosystem by Makers, which is well known in Japan.
Maggie Mayhem is a former sex worker and current full spectrum doula. She has spoken previously at HOPE as well as DefCon, Skytalks, SxSW, the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, as well as many events and universities around the world. Her website is MaggieMayhem.Com.
India McKinney is the director of federal affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Prior to joining EFF, India spent over ten years in Washington, DC as a legislative staffer to three members of Congress from California. Her work there primarily focused on the appropriations process, specifically analyzing and funding programs in the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Justice. Her biggest legislative accomplishment was authorizing, funding, and then naming a new outpatient VA/DoD clinic that will serve over 80,000 people. India's passion has always been for good public policy, and she's excited to be using skills developed during legislative battles to fight for consumer privacy and for robust surveillance oversight.
Christian McLaughlin is a U.S. Navy veteran, public speaker, and social engineer extraordinaire. Specializing in physical pen-testing, he has been working in the field for quite some time and has studied sociology and how humans interact with each other as a species. He leverages these experiences in order to exploit weaknesses in the security of the organizations that he tests. Lockpicking is fun, but it is always the last thing Christian does. His favorite way of getting access is just asking. He would love to be given the opportunity to break into your organization and help ensure that every weakness gets addressed.
Mek (@mekarpeles) libraries and runs OpenLibrary.org with a vibrant open source community at the non-profit Internet Archive (archive.org). There, he serves in the memory of Open Library's founder and his hero, Aaron Swartz, to help make millions of books freely accessible to read or borrow. Before joining the Archive, Mek co-founded two small startups, helped lead engineering for two YC companies, and was a regular tinkerer at the Noisebridge hackerspace. In his free time, when rock climbing gyms are closed, Mek helps facilitate Archive Labs (www.archivelab.org), an autonomous, volunteer-run incubator which promotes for open access and public good, is a steering member of the Open Book Genome Project (bookgenomeproject.org), mentors non-profits at ffwd.org, and prototypes open source knowledge maps and tools for thought. You can help him feed San Francisco's hungry at peanutsforgood.org and follow his life progress at mek.fyi.
Allie Mellen is a security strategist at Cybereason. She has spent several years in cybersecurity and has been recognized globally for her security research. Over the past year, she has helped organize and execute multiple election security tabletop exercises with participants from the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and state law enforcement. In these sessions, it's hackers versus law enforcement as an exercise in what attackers can do to disrupt Election Day and what the government is prepared to do - or should be prepared to do - to stop them.
Joseph Menn is the author of Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, inducted in June 2020 to the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame. He has written on hacking for 20 years as a journalist, most recently at Reuters, and wrote previous books on organized Russian cybercrime and on Napster.
Charlie Mewshaw is the security operations and incident handling team lead at UNC Chapel Hill's information security office and co-host of the podcast Data@Rest. He's a perpetual optimist that things are getting better in the field and that people, not appliances, are at the core of strong security programs. He has the CISSP, CASP, and GPEN certifications. He enjoys making things at work that kick off SCEP alerts and then watching the enterprise monitors try to figure out what just happened. His hobbies include video games, tabletop games, and hiking.
Eric Michaud is an expert in physical and cybersecurity with over 15 years experience. He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world, and his skill at opening impossible-to-pick locks earned him a place in locksport history with the "Michaud Attack." He co-founded and served on the board of directors for The Open Organisation of Lockpickers and is referenced widely in academic papers, talks, and books including Open in Thirty Seconds: Cracking One of the Most Secure Locks in America and No Tech Hacking: A Guide to Social Engineering, Dumpster Diving, and Shoulder Surfing. He was a computer and physical security analyst at Argonne National Laboratory, where he worked on nuclear security, counter proliferation tools development, and voting machine security. Eric has an abiding love for projects at the intersection of art and technology, and is a longtime collaborator with the Cacophony Society and Austrian avant-garde art group Monochrom.
Rory Mir is a grassroots advocacy organizer, primarily working on the Electronic Frontier Alliance. They are also a doctoral student of psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center studying activist pedagogy. Before coming to the EFF, they were active in several New York City groups, including the Cypurr Collective, a member of the EFA engaging in community education on matters of cybersecurity. A longtime advocate for open education and open science, they want to break down any barriers folks face to free expression, creativity, or knowledge.
Edward Miro has been in the IT world for 20 years, most recently teaching cyber security classes at Butte College in California. He is currently developing and running a free open source social engineering class called OSEEC. Edward is very passionate about the information security community and is very involved in his local hacker scene and education of the next generation. He is also active online and recently hosted his own mini hacker con for his students.
Orson Mosley is a cybersecurity researcher specializing in low level software reverse engineering. His love of reverse engineering started at 17 with an interest in hacking video games. Over the next few years, he delved into understanding CPU architecture and reverse engineering custom data and compression formats from old school JRPGs. During his first years of employment, he engaged in a wide range of activities, including conducting infrastructure and web application penetration testing in both physical and cloud environments, as well as producing technical configuration documentation. He's also a hands-on security engineer with a broad spectrum of both physical and virtual security appliances which include firewalls, routers, Linux/Windows, scanners, and SIEM/TVM products. Recently he's delved back into computer architecture and low level system functionality through learning to write 90s DOS and modern Windows malware.
nash leads EFF's grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliance's member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation.
Pawel "alxd" Ngei is a hacker, solarpunk, educator and a free software/open notebook science activist interested in neuroscience, technology, and policies around the world. They are creator of the Glider Ink project and a member of Global Innovation Gathering, connecting hackers from the Global South. Pawel is currently not active in any hackerspace.
Jay Neuner (@jayneuner) has a background that spans from Silicon Valley to sustainable development, including work with Microsoft, GE, Intel, Ericsson, and various UN agencies. Their interests span a wide range, but for Jay it all comes down to the evolving roles and responsibilities of government, corporations, and society.
Greg Newby (@gbnewby) is a creative thinker with passion for enabling diverse scientific, social, and educational opportunities for all people. He is devoted to the expansion of human intellect and capability through the use of information and computing technologies. His past roles include serving as the chief technology officer of Compute Canada, manager of KAUST's Supercomputing Core Laboratory, and director of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. He has volunteered as the director and CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which operates Project Gutenberg, since 2000.
[Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg_org) is a library of free online eBooks, and is one of the oldest online content providers in the world. Its mission is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. New Project Gutenberg eBooks are based on published works that do not have United States copyright protection. These eBooks are selected and digitized by volunteers. Project Gutenberg is online at www.gutenberg.org.
Yoshinari Nishiki is an artist and researcher based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Over the past ten years, Yoshinari has conducted a number of hacking practices: the subjects included a noodle bar, a corner shop, a greeting, a transport system, a Chinese restaurant, bananas, a catering service, a currency, tree climbing, and a programming language. Since Yoshinari moved to Rotterdam, his primary focus largely shifted to logistics systems, running projects that his collaborator professor Lori Tavasszy from TU Delft describes as "ridiculing the scale in logistics" - free transport by crowd, moving a mountain of agricultural produce with food couriers, and single-handedly flipping a 20-foot container. In 2020, Yoshinari continues working on the concept of "one-container container ships" with researchers from TU Delft.
SX Noir is a self-proclaimed "thot leader," leading the conversation on the intersection of sex work and sex tech. SX has created a podcast (Thot Leader Pod) in an attempt to hack the conversation on sex, love, dating, and tech. Creating more empathy in digital space is the key to intimacy. SX is from Missouri and is very into Frank Sinatra and adult animation. SX aims to de-stigmatize the conversation regarding sex in digital space.
Daniel Nowak has over two decades in the trenches of the global security community, bringing together the technical and kinetic divides. Daniel has extensive public and private sector experience crafting strategy while developing tools and tactics that lead organizations into battle against digital adversaries, malicious insiders, and human error.
Fil "SoloDallas" Olivieri is widely-recognized as perhaps the world's most prolific tone hacker, having spent 35 years searching for (and, finally discovering) the secret of AC/DC's Angus Young's guitar tone in Back in Black: Schaffer's wireless.
Omega is the longtime text files editor at Cult of the Dead Cow and the man who coined the term hacktivism. He will talk about his soon to be published new guide to threat modeling and privacy protections.
Nada O'Neal has been in IT management for a decade, working up through the sysadmin and support ranks. As a woman, she's expected to take care of everyone's feelings, but as a tech leader, she needs people to hear and take action on hard, complex truths. Nada has gained a reputation for a simple, firm, but ultimately compassionate approach that makes and sustains change.
Kurt Opsahl is the deputy executive director and general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In addition to representing clients on civil liberties, free speech, and privacy law, he counsels on EFF projects and initiatives. Kurt is the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project. Before joining EFF, he worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters. He received his law degree from Boalt Hall, and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. Kurt is the co-authored of Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook. In 2007, he was named as one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the O'Grady v. Superior Court appeal. In 2014, he was elected to the USENIX board of directors.
Dr. Yulia Ovchinnikova was elected as a council member of the Coordination Center of Top Level Domain Russia (cctld.ru) in 2008. She was the first woman elected to the council. Since then, she moved to the United States and founded Open Hub (openhubproject.com), an open ecosystem and resource center for the tech workforce and tech business in the Hudson Valley. Open Hub is building the local tech community, consulting tech startups and companies, matching business idea generators with developers, teaching coding and organizing education workshops, and is the founder of the Hudson Valley's first tech festival: HV Techfest (hvtechfest.com).
Josh "Peon" Patrick Paulton (joshhealthcare.com) is a registered clinical counselor with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counselors in Canada. Josh works in public mental health, and his professional research focuses are mindfulness meditation, gastrointestinal diseases, and consciousness. He is also a clinical hypnotist. Josh combines his experience working professionally in mental health with advanced practical mind/body knowledge to teach how the human mind operates, and how to exploit it. Josh is a magician, and one day will rule earth.
Esther Payne is an IT professional with over 20 years of experience and a BSc (Hons) in computer science from Robert Gordon University. She then discovered she preferred people rather than programming. Having worked with all sizes of businesses and across various industries, her interest has always been on how to make computing more accessible to the masses. She believes that no matter what your age, you can use Linux and free software. As a user of Kubuntu for 12 years, she likes the freedom of Ubuntu and all of its variant distributions. She works with hosting and IT support companies, as well as interesting open source projects. Currently Esther is a part of the LibrecastLive team, a project funded by NLnet for the European Union's Next Generation Internet Initiative as a community and privacy advocate. Having been in open source for over a decade, she believes that anyone can contribute to a project, as everyone has a different skill to bring to a project. The more the merrier. Esther is looking forward to the next stage of the Internet and to help bring it back to its decentralized roots.
Tom Perera is a retired professor of neuroscience who specialized in research on the coding of information in the human brain and nervous system. He has been hunting, collecting, researching, restoring, and writing about Enigmas and their history for over 35 years. He located, restored, and sold the Enigmas that star in The Imitation Game and Snowden. He provides extensive Enigma information through his Enigma book, his lectures, and his website: www.EnigmaMuseum.com.
Ania Piotrowska did her PhD in anonymous communications systems under George Danezis at University College London, who also designed the original "Mixmaster" mix network used by anonymous "cypherpunk" re-mailers. As part of the PANORAMIX project, she published her core design, Loopix, in 2017 at USENIX and is now working to make an open source, performant mix network at Nym Technologies SA as their head of research.
Aelon Porat (@whereIsBiggles) is an information security manager at Cision. He has extensive experience attacking and defending corporate environments. Aelon likes to jump inside networks and out of planes, and in his spare time he enjoys demoing, speaking, and providing training at different events and conferences.
J.M. Porup is a cybersecurity reporter, security engineer, and comedian in New York City. He's studied and performed at Second City, UCB, Magnet, and The PIT. He trained in clown with Chris Bayes (head of clown at the Yale School of Drama) and Philippe Gaulier in France. Tech side: Five years a programmer, a decade as a journalist, and a masters in cybersecurity from UC Berkeley. Check out his comedy at CyberCyberCyberCyber.Ninja.
Keegan Rankin is an advocate for free software and platform cooperativism. He has facilitated several lectures on surveillance capitalism and predictive analytics, and several workshops on free software and encryption as tools for more secure communications.
David Ruiz is a senior online privacy writer for Malwarebytes, reporting on online privacy, cybersecurity, and the laws and proposed legislation that regulate how data is stored, shared and accessed. He also helps steer Malwarebytes' advocacy against stalkerware-type applications and the company's actions as a founding partner of the Coalition Against Stalkerware. Together with a small, committed team, David has performed online privacy and cybersecurity trainings for domestic abuse advocates and survivors, and he regularly reports on the threats posed by stalkerware. He previously worked for Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he wrote and analyzed policy about NSA surveillance, encryption, and cross-border data transfer. He is not, and never will be, a lawyer.
R¥ is a professional noob and undergrad student studying computer networking and security in Yokohama, Japan. He runs federated services out of a futon closet and is co-founder of The Joeys, a computer security training group that arose from the Fediverse.
Alice Rhodes (c0debabe) is a Boston-based veteran web developer training to work in computer security. She is a moderator at hackers.town and a contributor to Projekt:ONI. She enjoys spoiling her two parrots and causing problems on purpose.
Oxblood Ruffin is the godfather of hacktivism and the creator of Cult of the Dead Cow offshoot Hacktivismo. Now based in Berlin, he will discuss efforts to promote privacy-protecting methods for tracing COVID-19 exposure.
Karen Sandler is a cyborg lawyer and advocate for rights related to software on medical devices. She is the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy.
Ken Schaffer is an inveterate Morse-loving radio engineer who overcame three significant technical hurdles to invent the "Schaffer-Vega Diversity System," the first wireless system for guitars, as used by nearly every band from the Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd, Aerosmith and, most particularly, AC/DC.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by The Economist. He is The New York Times best-selling author of 14 books - including Click Here to Kill Everybody - as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. He is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the chief of security architecture of Inrupt, Inc.
Roel Schouwenberg has over 20 years of experience in the security field. He has engaged in long-term campaign and actor tracking across the cyber, influence, and information domains. One of Roel's areas of interest is how state actors are leveraging offensive cyber and social media for deniable operations.
Phillip Scroggins is an educator who has retired from the New York City school system and loves to explore the globe. He and Marjorie George have been traveling the world together (mostly during summer vacations) for over 20 years and, between them, have visited every continent on Earth, over 90 percent of that travel having been done using airline miles.
David Sidi is a PhD student at the School of Information, University of Arizona. His research centers on privacy technology. David recently presented on shoulder surfing in the age of intelligent video ("the analog keyhole problem"), adversarial transparency as a response to the use of shared Wi-Fi as a privacy honeypot, and getting useful harmful content reports from users of pornographic websites with SecureDrop submission supplemented by automated video analysis.
Dr, Aditya K. Sood is a security practitioner, researcher, and consultant. With experience of more than 12 years, he provides strategic leadership in the field of information security covering products and infrastructure. He has research interests in cloud security, malware automation and analysis, application security, and secure software design. His work has been featured in several media outlets including Associated Press, Fox News, The Register, The Guardian, Business Insider, CBC and others. Currently, Aditya is a senior director of threat research and development at F5 Networks.
stakfallt is an IT specialist and hacker of many things.
Emilie St-Pierre is the security ambassador for Future Ada, a Spokane-based non-profit advocating for diversity and inclusion in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics). For the past six years, she has used her experience as an offensive security professional to provide privacy and security education within her community. Through her work with Future Ada, she has established free regular workshops and one-on-one technical support to the public. Emilie's focus has been to provide these workshops and services to underrepresented members of the public.
The Tarquin is a Seattle-based hacker, security researcher, and philosophy school dropout. His areas of research include the role of phenomenology in computers and the ways in which we use computers to lie to ourselves and one another.
Thomas Tempe is a migrant of the global village. He grew up, studied, and worked mostly in France, where he fell in love with computers, then Free Software. He's been living in China for close to ten years now. He's an aspiring musician. He'd do anything to not learn the piano. He has a wife and son, and a day job in manufacturing. He once started a Linux Users Group, built a straw bale house, and became a fluent Chinese speaker after age 30. When time allows, he goes to jam at the Shanghai hackerspace, or hits the keyboard for more hacker points.
Thomas (@citizen_451) has studied international relations during undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Cardiff University prior to University College London (UCL). Additionally, he has experience volunteering with the Nightline Association. His main interests are understanding the complexity of violence production and the challenge of helping those who have experienced it.
Tprophet has worked for 30 years to make the hacker world more open, more approachable, and more inclusive. Since 1990, he has been a regular writer and columnist for 2600. His "Telecom Informer" column, which is published in every issue, is written in the irreverent persona of a longtime telephone central office employee. Each column explores a different piece of telecommunications technology and explains the inner workings of it.
Alexander Urbelis is a co-host of Off The Hook, a frequent writer for CNN Opinion, an attorney and partner of the Blackstone Law Group in New York, creator of a unique DNS intelligence platform used to detect early stage indicators of malicious activity, and was also recently the acting CISO of the NFL. Alex has a degree in philosophy, summa cum laude, from Stony Brook University, a JD, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School, and the BCL from New College, Oxford University.
Matthew Valites had his first online experiences as a tween in the early 1990s, dialing into local BBSes on the family's home-built Radio Shack Tandy and clogging the phone lines playing Doom death matches with friends. By 14, he had ground his first set of lockpicks out of his dad's hacksaw blades, subsequently ruining every lock in the house. Under the tutelage of his older brother in the early 2.0 kernel days, Matt learned how to run Linux, forever influencing the rest of his professional life. He's the author of O'Reilly's Crafting the InfoSec Playbook, creator and host of Wall of Sheep's "Lockpick Gauntlet," and a forever curious maker and breaker.
Madison Vialpando (@madisonvialpan2) is a recent graduate from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2019 and 2020 , she worked as a student researcher and intern with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Threat Lab, compiling data on law enforcement technology along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her final research project focused on cybersecurity vulnerabilities in law enforcement agencies. Madison is currently a freelance journalist looking for new opportunities to scrutinize law enforcement and corporate surveillance.
vr0n is a cybersecurity student who has worked on several research projects related to virtualization, containers, data provenance, IoT security, fuzzing, and binary exploitation. They have posted some boring stuff at vr0n.tech, but plan on posting more interesting stuff soon. Super into decentralized tech and mesh Internet.
Xiaowei Wang is an artist, a writer, and a coder They are the creative director at Logic Magazine, and their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Award and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and more. They are working toward a PhD at UC Berkeley where they are a part of the National Science Foundation's Research Traineeship program in Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century.
Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) is the CEO of iFixit, the free-as-in-speech repair manual. He's dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. The Right to Repair campaign has, so far, successfully legalized cell phone unlocking and tractor repair and has legislation pending in over 20 U.S. states in 2020.
Brice Williams is the cybersecurity practice lead for technology consulting firm SysLogic, Inc. and has over 20 years of experience in software engineering and security best practices. Brice serves as a trusted advisor to global organizations providing modern cybersecurity guidance and support, including developer training, application penetration testing, secure product design, and secure development lifecycle programs. Brice has developed and conducted cybersecurity training classes for thousands of software developers around the world and is passionate about improving the state of cybersecurity at the earliest stages of software development. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and local meetups, sharing from his practical experience in the field.
Michael G. Williams is the network security team lead for UNC Chapel Hill's information security office and co-host of the podcast Data@Rest. He's been with UNC Chapel Hill for 11 years. Prior to coming to UNC, he spent a decade managing network security services for large enterprise clients in the telecom industry. Michael has the CISSP and PCNSE certifications. In his free time, he pursues any number of hobbies, including tabletop games, podcasting, and his many pets.
David Williams-King is finishing his PhD in binary security at Columbia University. He is now involved in the NYC-based startup Elpha Secure. David learned to be a hacker in a solar-powered home with limited electricity and Internet - his interests and also his environment itself all require constant ingenuity. David enjoys teaching, building computers, traveling (under normal circumstances), and writing code by voice (see The Eleventh HOPE).
Holmes Wilson is an Internet freedom activist whose work mixes mass mobilization and software tools. He is a co-founder and board member of Fight for the Future, the activism organization that was instrumental in defeating the infamous U.S. site-blocking laws SOPA/PIPA, fighting for net neutrality rules in the U.S. and Europe, opposing law enforcement crypto backdoors, and, more recently, challenging the use of face recognition tech by U.S. law enforcement and products like Amazon Ring. He also previously co-founded Miro, a free software video player based on BitTorrent and RSS, and was a campaign manager at the Free Software Foundation. He's currently building Zbay, a peer-to-peer app for secure messaging and marketplaces built on the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash.
Nancy C. Wolfson is a Washington DC-based scholar, independent researcher, speaker, entrepreneur, and artist. She is currently the vice chair of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) Technical Committee on Near Earth Objects (NEOs). She is president of Disrupting Space Company based in the United States. Her work is primarily focused on education, research, communication, and outreach for diverse space sectors. Some of her most recent work includes contributing to the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), She is a signatory for United Nations Declaration for Asteroid Day, an awareness and educational program designated to teach the world about asteroids. She was named space ambassador and media communications representative for Yuri's Night, an event in 2019 that celebrated astronaut Yuri Gagarin's work. She also participated in The Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) "Find an Asteroid" Search Campaign in 2018. Through her work as an independent researcher, she was invited to participate in The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) - Nation of Makers Meeting in 2016. Nancy's objective is to democratize access to higher learning, making space concepts accessible to all academia, corporations, and the broad general public.
Meng Weng Wong is principal investigator at the Research Programme for Computational Law at Singapore Management University, and co-founder of legalese.com, a venture-funded computational law startup. He previously co-founded pobox.com and co-authored RFC4408, the SPF anti-spam standard for email authentication. He didn't do very well in his undergrad languages and compilers class at upenn.edu, but is making up for it now with a vengeance: after fellowships at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and at Stanford's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, he is now leading design and development of a DSL for law. After moving from Silicon Valley to Singapore where he now lives with his co-founder and life partner, he helped start hackerspace.sg, Singapore's first hacker/maker space. He works in Emacs, Typescript, Haskell, and Prolog. He would like to learn Curry next, with all the copious free time available now that he has completed Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Michal Rysiek Wozniak is chief information security officer at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He is a policy hacker, a founding member of the Warsaw Hackerspace; and a member of the board of Polish Linux Users Group. A digital human rights activist, Michael is a participant in a number of policy consultations and debates on Polish and EU-level topics ranging from Internet censorship through data retention, net neutrality, and copyright reform, to open education resources.
Rockets Xia is the co-founder of Mushroom Cloud makerspace and one of the first batch of senior makers in the community in China. He created a desktop 3D printer called DreamMaker in 2013. He is an active speaker to promote maker culture and is a very welcomed coach at many junior robotics/maker competitions.
Jiang Xueqin (@xueqinjiang) is a China-based educator and writer. He advises Chinese schools on how to teach creativity, and he writes for a variety of Chinese and global media. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), a judge of the Global Teacher Prize, and a researcher at the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Rachel Zhang is currently strategic partnership manager for DFRobot, specializing in STEM and maker education. In addition to being the community manager of Mushroom Cloud makerspace and a committee member of Shanghai Maker Carnival, she is active in promoting maker culture and maker education to bring the joy and social value of innovation through creation to everyone. She is also actively exploring her talent in the improv theatre area in her spare time. She is now working on some projects integrating innovative technology with performance, music, and other forms of art, such as a theatre for children with interactive maker projects.