Michael (Mike) Steep is the founder and former executive director of Stanford Engineering School's Center for Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities and the former senior vice president of global business operations at innovation mega-hub, PARC Xerox. He draws on first-hand experience and anecdotes from time spent with the biggest names in Silicon Valley to instruct audiences on how to get ahead of disruptive innovation. Viewing new technology as opportunity, Mike highlights the importance of allowing innovation to trump company culture and legacies—and not the other way around.

Neil Jacobstein is the chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University, an organization whose founders hail from Google and the X PRIZE Foundation and has a goal “to educate, inspire and empower a new generation of leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Jacobstein shares one of the most thoughtful and up-to-date looks at the future of technology and how it will impact a variety of industries. He explores innovation, disruption, and artificial intelligence as he offers audience a glimpse into the future and its real-world applications.

Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MD, is a clinician-educator and associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He studies how doctors think – how they diagnose, how they make treatment decisions, and how they develop expertise. Considered one of the most skillful diagnosticians and clinician-educators in the U.S. today, he regularly mesmerizes audiences of hundreds of medical professionals as he correctly diagnoses cases meant to stump participants.

Renowned psychology expert and Stanford University professor Michele Gelfand is one of the leading researchers and writers on culture and the impact of culture on behavior. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 50,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, and The Economist, among other outlets. Most recently, she is the author of "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World."

Named one of the "40 Most Influential Minds in Tech" by TIME magazine, Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. Based in Silicon Valley, he researches exponentially advancing technologies that are soon going to change our world. Wadhwa has held appointments at Duke University, Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, and Emory University and is a faculty member at Singularity University. He is a globally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and the author of four books on the intersection of technology and society.

Nick Bilton, Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and former Lead Technology Writer for the New York Times, is a journalist, designer, UI specialist, technologist, author, hardware hacker, and researcher. Bilton has worked in many industries within the context of design, research and development, and technology. He is also the author of Hatching Twitter and I Live in the Future: & Here’s How It Works, which explores the effects of new technology on our brains. With highly visual presentations, he addresses innovation, the future of media, technology, and society and how technology affects our work and minds.

Mark has been working in Silicon Valley for over 30 years and has worked on over 1,000 venture capital transactions. He has significant experience in applying the law to the issues raised by new technologies, such as open source software, blockchain, IoT and domain names. For example, in 1994, he assisted Network Solutions, Inc. in developing the first domain dispute resolution system which is still the basis for the system in use today. His clients range from Fortune 500 such as Oracle Corporation and Sony Corporation to unknown startups. Currently, he and his team work with over 50 startups. He has worked across a wide variety of industries, including software (in particular open source software), blockchain, IoT, semiconductor, consumer electronics, content licensing (from music to characters), and medical devices.

Maurice Conti is among the architects of the cutting-edge emerging technologies that are evolving humanity and the world around us: Artificial Intelligence, immersive reality (AR/VR/XR), advanced robotics and manufacturing, and technology for sustainability. He is a rare blend of hands–on practitioner and big thinker. Conti is a sought-after and trusted advisor to the leadership teams of global companies, including Amazon Web Services, Lululemon, Mercedes AMG, NielsenIQ, Ralph Lauren, and Blackline Systems, on how to think about and deploy AI for the benefit of people and business. Working at the intersection of disruptive innovation, emerging technologies, and the future of work, cities, mobility, and climate, Conti is a vocal champion for the creation of technologies whose foundations are rooted in positive, human-centered purpose. More than 12 million people have watched his popular TED talks, and his engaging speaking style, deep subject-matter expertise, and relatable insights are based on decades of work “in the trenches” with leading brands, including Nike, Tesla, Disney, Amazon, Airbus, and Ford.

Major Anthony “AB” Bourke is a highly experienced F-16 fighter pilot who has flown tactical missions in countries all over the world. Bourke shares how fighter pilots, and other organizations where performance truly matters, have developed a feedback system to ensure continuous improvement and peak performance. Bourke discusses communication, leadership, organization, teamwork, commitment, culture, and selling and debriefing techniques.

Peter Sims is an award-winning author and entrepreneur. His latest book is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, which grew out of a collaboration with faculty at Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school), a hub of creative thinking and doing, and his previous work in venture capital with Summit Partners, including as part of the team that established Summit’s European Office in London. He was also the coauthor with Bill George of the best-seller True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, is a member of G.E.’s Innovation Advisory Panel, and is a Co-founder and Director of Fuse Corps, a social venture that places entrepreneurial leaders on year-long grassroots projects with mayors and governors to tackle some of America’s most pressing problems.

As a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition, he is credited for fundamentally changing the way that scientists think about auditory memory, showing through the Levitin Effect, that long-term memory preserves many of the details of musical experience that previous theorists regarded as lost during the encoding process. He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and worked for two years at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation, a Silicon Valley computer firm where he worked on issues in Human-Computer Interaction, and Applications of Cognitive Psychology.