Speakers
This speakers list is still a work in progress, so keep an eye open on this page for updates.
Meanwhile, we're very happy to let you know which key speakers are already taking part in this year's SHiFT:
Ana Tomé
Ana Tomé is assistant in Architecture at Instituto Superior Técnico – IST, Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal) and member of IST’ architecture research group. Her PhD studies focus the development of analytical models of space-use interactions in complex environments (spatial contexts that supports higher number and variety of users). The research is supported by field work and developed to define descriptive models of navigation and interaction patterns in spatial contexts characterized by strong social dynamics.
Portugal
Andrew Baron
Andrew Baron is the creator and founder of the popular daily video show, Rocketboom. After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Bates College (Maine), Baron graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology in 2003 from Parsons in New York City, where he went on to teach graduate and undergraduate courses. He was teaching at Parsons and MIT when the notion of Rocketboom came to him in 2004. Although he has little interest in television (and did not own a TV set during the past decade), Baron has always been inspired by the implications of the democratization of media.
Portugal
Andy Budd
Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft (clearleft.com), Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers online experience.
Andy is a regular speaker at international design events such as SXSW, An Event Apart and Web Design World. He also runs the popular dConstruct conference, which takes place in Brighton every year (dconstruct.org). Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine. Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery (cssmastery.com) and blogs at andybudd.com.
Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.
United Kingdom
Brian Suda
Brian Suda is a master informatician working to make the web a better place little by little everyday. Since discovering the Internet in the mid-90s, Brian Suda has spent a good portion of each day connected to it. His own little patch of Internet is http://suda.co.uk, where many of his past projects and crazy ideas can be found.
Iceland
Celso Martinho
My name is Celso Manuel Batista Martinho
My Myers-Briggs profile is the rare INTP.
I like Technology, Internet, Communications, Messaging, Comunities, Free Information Access, Free Software Models, OSX for personal productivity, Linux, Music, Digital Photography and Movie editing, Movies, Sea & Beach, Sun, Friends, Good food, Dinner & Drinks, Japanese Food, A good discussion, Hollidays, Travelling, Sport Cars, Moto4 riding and Skydiving (should write a "From Desk to Airplanes" essay).
I dislike Proprietary Formats, Digital Copyrights, Security by obscurity models, Noise, Crowds, Humourless people, Useless meetings, Bad wine, Retarded Operating Systems, Yes mans, Untolerance, Internet Explorer, Nasty software bugs, Stupidity in general. Yes, I'm an arrogant bastard too.
I was born on the 1st of July, 1972 and raised in a small village called Sangalhos in Portugal, near Aveiro.
I began my profissional career when I entered the University of Aveiro in 1990 to study Electronics by working part-time in a small telecommunications store where I promoted the so famous and old Commodore Amiga and ran a BBS for a couple of years.
In 1993 I was invited and joined the University's Computing Department. While working there I co-founded SAPO, the first Portuguese Search Engine and Web Directory, with 5 other friends. In 1996 we took SAPO out of the academic sphere and joined the enterprise world with our own startup company called Navegante.
A few years later, between Internet economy bubbles, buyouts, aquisitions, takeovers and you don't want to know the rest, SAPO ended up owned by Portugal Telecom. It is now the biggest and leading Internet Portal and ISP in Portugal providing ADSL broadband and dialup Internet access services. My current contractor is PT.COM (from the Portugal Telecom group) and I'm the head Director for the Product Technology department. Luckly for me I enjoy a lot what I do and I have now the privilege to work in a very capable, innovative and intelegent team.
Portugal
David Orban
Alert analyst of the global high technology landscape, with broad experience in structuring virtual subsidiary deals for companies penetrating the EU, and EMEA markets. Deep understanding of the needs and mechanics of both product marketing, sales development, localization, and globalization.
Business case analysis, contract negotiation, strategic market development, partner management. Startup management. Community, and metaverse design.
Futurist, and speaker. My vision is at the crossroads of technology and society as defined by their coevolution. There are times when things change fast, and this is one of them. To be able and act from the position where the perspective on this change is accessible is a true privilege.
"What is the question that I should be asking?" is my motto. Meta-analyses, and meta-rules are the tools of the trade when going breadth first is an advantage. The new renaissance is also about cutting across the limits of deep specialization. Tolerating high levels of pressure, and frequent mistakes, accelerating cycles of invention and innovation build the new worlds ahead of us.David Orban’s Specialties:
Italy
Delphine Ménard
Born in Southern France where her roots still linger, Delphine lived in France, the US and Austria and studied Political Sciences and International Communication. She now lives in Germany and prides herself in speaking 4 languages with only a hint of a French accent.
She started her career in the wine industry, working in the cellar with an Australian wine maker, moved on to logistics and sales for a French wine producer. She then changed course to become an Event Manager, working on projects for a wide range of companies (among which Orange, Ford, Sony, Trivial Pursuit and Microsoft). By editing a wiki, she then entered the non-profit sector and worked for the Wikimedia Foundation (the organisation behind Wikipedia). She organized Wikimedia international community conferences in Frankfurt, Harvard Law School and the Library of Alexandria and for three years, coordinated the development of 17 national Wikimedia Chapters across 4 continents.
She now works in the difficult but rewarding business of advising companies, organisations and individuals in intercultural communication and development. She provides them with insight and tools to work effectively and stress-free in today's global village. She's amazed at people in general and still wonders why the Germans are always on time.
France
Eddie Correia
Firstly, Eddie is a Ms. not a Mr., has a corporate background in international business and studied computer systems. She focuses on strategic planning, project development and creative direction. She is also a writer, photographer, food aficionado and one mean cook.
Portugal
Eduardo Manchon
Eduardo Manchon is co-founder of Panoramio.com, the community of geolocated photos that was acquired by Google in 2007. Nowadays Eduardo keeps running Panoramio from the Google offices in Zurich.
Eduardo launched Panoramio together with his friend Joaquín Cuenca in October 2005 working in their spare time and without any investment. Panoramio became quickly popular and a useful tool to explore the world. Photos from Panoramio are also available in Google Earth and Google Maps. Panoramio has been the first Spanish start-up sold to Google.
Born and raised in Callosa de Segura (Alicante, Spain), Eduardo studied Psychology in Valencia (Spain) and Bergen (Norway). Eduardo has a background in Psychology and Human Computer Interaction. Before Panoramio he worked in the Usability field for 7 years, first in online banking and later as independent consultant.
Chile
Felix Petersen
Felix Petersen is co-founder of plazes.com, one of the pioneering start-ups in the context and location based services area. Founded in 2006 it has recently been sold to Nokia. Petersen is now Head of Product Management in the newly formed "Social Activities" team at Nokia.
Plazes has been written and talked about up and down the media landscape and its investors and developer community included some of the brightest minds in the space. Petersen has had numerous appearances in publications like Wired, the New York Times and many others as well as being a frequent speaker at conferences.
Born and raised in Berlin, Petersen has been busy with remote data transmissions since the late eighties and has been building things on the Internet since 1996. He currently lives with his lovely wife and daughter in Berlin and enjoys things like food, cooking, media hacking and robotics. If for some reason you feel like finding out more, go to: http://plazes.com/whereis/felixpetersen
Denmark
Fred Oliveira
Portugal
Geoff Marslett
Geoff Marslett is a native Texan who studied Matmatics, Philosophy, Art, Science, and Languages at St. John’s College before returning to Texas to pursue an MFA in filmmaking. He has lived throughout the United States, but prefers the deserts of the southwest, and hopes his diverse background is reflected in his own work.
He has directed twenty short films and segments of longer projects. His critically acclaimed Monkey vs. Robot screened at over 25 festivals worldwide, was distributed theatrically and broadcast on HBO, PBS, and Univision. His most recent award winning short, Bubblecraft, premiered in 2006 and is still screening at festivals currently. In addition to making his own films, Geoff teaches at animation at the University of Texas at Austin. Geoff wrote and directed the feature film MARS and created one of the animation software programs necessary to animate it. Mars will be his feature filmmaking debut and should be completed in late 2008. Some of his other films include Out of Bounds, Trip To Roswell, Eight Movements and Ten is My Favorite Number.
United States
Jeff Ausura
Jeff Ausura is an instructor with Aquent. He teaches interactive design and web design to Aquent’s clients, and is based in Boston, USA. Jeff is highly skilled in creating Silverlight projects using the Microsoft Expression tools, bridging the work of web designers with the needs of web developers. Jeff is proficient in a wide range of web and interactive tools, and has co-authored several books on web technologies. Prior to working with Silverlight and C#, Jeff has had extensive experience with ActionScript and Flash. Jeff has a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Bennington College, but is equally comfortable working with XHTML, CSS, and C#.
Portugal
João Martinho Moura & Jorge Sousa
At the moment, they are in the end-stage of their master course in Technology and Digital Arts in the University of Minho.
Portugal
José Sacavém
1989-1998 Broadcast Journalist - National Radio and Public Portuguese TV.
Digital Storytelling facilitator, certified Professional Trainer, multimedia Journalism, Event Management, Event Sponsorship, PR & Media Relations consultancy, Issues & Crisis Management. Hands on experience managing international teams and voluntary staff for major international sports event.
1998-2002 Press Officer - for the Portuguese Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries.
2002-2004 Documentary writer and Director at Public TV.
2005 Digital Storytelling workshop in Polverigi, Italy
2006 Digital Storytelling Train the trainers workshop by the Center for Digital Storytelling from Berkeley CA, USA
2006-2007 Director of Communications at Portugal Vela 2007 SA - organizer of the Cascais ISAF World Sailing Championships.
2007-2008 Senior Consultant at Imago PR agency - a member of the Worldcom Public Relations Group.
2008 - Self Employed consultantJosé Sacavém’s Specialties:
Portugal
Joshua Kaufman
Joshua Kaufman is an interaction designer and user experience consultant living in San Francisco and working at Tiny Pictures on Radar. His work focuses on cross-platform interaction design and strategy for social web applications.
United States
Julian Bleecker
Julian Bleecker is a design-technologist, scholar and researcher. His work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, and concept innovation, particularly in the area of digital media. His focus is on designed-technology that tells stories from critical perspectives, and addresses commonly held assumptions about what digital media and digital devices are, in order to raise questions about how they may be otherwise.
Bleecker has given talks and exhibited many of his emerging technology projects, designs and concepts in venues such as SIGGRAPH, LIFT, Xerox PARC, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and Where 2.0 Conference on Location-Based Technology, Ubicomp, Ars Electronica, ACM SIGCHI, ACM Advances in Computer Entertainment, Banff New Media Institute, American Museum of the Moving Image, Art Interactive (Boston), Boston Cyberarts Festival, Reboot, Eyebeam Atelier (New York City), and SK Telecom’s Art Center Nabi (South Korea).
Bleecker has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, an MS Eng from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz where his dissertation was on the relationships amongst technology, entertainment and popular culture. He is a design-technologist and researcher working with Nokia Design in Los Angeles.
United States
Ken Nunes
Ken Nunes is a 56 year old Electrical Contracts Engineer with a career spanning over 30 years. In 1988 moved to Portugal and in 1989 started a real estate developing company, Tirone Nunes, which included the architecture and commercialization services of the company’s own developments. Initially, the company focused on housing developments and introduced to Portugal the concept of Bio-climatic Architecture. Over the last 20 years this concept has evolved into what is now known as Sustainable Architecture. Considered leaders in this field in Portugal, Tirone Nunes has pioneered and innovated by creating buildings which have become a reference for Sustainable Construction in Portugal as well as in Europe.
Portugal
Leo Xavier
Leo started his own company - Quodis - at the age of 18, which he still runs, after spending most of his teenage life experimenting with the internet as a revolutionary communication platform. Quodis is all about mixing the two biggest passions of Leo: Information Technology and Graphic Design. Born in 1983 to a Goan father and German mother in Portugal, Leo speaks fluently Portuguese, German and English, and has a graduation in Graphic Design at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa. He also co-founded and developed The Star Tracker - a social network of global Portuguese talent, launched in 2007.
Portugal
Leonel Moura
Leonel Moura is a European artist born in Lisbon (1948), Portugal, that works with AI and robotics. He created in 2003 his first swarm of ‘Painting Robots’, able to produce original artworks based on emergent behavior.
Since then he has produced several artbots, each time more autonomous and sophisticated. RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006, created for a permanent exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is able to generate highly creative and original art works, to decide when the work is ready and to sign it, which it does with a distinctive signature. ISU (The Poet Robot), 2006, generates random poems, very much in the style of the Lettrist Movement and of Concrete Poetry.
In 2007 the Robotarium, the first zoo dedicated to robots and artificial life, opened in Alverca.
Also in 2007, he inaugurates in Lisbon an Art Space [LEONEL MOURA ARTe] to show the works done by his robot artists.
Portugal
Lisa C. Anderson
Lisa C. Anderson is currently the Microsoft Surface User Experience Director. Previous to this role, she held similar positions at Intuit and Autodesk in the Bay Area. In years past, Lisa acted as User Experience Director for several other teams at Microsoft: Windows XP, MSN, Real Time Collaboration. She was also Executive Producer at Corbis for several years, where she produced award-winning, high-end documentaries on CD-ROM (Leonardo da Vinci; Critical Mass: America’s Race to Create the Atomic Bomb; FDR; The Barnes Collection). Her background and education are in Design, Art History, English Literature, Writing, Editing, Publishing.
Portugal
Manuel Heitor
Currently the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education in Portugal, Manuel Heitor was the founding director of the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon. After completing in 1985 a PhD at the Imperial College, London, and a post-doctoral training in 1986 at the University of California San Diego, both focused on combustion research, he has served as a Professor at IST, as well as its Deputy-President (1993-1998). He is also a Research Fellow of the University of Texas at Austin’s Innovation, Creativity, and Capital (IC2) Institute. His research work includes publications in the area of the management of technology and the development of engineering and innovation policies and engineering design. He chaired during the period 1996-2005 the Organizing Committee of the series of International Conferences on “Technology Policy and Innovation”, and his co-editor of a related book series through Purdue University Press. He was co-founder in 2002 of “Globelics - the global network for the economics of learning, innovation, and competence building systems”. He is a member of the Science and Technology Council of the “International Risk Governance Council”, IRGC.
Portugal
Manuel Lima
Portugal
Mark Wubben
Mark Wuben has a keen interest in how the web operates as a platform for innovation, and brings change to societies and economies. He is also greatly interested in how the physical world can be connected to the digital world through ubiquitous computing. But most of all, he’s just plain curious about everything!
Mark is also the developer of sIFR, which helps bring rich typography to the web. He’s also worked for Silicon Valley start-up JotSpot, which is now part of Google. In the past few years he’s worked for Xopus, where he performed crazy DHTML wizardry to create a friendly, browser-based, WYSIWYG XML editor.
Besides the purely web stuff, he’s worked on Physical Computing / RFID projects in both his spare time and as part of the PICNIC conference. He has also been a speaker at various events and conferences.
Mark is also involved in Toothless Tiger, a web freelance agency responsible for various fun projects in the Copenhagen area and beyond.
Denmark
Multitouch Barcelona
Multitouch Barcelona is a recently born interaction design group that explores natural
communication between people and technology. They design touch sensitive environments
where real world interactions move to a digital context. Interfaces where people touch, play,
move, feel...Where senses play their natural role, where everything just 'happens" as it does in
the real world.
Multitouch Barcelona dreams of computers understanding people instead of people
understanding computers, full sensitive environments where people can see, hear, touch, smell
and taste digital contents - blurred boundaries between real and digital.
Group members are Roger Pujol, Dani Armengol and Xavier Vilar, restless explorers who merge
their digital backgrounds to create a collaborative fun space where only challenging projects are
welcome.
Spain
Nick Cristea
Nick Cristea is a partner and strategy director at AllofUs, a London based interactive design consultancy that develop interactive strategies and award winning work for projects as big as buildings and for projects small enough to fit in your pocket.
At AllofUs Nick heads up the strategy team that helps clients such as Motorola, Playstation, BSkyB, and the Science Museum realise new business ventures and innovation projects. He
specialises in facilitating the creation of innovative cross media and physical based projects and has spoken extensively on the subject with recent talks at FITC and MAD in Spain.
Before establishing AllofUs with his partners back in 2003 Nick was the design director at Digit which he helped establish in 1995. Before that, in the dark days before the web, Nick run the multimedia department at Nottingham Trent University, and if you traveled back to the late 1980s you would find Nick designing button interfaces for electrical appliances.
United Kingdom
Nick Weldin
Nick had many jobs including pyrotechnician, for companies like Theatre of Fire and Le Maitre, he helped set fire to the Fourth Bridge for its centenary celebrations. He ran an adventure playground for disabled children for Kidsactive and set up a project in the London borough of Westminster developing multimedia work with people with profound learning difficulties and the people who support them, and has played around with electronics since his teenage years.
He works at Tinker as Senior Technologist and at the Rix Centre based at the University of East London developing multimedia work with people with profound learning difficulties.
United Kingdom
Sanky (Simon Sankarayya)
Sanky is currently one of the 5 partners at AllofUs, his daily role as Art Director sees him casting an eye over all projects in terms of look and feel whilst working on creative direction and helping to form the recently conceived R&D offer. AllofUs focuses on how interactive design can work alongside other areas in the creative industries such as interiors, branding and installation based work. At AllofUs he has created installations for most of the major galleries in london, a sound reactive identity for Great Ormond Street Hospital, interactive furniture for Chelsea Harbour and worked on Sky’s video download service from its inception which we now act as the strategic consultancy for.
Previously he worked at Digit for 8 years as the Art Director helping them establish themselves as a major force in interactive media working for such clients as MTV, Habitat, Sony, Universal Music, Stella McCartney and the Design Museum.
He has judged interactive work for Design Week, D&AD, Creative Review the Canadian Art directors Club and Design Indaba and has talked round the world at Design Indaba, IDN Fresh in Sydney and Singapore, Flash Foreward, Offf in Lisbon and Design Yatra in Goa. He has taught in London, Sweden and Copenhagen in interactive design and has just been made part of the executive Committee for D&AD.
He is currently taking photos of wet paint signs and writing a novel.
United Kingdom
Sofia Oliveira/Jared Hawkey
CADA is a Lisbon-based platform for artistic work inspired by technological structures. Active since 2004, it has produced numerous innovative media projects and run successive workshops. They are obsessed with the possibility of unveiling hidden patterns in everyday life. www.cada1.net
Portugal
Stephanie Booth
After living in India for a year, Stephanie Booth has emigrated to the internet where she has quickly gone native. Amongst various social media consulting activities, she regularly gives talks in schools about the living web to teenagers, parents and teachers. One of her favorite roles is that of "tourist guide of the online world".
Chile
Stowe Boyd
Stowe Boyd is the Front Man for The /Messengers, a role that includes playing editor for /Message, /Ground, /Mind, and /Ambivalence, and leading the /Edgewards blog federation. Stowe is obsessed with social tools and their impact on media, business, and society, and has written and spoken on those topics for over a decade.
United States
Tara Hunt
Tara Hunt, is the co-founder of Citizen Agency, a community marketing consulting firm, and blogs at HorsePigCow.com. She also is a community leader in such worldwide movements as BarCamp and Coworking. Named as one of the Digital Utopians who populate Web 2.0 in the San Francisco Chronical, she has proven, says Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, "the power of grass roots organizations that really represent the future of business."
United States
Teresa Heitor
Teresa Heitor is an architect, associated professor and a researcher at the IST architecture school. She has been directly involved in the development of space syntax techniques and their application in the field of space use analysis to a wide range of architectural research and live project domains, both at the urban and the building scale. In particular she has specialised in the application of these techniques to the design of educational and work environments such as schools and offices.
Teresa is now involved in the coordination of a major national program, launched by the Portuguese Government in March 2007, to modernize secondary schools.
Portugal
Tiago Forjaz
Tiago Forjaz is Partner at Jason Associates, a Innovative Strategic Talent Management Consultant.
Tiago Forjaz (1972), Portuguese, was born and lived in South Africa until 1985, when he came to Portugal and studied economics at the Universidade Lusíada in Lisbon.
After initiating his career as Risk Analyst in Banif (a Portuguese retail bank), he moved to Madrid to participate in the set-up strategy of and implementation of Michael Page in Portugal.
Later, he was Manager, at Heidrick & Struggles, specialized in projects of
Executive Search, Middle Management and talent management consulting in
several industries, covering from Financial to Professional Services, Industry
and Consumer Goods.
In November 2004, Tiago Forjaz founded the Jason Associates, a national
consulting firm of Talent Management, which advises clients on matters relating
to strategic decisions about talent. Their work focuses on the management of
talent, leadership, organizational effectiveness and entrepreneurship.
Tiago Forjaz was one of the main drivers of the initiative Star Tracking
(www.startracking.org) which later came to launch the first social network of
Portuguese global talent - The Star Tracker. Today this network connects
around 15,000 talented Portuguese with a global perspective, in over 107
countries and counts with the presence of the President of the Portuguese
Republic.
Tiago Forjaz is a member of the committee for Forum de Administradores de
Empresas (FAE) - a member committed to develop and distribute knowledge
about leadership through several generations of business leaders and is also a
member of the Advisory Board of COEUR - European University Network.
Tiago Forjaz is guest speaker at several prestigious universities such as UCP –
Universidade Católica Portuguesa and ISCTE – Instituto Superior das Ciências
do Trabalho e da Empresa and EGP - Escola de Gestão do Porto on topics
related to talent such as Mentoring, Talent Management, the power of
Networking, Entrepreneurship, the future of CEO's strategy and Corporate
Philanthropy.
Tiago is trilingual in Portuguese, English and Spanish. Father of two sons,
Tiago lives in Lisbon and is interested in contemporary art and fine dining.
Portugal
Tijmen Schep
Tijmen Schep (1981, NL) is a Dutch mediatheorist who is fascinated by the intertwining of notions of public space and wireless media. He graduated with an MA in Digital Media Design at the Higher School of the Arts (HKU), where he learnt that digital media might become even more powerful when they moved away from our desktops and were embedded 'out there', in our everyday lives. Wireless media seemed to be a primary candidate for colonising this space, with the mobile phone as it's flagbearer.
A second MA on New Media and Digital Culture received from the University of Utrecht, however, lead to a more nuanced perspective. His thesis, a critical look at Mark Weiser's idea of Ubiquitous Computing, was well received. He now focuses on ideals and myths surrounding wireless technology, trying to balance excitement over the new with the reality of the everyday, a skill that is very necessary of the colonisation is ever to succeed.
This academic balancing act is fed back into society through the NetNiet.org Foundation, of which he is a founding member. This foundation promotes wireless media art in public space. Examples of this work have been the Wireless Festival 2006 in Utrecht, as well as the creation of countless installations, workshops and lectures.
Netherlands
Verónica Orvalho
Verónica Costa Orvalho has a Ph.D. in Software Development (Computer Graphics) from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2007), where her research centered on "Facial Animation for CG Films and Videogames". She has been working in IT companies for the past 11 years, such as IBM and Ericsson, and Film companies, like Patagonik Film Argentina. She has given many workshops and has international publications related to game design and facial animation. She has received international awards for several projects: "Photorealistic facial animation and recognition", "Face Puppet" and "Face In Motion".
Now, she is a full time professor of Porto University and cofounder and CTO of Face In Motion (www.faceinmotion.com). She is also a former research member at the Event Computational Lab (http://moving-event.org/) working on virtual reality and character animation. Current and past collaborations include several film and game companies (Blur Studios, Electronic Arts, Dygrafilms), and research groups (Stanford University, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya). Now, her research focus on developing new methods related to motion capture, geometric modeling and deformation, and real time animation.
Spain
available here
SHiFT - Social and Human Ideas For Technology
15 to 17 October 2008
