The Complexity of Platforms-Speakers

Home Agenda Speakers Registration Travel Information

Adam Bly
Spotify VP of Data

Adam Bly is a scientist and entrepreneur who has spent the past fifteen years innovating at the nexus of science and society. Currently, he leads data at Spotify. He previously founded and was CEO of Seed Scientific, the ground-breaking data innovation firm, which was acquired by Spotify in 2015. Learn more on his website.

---

Terry Crowley
Programmer and former Microsoft CVP of Office Development

Terry Crowley is former VP of Microsoft Office development and Technical Fellow at Microsoft. He led Office development for ten years from 2005 through 2015. Prior to leading Office development, he led the Word, OneNote and Publisher development teams. He joined Microsoft with the FrontPage acquisition and was dev manager for FrontPage for 5 years as well as lead developer for the FrontPage editor. He built the Unix and Mac versions of BeyondMail while at Beyond. He spent ten years at BBN building early multimedia document, real-time conferencing and email systems. He currently writes on the design and management of complex systems and organizations.

---

M Eifler
Y Combinator Research Artist and Researcher

BlinkPopShift (M Eifler) is an American artist and researcher who lives and works in San Francisco, California. They make chimeras, things in between things. Using sculpture, performance, video and immersive technology they focus on navigating back and forth between different modes of thought and making (for example the physical and the virtual) in an effort to blur the strict categories humans are so fond of. Their work centers intersectional, interdisciplinary, and systems oriented thought as the most important tools for human progress. Learn more on their website.

---

Tarleton Gillespie
Microsoft Research New England Principal Researcher

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and an affiliated associate professor in the Department of Communication and Department of Information Science at Cornell University. He is the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007) and co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT, 2014). He is also the co-founder of the blog Culture Digitally, http://www.culturedigitally.org/. For the past several years he has been study how social media platforms moderate the content and behavior of their users, and how their approaches to moderation have broader implications for the character of public discourse. His next book, Everything in Moderation (Yale University Press) will be published in early 2018. Learn more on Microsoft's website.

---

John Hagel
Santa Fe Institute Trustee and Leader of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte

John has spent over 35 years in Silicon Valley and has experience as a management consultant, entrepreneur, speaker and author. He is driven by a desire to help individuals and institutions around the world to increase their impact in a rapidly changing world.

In addition to his current role as leader of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, he has worked with McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group. He also served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. Learn more on his website.

---

David Krakauer
Santa Fe Institute President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems

David’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. At the cellular level David has been interested in molecular processes, which rely on volatile, error-prone, asynchronous, mechanisms, which can be used as a basis for decision making and patterning. David also investigates how signaling interactions at higher levels, including microbial and organismal, are used to coordinate complex life cycles and social systems, and under what conditions we observe the emergence of proto-grammars. Much of this work is motivated by the search for 'noisy-design' principles in biology and culture emerging through evolutionary dynamics that span hierarchical structures. Learn more on SFI's website.

---

Nathaniel Persily
Stanford Law School Professor of Law

An award-winning teacher and nationally recognized constitutional law expert, Professor Persily, JD ’98, focuses on the law of democracy, addressing issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance and redistricting. A sought-after nonpartisan voice in voting rights, he has served as a court-appointed expert to draw legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland and New York and as special master for the redistricting of Connecticut’s congressional districts. Most recently, he also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan commission created by the President to deal with the long lines at the polling place and other administrative problems witnessed in the 2012 election. Learn more on Stanford's website.

---

Graham Spencer
Santa Fe Institute Trustee and managing partner at GV

He was an engineering director at Google following the 2006 acquisition of JotSpot, which he co-founded with Joe Kraus. Graham was one of the original six founders of Excite.com and was the chief technology officer of the company until its sale to @Home.

In 1999, Graham left Excite@Home to co-found DigitalConsumer.org, a 50,000-member non-profit consumer organization dedicated to protecting fair-use rights for digital media. Graham is also on the board of the Santa Fe Institute. Learn more on his website.

---

Will Tracy
Santa Fe Institute Vice President for Strategic Partnerships

William M. Tracy is the Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Santa Fe Institute. His academic work lies at the intersection of complex systems and strategic management, with a focus on how boundedly-rational actors approach novel problems. Will comes to SFI from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was the undergraduate program director for the Lally School of Management and a faculty member. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and formerly served as the Associate Director of CSSS-Beijing, which was jointly administered by SFI and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before entering academia, Will was a Junior Professional Associate at The World Bank, where he focused on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Will also has private sector and entrepreneurial experience in the US, China, and India. He holds a Ph.D. in management with a certificate in human complex systems from UCLA, and a BA (cum laude) in economics from Swarthmore College. Learn more on SFI's website

---

Marshall Van Alstyne
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Research Associate

Professor Van Alstyne is one of the leading experts in network business models. He conducts research on information economics, covering such topics as communications markets, the economics of networks, intellectual property, social effects of technology, and productivity effects of information. As co-developer of the concept of “two sided networks” he has been a major contributor to the theory of network effects, a set of ideas now taught in more than 50 business schools worldwide. Learn more on MIT's website.