2008 JHTC Event Schedule

Marina reflects on her experience emigrating from the former Soviet Union and what she learned from that experience that helps her work as a forecaster. Marina will start with an introduction on the Institute For The Future and then talk about her personal journey from Ukraine to her position as the IFTF's executive director, lessons learned from this experience and how they apply them to the group's work.

Speakers/Special Guests

Marina Gorbis , Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has directed international programs and led international development projects for SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in China, Japan, Vietnam, India, and Eastern Europe. In addition to serving as IFTF's Executive Director, Marina leads the Technology Horizons Program, focusing on the innovation at the intersection of new technologies and social organization.

She has initiated a Global Ethnographic Network (GEN), a multi-year ethnographic research program which tries to develop an understanding of daily lives of people in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley, in an attempt to integrate their voices into IFTF's forecasts.

Marina holds an M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley, a certificate in international business from the University of London, and a B.A. in industrial psychology, also from the University of California, Berkeley. California, Berkeley.

FixYa is based on the proposition that consumer products manufacturers are not providing adequate support, directly or through their web sites, but a social network for peer-to-peer help can fill this gap through crowdsourcing.

Since founding the company two years ago, Yaniv and his team have grown the site organically to be the largest community tech support destination getting over 5 million unique visits per month and, with a $4M+ Series A from VC funds Mayfield and Pitango, are nearing profitability.

Speakers/Special Guests

Yaniv Ben Saadon is a seasoned internet entrepreneur who over the past 8 years founded and led several successful consumer internet ventures. He is the founder and CEO of FixYa.com and previously held leadership roles at Israeli startups HotBar, 3Turtles and TargetMatch.

Prior to entering the Internet space Yaniv represented the Israeli Government as a Spokesperson for the Consul General of Israel in Miami, served as a Captain in the Israeli Air Force and earned his bchelor's degree at Florida Atlantic University.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our main tool for doing this is search, which we have taken to a very high level of sophistication, while keeping it simple to use. In this talk I will describe some of the non-obvious things we do, the challenges we face, and the huge opportunities we have to help people.

Speakers/Special Guests

Udi Manber As a Vice President of Engineering, Udi is responsible for core search. Before joining Google early in 2006, Udi was CEO of A9.com, a Senior VP at Amazon.com, and Yahoo's Chief Scientist. He started working on search algorithms in 1989 with the invention of Suffix Arrays (with Gene Myers) while he was a professor at the University of Arizona, and he was a co-developer of several search packages, including Agrep, Glimpse, WebGlimpse, and Harvest.

He started developing search and other software tools for the web 2 months after Mosaic was announced in 1993, and continued ever since. While in academia, he also worked in the areas of theoretical computer science, computer security, distributed systems, and networks and won a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985. Udi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

As the Pacific Northwest Deputy Director of AIPAC, Charlie Kirschner receives the most up-to-date information on current events and political dynamics in the United States and the Middle East. Join Charlie for a very timely discussion of current diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, future threats in the region and how you can get involved in the U.S. political process to shape Israel's future.

Speakers/Special Guests

Charles Kirschner As AIPAC’s Pacific Northwest Deputy Director, Charlie Kirschner works with communities from Central California to Alaska, organizing the political and grassroots efforts of pro-Israel activists. His portfolio includes community organizing, strategic planning, Congressional lobbying, fundraising and leadership development.

As a former AIPAC student activist, Charlie has a unique perspective upon grassroots pro-Israel activism. Originally from Los Angeles, he has worked on Congressional campaigns in California and Georgia. He turned his passion for politics into pro-Israel activism after visiting Israel on a Dorot Foundation grant.

Charlie graduated from Emory University in Atlanta with a degree in International Relations and Linguistics, focusing upon the Middle East and South Asia. He's also studied at Tel Aviv University and conducted research on language policy, terrorism and ethnic violence. Charlie has served in a variety of positions within AIPAC, most recently as the South Bay Area Director.

Sponsors and Raffle Prizes

• City Lights Theater Company of San Jose two tickets to an upcoming performance
• San Jose Stage Company two tickets to an upcoming performance
• Fred Astaire Dance Studios dance lessons (Santa Clara, CA)
• Tim Harvey, Advanced Sports Therapy sports therapy
• Center for Complimentary Medicine acupuncture
• Symphony Silicon Valley two tickets to an upcoming performance
• Ming Fang (Lisa) Qui traditional Chinese massage
• Diamond Associates three hourlong professional development/management consulting sessions
• Fenwick & West - our gracious hosts

Many scientists, politicians, businesspeople, pundits and other interested observers discuss the potential consequences one or a few areas of technological development but David Friedman is attempting to look at the broadest swath, individually and in combination, from legal, economic and practical perspectives in an upcoming book as well as an ongoing law school seminar and during this event he will give us the chance to add to the discussion.

Speakers/Special Guests

David Friedman is currently writing Future Imperfect, a book about technological change in the near future and its consequences. He has also published several highly regard books on law and economics as well as several novels, most recently Harald in which the storyteller is mightier than the Emperor.

Dr. Friedman teaches at Santa Clara University in the Law School and (sometimes) the Business School. In Spring 2007 he taught a seminar on Legal Issues of the Twenty-First Century and a course on the economic analysis of law and in Spring 2008 will be teaching a course on Analytic Methods for Lawyers and a seminar on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.

Intel, Apple, and Microsoft did not invent the computer—there was computing before PCs. This talk will highlight some of the colorful people and strange machines from the days when computers were big enough to walk inside, not small enough to wear.

This is a rich 50-year history with many lessons for us today. You will also hear about the Computer History Museum here in Silicon Valley, which is dedicated to preserving and telling the stories of the Information Revolution that is changing civilization forever.

Speakers/Special Guests

Len Shustek is chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum.

In 1979, he co-founded Nestar Systems Inc., an early producer of networked client-server computer systems. In 1986, he co-founded Network General Corporation, a manufacturer of network analysis tools, notably The Sniffer™. The company became Network Associates Inc. after merging with McAfee Associates and PGP. He now teaches occasionally as a consulting professor at Stanford University, and is a partner at VenCraft, a small "angel financing" venture capital fund. He is also a trustee of Polytechnic University.

Shustek's educational background is in computer science (master and doctor of philosophy, Stanford University) by way of physics (bachelor and master of science, Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY). After graduation, he joined the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science.