Bios

• Paul Braund is Executive Director and co-founder of RiOS Institute. Currently, he is completing a book, Worlds By Design. He is an award-winning industrial designer who has developed numerous patents. He has worked in technology research and development in Silicon Valley, and has consulted with startups, multinationals and government agencies such as the EPA and NASA.
• Hans Appel has been working in the computer industry for some 35 years. After studying electronics, he began building and programming hybrid analog/digital computer systems in the late sixties. Since 1996 Appel has been working at Sun Microsystems, as Chief Technology Officer and Vision Council Member for the Northern European Region. Sun is one of the few IT organizations where the design of a product, from silicon to end product, still occurs within the same company. It is a company in which the person-technology interface occupies an important place, right next to bringing highly professional IT-technology on the market.
• Gil Friend is President and Chief Executive Officer of Natural Logic. A systems ecologist Friend was a founding board member of internet pioneer Institute for Global Communications, and played key or founding roles in such seminal environmental enterprises as EcoNet, GreenLine, the California Office of Appropriate Technology, and Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game.” He was co-founder and Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, one of the nation’s leading urban ecology and economic development think-tanks.
• Jim Jones is Managing Director at Scale Venture Partners and currently sits on the boards of Auvitek, CipherMax, Discera, Entone, IMT, NComputing, and Xceive. Prior to Scale Venture Partners, Jones led product management, product marketing, and business development groups at 3Com Corporation and spearheaded the company’s entry into and market leadership of Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet solutions as well as its foray into the home networking market. Jones’ investment focus is in semiconductor and MEMS components and enterprise systems.
• CJ Koomen is the Founder and Managing Partner of Point-One Innovation Fund. In 2000, Koomen co-founded the company Securealink, which was acquired by SafeNet in 2002. Since then, he has been an entrepreneur, founder, advisor, angel investor, board member, chairman and interim CEO for many start-up initiatives. Before founding Securealink, he held several high-level positions at large, multinational corporations such as Philips and the Communications & Multimedia Business Group.
• Andrea Saveri is Research Director at the Institute for the Future. Saveri is a director in the Technology Horizons Program and has worked at IFTF for 16 years. Her work focuses on identifying the long-term demographic, social, and technological trends that shape the transformation of work, the workplace, and household life. In particular, Saveri examines the underlying factors and unarticulated needs and desires that shape the diffusion, adoption, and reinvention of information and communications technologies at home and at work.
• Maarten Sierhuis is a computer scientist and senior researcher at RIACS/NASA Ames Research Center. His research in the last ten years has focused on computational modeling and simulation techniques for understanding how people work in practice. Sierhuis believes that technology designers need a deep understanding of how people work in practice, before they even attempt to develop technology for people.
• R. Stanley Williams is Senior HP Fellow at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and founding Director (since 1995) of the Quantum Science Research (QSR) group. The QSR was established to prepare HP for the major challenges and opportunities ahead in electronic device technology as features continue to shrink to the nanometer size scale, where quantum mechanics becomes important. He recently received the prestigious Glenn T. Seaborg Medal awarded by the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry