Michael Peter Edson is a director, founder, and strategist working at the intersection of tech, culture, and democracy.

Michael was the Director and Chief Museum Officer of the Museum of Solutions (MuSo), a new, state-of-the-art facility in Mumbai, India, dedicated to inspiring and empowering young people to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

In its inaugural year MuSo was named to TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Greatest Places list and won the prestigious Hands On! Children In Museums Award bestowed by the European Museum Academy and the International Association of Children in Museums.

Previously, Michael was the co-founder of the Museum of the United Nations – UN Live in Copenhagen, and the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex in Washington, D.C.

Michael is a Salzburg Global Fellow; a Fellow at the Getty Leadership Institute; a Presidential Distinguished Fellow emeritus at the Council for Libraries and Information Resources (USA); and a juror for the MacArthur Foundation's $100 million grant initiative, $100 & Change, and Cumulus Green, a global design competition for solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Michael is chair of the Europeana Foundation Advisory Board; he is an O'Reilly Foo Camp alumni; and he was named a "Tech Titan: person to watch" by Washingtonian magazine.

More about Michael’s work can be found at https://usingdata.com/about.

Z works at the intersection of operations, design, and AI, helping organizations scale through better systems, stronger alignment, and more effective teams. She currently leads Experience Operations at Deel, a global leader in people technology, focusing on end-to-end AI enablement across products, teams, and operations. Most recently, she led a five-month AI transformation initiative at Cloudflare, advancing AI literacy and practical adoption across teams.

An entrepreneur and educator, Z is passionate about operational excellence and creating environments where teams can do their best work. Throughout her career, she has led design organizations in-house and in consulting, taught leadership and interaction design, and mentored the next generation of designers.

Outside of work, Z co-creates a sci-fi series and paints large-scale floral artworks, reflecting her passion for creativity both at work and beyond.

Andrew Sniderman spent 30 years in big tech, including 20 at Microsoft, before going independent. He now teaches high schoolers to build and ship software with AI, and runs Wirepine Digital, doing web work for Sonoma County nonprofits and small businesses. He writes TechTales, a newsletter on technology's past, its future, and the people caught in the middle.

Dave Kanter builds AI systems and leads engineering teams. His twenty years of full-stack experience across everything from Fortune 500 enterprises to non-profits to mom-and-pop run businesses gives Dave the engineering and architectural range to move between production infrastructure and research-level problems — and the communication skills to align teams and stakeholders around both.

As a Technical Lead at Publicis Sapient, Dave leads development teams in several verticals including retail, e-commerce, and financial services. He runs the XENA (Experience Engineering North America) internal talk series and mentors engineers through the annual internship program.

Currently Dave is also serving as the CTO of VoterPrime, a civic tech nonprofit where he owns all the stack and all of the architecture decisions for a production AI platform including RAG pipelines, embedding-based retrieval, confidence scoring, and LLM observability with Langfuse. He holds a provisional patent on a novel feedback architecture for multi-turn LLM agent systems, which is currently in full utility filing.

Prior to coming to Publicis Dave was the lead developer for starwars.com through the Disney acquisition. He was also full-time faculty at Parsons MFA and Academy of Art University, where he built and led graduate-level technology curriculum. Dave ran his own business, Kanter-Ross New Media, which brought in $2M in sales in ~18 months.

He likes to think in systems. His background includes control theory applied to agent architectures, signals and systems, and the mathematical foundations of machine learning. Outside work Dave is a licensed private pilot, ham radio operator, jazz musician, full-time dad, and Division F Director for Toastmasters District 203 — responsible for club health across coastal California from San Francisco to Eureka.

Kyle O'Brien's north star is to help make AGI go well for humanity. There are many ways it may not. He doesn't study them all. Kyle's research focuses on developing solutions to the technical and governance challenges. He focuses on LLMs because he believes they will lead to AGI and beyond.

Kyle's current primary research direction is Capability Prevention & Removal (CPR). This multi-paper direction aims to build scalable techniques for removing unwanted capabilities from models before deployment. Crucially, it shouldn't be easy for downstream users to fine-tune models on these capabilities. For instance, he wants to be able to prevent models from learning biorisk capabilities in the first place and develop unlearning algorithms to remove any remaining biorisk knowledge from the weights of a fully-trained model. The ability for model providers to control which capabilities their models have would be a significant breakthrough for AI safety. However, this direction may not scale to ASI, and it is best complemented, and hopefully replaced, by breakthroughs in foundational AI alignment.

Kyle recently released his first paper in this direction — Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs. He finds that one can prevent LLMs from learning about biorisk by filtering pretraining data, and that this is an especially promising intervention for open-weight models. This work has been covered for a general audience by the Washington Post and Fortune.

His secondary interests focus on empirically studying self-fulfilling misalignment, safety evaluation data contamination, training open-weight models, and technical AI governance.

Nick is an SRJC alum with associate degrees in environmental science and computer studies. He transferred to UC Berkeley to earn degrees from the College of Environmental Design and the College of Engineering, and recently graduated with a Master of Analytics focused on machine learning and optimization. During his graduate studies he interned at Geopogo, a startup at the intersection of artificial intelligence and architecture, building AI design and code-compliance tools that automate workflows for architecture firms.

Reg serves as subject matter expert evaluating the quality and accuracy of AI-generated legal content. Before focusing on AI, he spent 25 years as an attorney editor for legal treatises on a wide variety of topics including civil litigation, medical damages, toxic torts, and drone law. He has also: trained and mentored editorial professionals; written documentation for editorial tools and workflows; and served as a teaching assistant for web development courses. Reg has built his career around making complex legal and technical subjects clear, accessible, and easy to understand. He holds a law degree from UC Law San Francisco, a B.A. in Biology from Pomona College, and certificates in drone studies and web development from Santa Rosa Junior College.

Neha Saigal is a founder building AI for the physical world.

She is the founder of an early literacy platform that creates personalized learning experiences to get kids reading real books, and runs a rapid metal parts manufacturing and fabrication business. At the heart of both is a conviction that the best technology gives people real capability and points them back to the physical world.

She also advises mission-driven organizations and nonprofits across education, well-being, and impact. Earlier in her career, she spent 13 years in product design and strategy, including several years at Optimizely and later running her own San Francisco studio, N5, where she worked with startup accelerators and large organizations like Google and Cisco. She holds a master's in psychology from Harvard, focusing on developmental psychology and learning science.

Bio coming soon.

As a proven growth driver in high performing industries, Zack Darling collaborates within creative and strategic teams as a leader, marketing executive, and experiential designer to enhance brand value and drive sales. Specializing in purpose driven ventures, regulated industries, lifestyle brands, consumer packaged goods, sustainable enterprises, and live events, Zack supports growth through omni channel brand strategy, public relations, campaign planning, retail marketing, experiential design and fabrication, digital solutions, and tactical execution for B2B and B2C brands.

Zack is an award winning brand builder with decades of experience in strategy, development, experiential design, and fabrication for industries such as lifestyle products, hospitality, apparel, wellness, luxury goods, solar energy, beer and wine, beverage, food products, restaurants, hydroponics, music festivals, venues, artists, architects, nonprofits, and cannabis.

Zack has served in executive leadership positions for sixteen years, working directly with founders, board members, and investors. He is an awarded designer and board member of trade, civic, industry, and nonprofit organizations.