Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Later in high school he created a pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony.

Michael Hickins (born May 1, 1961) is an American fiction writer, journalist, and news editor.

Hickins was born in Queens, New York. He lives in Manhattan and is an editor at the Wall Street Journal.

Hickins studied English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he studied with Wallace Gray, Quentin Anderson, Kenneth Koch, David Damrosch, and Arnold Weinstein.

He also earned his MFA at Columbia University, studying with Stephen Koch, Jonathan Baumbach and his thesis advisor, Robert Towers.

Hickins sent an unsolicited manuscript of his early stories to author and editor Gordon Lish, then a senior fiction editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who published Hickins' short stories in The Quarterly and, later, in a collection entitled The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (1991). The cover design by Chip Kidd featured a noir style pistol which prompted many bookstores to place the book in the mystery section instead of the literary newcomers.

Hickins has since written several novels, some self-published. His historical novel Blomqvist has enjoyed limited success. His work has also appeared in various literary magazines such as Monkey Bicycle and Setentia.

Robert A. Freitas Jr. is a Senior Research Fellow, one of four researchers at the nonprofit foundation Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California. He holds a 1974 Bachelor's degree majoring in both physics and psychology from Harvey Mudd College, and a 1978 Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Santa Clara University. He has written more than 150 technical papers, book chapters, or popular articles on a diverse set of scientific, engineering, and legal topics. He co-edited the 1980 NASA feasibility analysis of self-replicating space factories and later authored the first detailed technical design study of a hypothetical medical nanorobot, the respirocyte, ever published in a refereed medical journal.

In 1977-78 Robert Freitas created Sentience Quotient (SQ) as a way to describe the information processing rate in living organisms or computers. Freitas is authoring the multi-volume text Nanomedicine, the first book-length technical discussion of the potential medical applications of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology and medical nanorobotics. Volume I was published in October 1999 by Landes Bioscience while Freitas was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing . He published Volume IIA in October 2003 with Landes Bioscience while serving as a research scientist at Zyvex Corp., a nanotechnology company headquartered in Richardson, Texas, during 2000-2004.

Glenn Edward Lee Beck (born February 10, 1964) is an American conservative radio host, vlogger, author, entrepreneur, political commentator and former television host. He hosts the Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks. He formerly hosted the Glenn Beck television program, which ran from January 2006 to October 2008 on HLN and from January 2009 to June 2011 on the Fox News Channel. Beck has authored six New York Times–bestselling books. Beck is the founder and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, a multimedia production company through which he produces content for radio, television, publishing, the stage, and the Internet. It was announced on April 6, 2011, that Beck would "transition off of his daily program" on Fox News later in the year but would team with Fox to "produce a slate of projects for FOX News Channel and FOX News' digital properties". Beck's last daily show on the network was June 30, 2011. In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter named Beck on its Digital Power Fifty list.

Juan Enríquez was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. His work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, and The New York Times. He is the author of As the Future Catches You and The Untied States of America. He works in business, science, and domestic/international politics.

Juan Enríquez is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. He is currently Chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm.

He has published several key articles including, "Transforming Life, Transforming Business: the Life Science Revolution", co-authored with Ray Goldberg, which received a McKinsey Prize in 2000 (2nd place). He co-authored the first map of global nucleotide data flow as well as HBS working papers on "Life Sciences in Arabic Speaking Countries", "Global Life Science Data Flows and the IT industry", "SARS, Smallpox, and Business Unusual", and "Technology, Gene Research and National Competitiveness." Harvard Business School Interactive picked Juan as one of the best teachers at HBS and showcased his work in its first set of faculty products.