Jacob Beal is a researcher working on engineered self-organization: the science of obtaining predictable aggregate behavior from collections of unreliable devices with local and non-linear interactions. His focus in this area is on problems of system integration for human-level intelligence and on problems of modelling and control for spatially-distributed networks like sensor networks, robotic swarms, and cells during morphogenesis. Dr. Beal, who has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, is completing a postdoctoral position at MIT and beginning as a Scientist at BBN Technologies in Fall, 2008.

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Tania Bubela is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the School of Public Health, University of Alberta and an adjunct professor in the School of Business. She holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree (1988) from the Australian National University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1995) from the University of Sydney, Australia, and a Bachelor of Laws (Gold Medalist) degree (2003) from the University of Alberta. After gaining her law degree, Dr. Bubela clerked for the Honourable Louise Arbour at the Supreme Court of Canada.

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Jesse Dylan is a fellow at Creative Commons and serves on the board of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C. based public interest group working to defend citizens’ rights in our emerging digital culture. Jesse also dedicates himself to his non-profit medical website Lybba.org. The hope behind Lybba is that all of the worldʼs medical knowledge will be available in an open forum, free of charge, in simple, easy-to-understand language. Jesse is also an active member of several organizations dedicated to growing our understanding of the world in an effective and equitable way.

He is a filmmaker and Creative Director & CEO of FreeForm, a full-service production company with a focus on corporate social responsibility and social media, working to translate potent thinking into content that moves people to act and engages communities across the media landscape. In addition, he a prolific director behind some of the most successful campaigns in commercial television, print, and interactive advertising; he has created award-winning commercials for clients including Nike, Nintendo, Motorola, American Express, NFL, and MTV.

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Puneet evangelizes open access to geospatial data, science and technology as a senior Science Commons Fellow. Puneet was a Science Policy Fellow at the National Academies which got him interested in open data. He is an elected Charter member of the Open Source GeoSpatial Foundation, and a researcher in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is building a web-based carbon modeling tool. Puneet has worked as an engineer in a small New Delhi NGO, internationally as a GIS specialist at the World Bank in Washington DC, and at a private GIS consulting firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Puneet has an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, an M.S. from UW-Madison, and is a Ph.D. candidate at UW-Madison trying to develop a methodology for measuring information accessibility.

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Jordan is best known for building the Napster backend software including real-time search and chat and scaling it up to 80 million users. He has founded multiple companies, the most recent one was SNOCAP. It was a real-time copyright clearinghouse that allowed P2P systems to identify content and retrieve licensing information. SNOCAP became the primary MySpace storefront for music. As a Science Commons Fellow, Jordan is working on a system to transition scientific publications from isolated islands of text to highly interconnected collaborative pages that can be discussed, annotated, organized and edited.

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MacKenzie joins the Science Commons from MIT, where she is Research Director for the Libraries and was formerly the Associate Director for Technology, overseeing their technology strategy. At MIT she was the project director for DSpace, the Libraries’ collaboration with Hewlett-Packard to develop an open source digital research repository platform, and led research projects on Semantic Web data publishing, long-term preservation of digital data, and policy-aware data interoperability, particularly in the sciences. She is also Special Consultant to the Association of Research Libraries’ E-Science Institute, and formerly held technology positions at the Harvard University Library and the University of Chicago Library. She holds a BA from the University of Washington, and an MA in Information Science from the University of Chicago.

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Victoria is a fellow with the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. She obtained a Master’s in Legal Studies in 2007 from Stanford Law School where she worked with Larry Lessig to create a new license for computational research. Her current research includes understanding how new technologies and open source standards affect societal decision-making and welfare. Victoria completed her PhD in statistics at Stanford University in 2006 with advisor David Donoho, specializing in regression techniques for cases where there are many more variables than observations. She also has a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of British Columbia and the University of Ottawa respectively.

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