Dr. Carrie Gates is a Vice President and Research Staff Member with CA Labs, the research arm within CA. She is responsible for performing research that has the potential to impact the strategic direction of CA products and services. This is achieved through identifying opportunities within the business units at CA that can be transformed into research relationships performed in collaboration with university faculty and students.

As Creative Director at frog, Jennifer Kilian is responsible for leading convergent teams with expertise in research, strategy and design to create innovative products, services, environments and digital experiences. She believes that true insights come from understanding the mindset of the user and creating designs they emotionally connect with.

Jennifer has a broad range of experience with design and digital media in both consulting and corporate settings. Prior to joining frog, Jennifer led Creative Teams at Apple, IBM and Intuit. Jennifer has helped to revolutionize the digital offerings of many of the world's largest brands, from GE and HP to Disney, Samsung and Microsoft.

Jennifer conducted her graduate work at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and holds an undergraduate degree in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Frederick Weber has been working in speech technology research for a decade, starting with speech recognition and biometric research in the corporate sector at Dragon Systems (later Nuance). Now affiliated with Columbia University's Earth Institute, his current research studies how speech and related technologies can be deployed to better integrate underserved populations, such as people with disabilities or those facing illiteracy. Dr. Weber's research has focused on India, whose dynamic and multilingual society presents several challenges and opportunities for speech technology. An area of particular interest for Dr. Weber is open source assistive technology, as a significant opportunity for the developing world. As a visiting researcher with Microsoft's Technology for Emerging Markets group in 2008, he investigated language issues with screen readers at the National Association for the Blind in Bangalore.
Dr. Weber earned his Ph.D. in experimental particle physics working on a collider experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Abhishek Hazra is an interaction designer and new media artist based in Bangalore. He has eight years of experience working across various design domains including a tenure at the Center for Knowledge Societies where he was also involved with the Doors of Perception design conference. His work explores the intersections between technology and culture through animated shorts and performance pieces. Abhishek is also interested in the social history of scientific practices in colonial India and its rich context of local innovation. His recent work has explored the pedagogic possibilities of interactive media.
Abhishek has exhibited widely in India and abroad. He participated in Experiment Marathon Reykjavík curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson (2008). His recent shows include On Uncertainty (2009) at Bose Pacia, New York, curated by Rit Premnath. Abhishek graduated from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.

Dr. Arun Mehta co-founded radiophony.com together with Vickram Crishna, a .com dedicated to audio-centric solutions to the problems of the under-privileged. At the request of Professor Stephen Hawking, he wrote eLocutor, free and open source software that allows persons as severely disabled as him to write and speak.
He has written extensively for international publications and co-authored a book "Technology and Competitiveness". In 2007, he contributed a chapter on eLocutor, entitled "When a button is all that connects you to the world” to “Beautiful Code” published by O'Reilly in which the world's leading programmers, including Brian Kernighan and Matz, contributed a chapter each.
He is PhD. From Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, as a fellow of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and also a B. Tech from IIT Delhi, and a Masters in Computer Sciences from the State University of Stony.
Currently, his passion is software that might make it easier for children with autism, cerebral palsy and dyslexia to communicate, which is being made available free of cost at skid.org.in and documented at arpitblog.wordpress.com. This software received the Manthan Award in 2008.

Dr. Murli Nagasundaram is a consultant on creativity, innovation and design thinking in business, government, education and society. He has been training and facilitating business teams, conducting research, and teaching innovation and information technology for over two decades. He was trained in the Osborn-Parnes Creativity Problem Solving Methodology (CPSI) at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) founded by Alex Osborne and Sid Parnes, the oldest such gathering. In the 1980’s he co-founded Collaborative Technologies Corporation, in Austin, Texas, where he helped develop VisionQuest, a pioneering groupware tool to structure and augment group interaction and creative thinking, as well as the socio-technological theories on which it was founded. Later, he taught at the Boise State University College of Business for over a decade. He has also has taught, conducted workshops, and consulted at other institutions and corporations in the US, Singapore, Dubai, and in India. Murli’s interests extend to organizations, culture, cognition, collaboration, complexity and emergence among others. He received his PhD from the University of Georgia, Athens. His prior education was at IIM Kolkata and REC (later, NIT) Tiruchirapalli.

Dr. Christian Lappe is heading the Sales and Marketing activities for SMI SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH Eye and Gaze Tracking Solutions from the head office in Berlin, Germany, US-based office in Boston and a network of resellers and distributors around the globe. He relies on more than 10 years business experience with global activities in B2B and B2C. Prior to joining SMI, he was responsible for sales and account management for opto-electronic solutions in medical device industry and research institutions in health care and life science. His educational background is a degree in physics followed by a Ph.D in Medical Physics from Univ. Heidelberg, Germany

Jason co-founded UPA China as the 1st non-profit usability organization in China in April, 2004 and was elected as President in upa china's first electon in 2005. In the past 5 years, Jason organized User Friendly 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and has led the team to make both UPA China and User Friendly the well-known brands in the Asia-Pacific UX community. In 2007, he was nominated as Member of UPA International Director Board. He has been the Regional Coordinator of UPA Asia since 2007.
In 2007, he founded TANG User eXperience Consulting leading a team with over 25 researchers, designers and consultants located in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, and he has served over 60 clients, 30 of which are World Top 500 Enterprises, such as SAP, China Mobile, Samsung, Paypal, GE, Microsoft, Intel, etc
Jason has been invited to give presentations and trainings at over 80 companies, organizations, conferences and universities including Samsung, Intel, ICBC，BOC, China Telecom, China Mobile, GE Healthcare, NetEase, Microsoft, Tsinghua University, KAIST, Sina, UPA International, Design For BRICs, etc.Jason studied Computer Science in Southeast University, China and then holds the Master degree in HCI from University of Bath, UK.
Jason's dream is to make UPA China the communication platform of choice for user experience practitioners in both the east and west, and TANG Consulting a force for product innovation for China.”

Jan Blom is heading a nomadic research team in India. The team is multidisciplinary, consisting of ethnographers, designers and technologists. The whole of India is used as the stage for the research.
The team concentrates on the following research questions: What factors hinder economic prosperity, well-being and self-actualization in emerging markets, ranging from individual to community to society? What are the key technological solutions to these challenges and what is their impact on the community?
Jan joined Nokia in 2003. Prior to his current role, he was User Researcher at Nokia Research Center, Finland. Subsequently, he was involved in setting up a satellite design studio for Nokia Design in Bangalore.
He has a doctorate degree from the University of York, UK, in psychological implications of personalised user interfaces.

Raghu Dwarakanath is the head of product development for the global small business and the emerging markets at Intuit’s Global Business Division. He is currently responsible for the development of products for customers in Canada, United Kingdom and the Emerging Markets including India.
Raghu is very passionate about Intuit’s focus on solving customer pain points through innovation and the global, mobile & social paradigm.
Raghu has split his career between the Silicon Valley and India. Having worked at Hewlett Packard Company, Sun Microsystems Inc., a startup and Oracle Corporation in the US and at McAfee, Dell and now Intuit in India. Raghu holds a bachelors and a masters degree in mechanical engineering and a masters degree in computer science.

Mrinal Wadhwa, is the Founder of Blu, a stealth mode start up that is taking a user centered approach and rethinking various business process applications used within enterprises. He is involved with some of the latest Software User Interface development technologies like Adobe Flex/Flash, Microsoft Silverlight/WPF and HTML5 and is regarded as an expert in the Rich Internet Applications community. He has also been recognized as an SAP Mentor and an Adobe Flex Community Champion.
Mrinal spends a lot of his time thinking about the evolution of Software User Interfaces and has more recently been researching and thinking about various techniques of visualizing large data sets. He has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Manipal Academy of Higher Education. He likes to blog and studies various aspects of user interface development on his blog at mrinalwadhwa.com.

Sanjai.K is a Vice President and Heads the Solution Management for ERP, SRM and Sustainability Solutions at SAP Labs India. In his current role he is a part of the Global Management team responsible for defining the Product Strategy & Roadmap for ERP & SRM. He is also responsible for Roll out & Enablement of SAP Field and Partner Community in APJ region. Prior to this he has spent close to 10 years with SAP Consulting as Program Manager responsible for managing delivery of SAP implementations.