Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is an internationally-acclaimed and award-winning poet. A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia (pronounced JOY-uh) received a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Stanford University, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.

Gioia’s many literary anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, and Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.

Since becoming Chairman of the NEA, Gioia has succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. Business Week Magazine has referred to him as “The Man Who Saved the NEA.”

Kenneth C. Green is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project (campuscomputing.net), the largest continuing study of the role of computing, eLearning, and information technology in American higher education. Begun in 1990, the project is widely cited by campus officials and IT industry executives as a definitive source for data, information, and insight about IT planning and policy issues affecting U.S. colleges and universities. Green is the author/editor of a dozen books and published research reports and more than 80 articles and commentaries published in academic and professional publications. In October 2002, he received the first EDUCAUSE Award for Leadership in Public Policy and Practice. The award cites his work in creating The Campus Computing Project and recognizes his "prominence in the arena of national and international technology agendas, and the linking of higher education to those agendas." A graduate of New College (FL), Green earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes Inc. magazine, which ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” And PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-tospeech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially-marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton at a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.

He has received thirteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Eileen M. Lento, Ph.D., is Government and Education Strategist at Intel Americas, currently developing and implementing holistic models to meet the needs of state and local governments as well as school systems in the United States. In the area of government, she supports transportation, health and human services, public safety as well as data center consolidation. In each pillar of government, she brings to bare uniquely tailored solutions that provide intelligent and appropriate infrastructure that reduce costs while increasing efficiencies. In the current economic climate, the government initiatives are more critical than ever as the data clearly demonstrates that these projects will pay off substantially in reduced operation costs, e.g. consociation through virtualization, energy efficiency as well as intelligent performance. In the education space, she is expert at guiding school systems along the technology adoption curve. These models recognize that such efforts demand more than simply providing students and educators with laptops. The work addresses the need for quantitative and qualitative results, visionary leadership, creative funding, rich digital content, ongoing professional development, all supported by a solid infrastructure. Additionally, she brings awareness to the need for advocacy around policies necessary for such systemic reform efforts to gain real traction (i.e., scale and sustainability). A retired US Air Force Officer, her previous work includes the Director of Learning Technologies for PASCO Scientific and an Assistant Professor of Research in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. Having worked on several large scale NSF and DOE projects, she is dedicated to transforming learning experiences via teaching and learning processes that take full advantage of technology so that all students can achieve the high standards essential for them to be successful. Dr. Lento has won a number of awards as well as published in several peer-reviewed journals.