Richard Saul Wurman is an American architect and graphic designer. Wurman has written and designed over 83 books, and created the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference, TEDMED and the WWW suite of gatherings.

Described by Fortune magazine as an "intellectual hedonist" with a "hummingbird mind," Richard Saul Wurman seeks ways to make the complex clear. Recognizing at an early age that his ignorance is his greatest asset, he has made it his mission to sort through the abundance of information that is available on every topic, and design the techniques to make it understandable.

Richard Saul Wurman has been named this year's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. This top honor recognizes an individual who has made a long-term contribution to the practice of design.

Wurman has had many lives: as an author (83 books); FAIA Architect, 13-year partner in Murphy Levy Wurman Architects; cartographer (mapped 1/3 of the Mayan city of Tikal and current project 19.20.21.); teacher (Cambridge University, England; Princeton; Washington University, St. Louis; University of Southern California; University of California Los Angeles; City College of New York, and Dean, Cal Poly School of Design); urban designer (recipient of MIT's Kevin Lynch award in urban design); graphic designer (AIGA Gold Medal, membership in AGI and inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame); information theorist (Information Anxiety, Follow the Yellow Brick Road); in medicine (6 books and creator of TEDMED), and as a conference convener. The path of this journey has been paved by one surface: his curiosity.

Nathaniel Pearlman has been visualizing data for more than two decades; his interest goes back as far as his first statistics class with Edward Tufte in 1988. Nathaniel majored in computer science at Yale and he finished all but his dissertation in MIT’s political science doctoral program. Outside of academics, Nathaniel is an experienced entrepreneur. He founded NGP Software, Inc. in 1997 (now NGP VAN, Inc.) to join his interests in politics and technology and grew that company into the market leader in fundraising and compliance software for progressive political campaigns. Nathaniel served as Chief Technology Officer for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign in 2007-8. In 2009, Nathaniel founded the information graphic products company Timeplots and reserved the name Graphicacy for information graphics consulting and services. Together, Timeplots and Graphicacy are dedicated to making the visual display of information more comprehensible and aesthetic.

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Wonk Wire, Political Job Hunt and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Nicco Mele, entrepreneur, angel investor and consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, is one of America's leading forecasters of business, politics, and culture in our fast-moving digital age. He is currently the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow atUSC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP) and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review.

Nicco is an active angel investor in technology startups, including Plympton (a publishing startup), UMS (mobile), Cignify (data analytics), and iDiet (health care). He advises several startups, including Blueprint Robotics and Good Labs.

Most recently, Nicco Mele has served as Senior Vice President and Deputy Publisher of the Los Angeles Times. He focused on product, content, revenue, and audience development for all of the California News Group's brands, including growing existing digital products and services, identifying possible acquisitions, developing new business opportunities and launching new products.

Nicco's first book, The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath, was published by St. Martin's Press on April 23, 2013. In it, he explores the consequences of living in a socially-connected society, drawing upon his years of experience as an innovator in politics and technology. The book has been translated intoJapanese and Korean.

From 2009-2014, Mele served on the faculty of theHarvard Kennedy School teaching graduate-level classes on the Internet and politics. In the spring of 2009, Mele was the Visiting Edward R. Murrow Lecturer at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and in the fall of 2008 he was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Harvard Kennedy School, Mele taught at theJohns Hopkins Graduate School of Communications.

Nicco co-founded Echo & Co., a digital consulting firm with offices in Boston and Washington, DC. Echo & Co. aids clients who are facing, and being overtaken by, overwhelming technological and social change. In addition to Echo's strategic consulting practice, our design and technical teams have ten years of experience designing digital experiences and executing technical projects. We are recognized experts in Drupal development.

Born to Foreign Service parents, Nicco spent his early years in Asia and Africa before graduating from the College of William and Mary in Virginia with a bachelor's degree in government. He then worked for several high-profile advocacy organizations where he pioneered the use of social media as a galvanizing force for fundraising. As webmaster for Governor Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid, Nicco and the campaign team popularized the use of technology and social media that revolutionized political fundraising and reshaped American politics. Subsequently, he co-founded Echo & Co.

Since his early days as one of Esquire Magazine's "Best and Brightest" in America, Nicco has been a sought-after innovator, media commentator, and speaker. He serves on a number of private and non-profit boards, including the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Nicco co-founded theMassachusetts Poetry Festival, and in 2014 he co-produced a documentary about the poet W.S. Merwin, "Even Though The Whole World Is Burning".

Nicco lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Morra Aarons-Mele (founder of Women Online) and their three children (and three cats).

After more than a decade at the intersection of digital media and political advocacy, Patrick is the co-founder Echelon Insights, a company that brings digital thinking and accountability to fix how organizations communicate offline. Echelon is innovating in new ways to measure audiences -- finally closing the loop between traditional polling, predictive modeling, and social data. In addition, Echelon is investing in analytics technology infrastructure to model audiences and measure media across channels, optimizing message delivery in real time. 

Ruffini also serves as the chairman of Engage, a digital agency founded in 2007. Engage builds digital platforms for Presidential candidates, national and international political parties, corporations, advocacy organizations, and elected officials. Engage was on of the first companies to build technology platforms to help clients organize online -- from CRM tools to online fundraising to Facebook social targeting. 

All of this came after years of experience running digital and technology for the Republican National Committee in 2006 and as part of the first full-fledged digital department on a Republican Presidential campaign on Bush-Cheney '04. 

Dr. Melander is Vice President, Consulting at Civitas Learning.  In this role, she manages a team of services professionals who help colleges and universities harness the power of insight and action analytics.  Before joining Civitas Learning, Dr. Melander was Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH).  In this positon, she connected the product vision of the Chief Customer Officer and platform vision of the Chief Technology Officer with all other parts of the enterprise to drive “digital first” throughout.

Prior to joining HMH, Dr. Melander was the Chief Technology Officer for Achieving the Dream.  In this role, she ensured that programs and operations were informed, supported by, and integrated with cutting-edge technology.   She was a Specialist Leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP where she focused on the innovative use of collaboration & social software and a previously a full-time faculty member at American University where she won the "Teaching with Technology Award" for her use of technology in the classroom. 

Dr. Melander has held a variety of positions in the Technology industry including Senior Global Director for Higher Education Strategy and Programs at Microsoft Corporation and Vice President for Oracle Corporation's ThinkQuest and Think.com initiatives.

Dr. Melander received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from West Chester University, a Master of Science degree in technical management from Johns Hopkins University, and a Doctorate of Philosophy degree in information technology from George Mason University.  Dr. Melander has a patent in the area of Information Retrieval.

Sean Gonzalez is currently President of Data Community DC (DC2) and a Data Science Consultant at General Influence. DC2 was founded in 2012, has grown into the largest active technical community in the Washington DC area with 13000+ members, and is focused on reducing the entropy of that network. General Influence, LLC, is a loose consulting network focused on productizing data using interactive webapps and Deep Learning. In general, Sean is interested in reducing the social and political friction of building networks on demand.