Dr. Garnet Hertz a Fulbright Scholar and contemporary artist whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is a Faculty Member of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine and is Artist in Residence in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at UC Irvine. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture series on electronic art and design.

His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.

Dr. Jussi Parikka - teaches and writes on the cultural theory and history of new media. He has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and is Reader and Pathway Leader in Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He is the Director of CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy-Institutein the UK. He is also the co-director of the recently founded Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture. Parikka has authored and edited four books with three more forthcoming during the next year.

Parikka has published a book on “Cultural theory in the age of digital machines” (in Finnish) and his "Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses" in 2007.