Tech Policy Summit's 2009 Advisory Board featured an all-star group of Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs and executives who are directly involved in promoting technology and innovation. We invite you to learn more about this year's advisors below. If you have questions about the 2009 Summit, please contact our staff directly.

Prith Banerjee is senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, the company's central research organization. In these roles, he helps chart technical strategies for the company, and he heads HP Labs, which has seven locations worldwide. Most recently, Dr. Banerjee was dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he led an organization of about 115 faculty in six engineering departments, 1,550 undergraduate and 900 graduate students, and $21 million in annual research funding. He also is the founder, chairman and chief scientist of BINACHIP Inc., a developer of products and services in electronic design automation.

Previously, he was the Walter P. Murphy Professor and chairman of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University. Prior to that, he was the director of the Computational Science and Engineering program and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000, Dr. Banerjee founded AccelChip Inc., a developer of products and services for electronic design automation, which was sold to Xilinx Inc. in 2006.

Dr. Banerjee currently serves on the Computer Science Advisory Board of the National Academy of Engineering, Tech Policy Summit Advisory Board and the advisory board for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a recipient of the 1996 American Society for Engineering Education Terman Award and the 1987 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

He received a bachelor of technology in electronics and electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a master of science and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

John Chen has served as chairman, chief executive officer and president of Sybase, Inc. since 1998. He is recognized as a technology industry leader and corporate turnaround specialist. Under his leadership, Sybase has become a highly profitable company that has grown from a leading enterprise-class database provider to the largest publicly traded software company specializing in data management, enterprise mobility and mobile messaging. In recognition of his outstanding entrepreneurship in building and leading a dynamic Sybase, he was named 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Northern California.

Mr. Chen is actively involved in international relations. He has testified before Congress on U.S.-China trade relations. In 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush appointed him to serve on the President's Export Council. In 2006, he was appointed co-chair of the Secure Borders and Open Doors Advisory Committee. In addition, Mr. Chen has been a longtime member of the Committee of 100. In recognition of his leadership in building U.S.-Asia business relationship, the California-Asia Business Council recently presented him the New Silk Road Award.

Mr. Chen serves on the boards of directors for the Walt Disney Company, Wells Fargo & Co., and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He is also active in the community. He is a trustee of CalTech, as well as the governor of the San Francisco Symphony.

Mr. Chen graduated from Brown University magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He holds a master's from California Institute of Technology (CalTech). He also has an honorary professorship from Shanghai University, an honorary doctorate from the San Jose State University in California, and the City University of Hong Kong, as well as an honorary doctorate in business administration from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Esther Dyson does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004. Her primary activity is investing in startups and guiding many of them as a board member.

She currently has holdings in a variety of online ventures, including WPP Group. She also founded the Flight School workshop and is active in fostering the emergence of startups in air and space -- air taxis, online markets for travel, new forms of air traffic management, commercial space startups, space tourism and the like.

In addition, Ms. Dyson is very interested in the potential of IT to change the world of health care, both through genetics and genomics. She is on the board of 23andMe, and was one of ten initial research subjects in George Church's Personal Genome Project.

For over two decades, Ms. Dyson wrote the Release 1.0 newsletter and ran the PC Forum conference. She was also the founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000, and was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 1990s. In 1997, she wrote her (so far) only book, "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age," which appeared a year later in paperback as "Release 2.1." In 1994, she wrote a seminal essay on intellectual property for WIRED magazine.

In both her investments and her nonprofit activities, she has always been concerned with the impact of information (technology) on business and society. She sits on the Stop Badware advisory board, and is on the board of The Sunlight Foundation and the Santa Fe Institute's Board of Trustees.

As chairman, CEO, and co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman drives the company's vision and strategy. Prior to LinkedIn, Mr. Hoffman was executive vice president of PayPal where he was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations and banking/payments infrastructure.

Prior to LinkedIn, Mr. Hoffman was executive vice president of PayPal. At PayPal, he was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, he was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo.

He also has held management roles in large technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. Currently, in addition to LinkedIn, Mr. Hoffman serves on the board of directors for SixApart and Mozilla Corporation. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a master's degree in philosophy.

David Hornik joined August Capital in 2000. He invests broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software and consumer facing software and services.

Prior to joining August Capital, he was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and Perkins Coie LLP. In his legal practice, he represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing and operations, including Yahoo!, When.com (AOL), Sonique (Terra Lycos), Pure Payments (Excite@Home), BuyDirect (Beyond.com) and Ofoto (Kodak).

Mr. Hornik has an eclectic technology background. At Stanford, he studied and taught the impact of technology on music, earning a degree in Computer Music. At Cambridge, England, he explored the power of technology in tracking and combating bias crime, receiving an M.Phil. in Criminology. At Harvard Law School, from which he received a J.D., magna cum laude, he focused upon the convergence of technology and the law, serving as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and publishing papers on digital audio and software piracy.

He has taught business and law internationally and is a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He currently sits on the board of directors of DoneRight, Nomis Solutions, PayCycle, Six Apart, Splunk Technology and VideoEgg. He previously served on the board of Evite which was acquired by Ticketmaster and was a board observer with Tickle Inc.(which was acquired by Monster) and Actional (which was acquired by Progress Software).

Mitchell Kapor
Chairman,
Xmarks

Mitchell Kapor is chairman of a privately held startup named Xmarks that develops a free add-on for the Firefox browser. He is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, activist and investor.

Mr. Kapor is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and served as the president (later chairman) and CEO of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and as a director until 1987.

After leaving executive management at Lotus, he spent time completing work on his favorite product, Lotus Agenda, the first application for Personal Information Management (PIM), and as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 1987 to 1990, Mr. Kapor served as the chairman and CEO of ON Technology.

In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. He also chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law, which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state, and served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.

Mr. Kapor has also played an important role in other organizations, as founding investor of UUNET; founding investor of RealNetworks; founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation; board member of the Level Playing Field Institute; founding chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the open source Web browser Firefox; and founding investor and chairman of the board for Linden Research, creator of Second Life.

He received a bachelor's degree from Yale College where he studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in cybernetics.

Chris Kelly
Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy,
Facebook 

Chris Kelly is the chief privacy officer and head of global public policy at Facebook, guiding Facebook's efforts to make the Internet a safer and more trusted place. He has previously served as chief privacy officer at three other Internet companies: Spoke Software, Excite@Home and Kendara.

As an attorney in private practice at Baker & McKenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Mr. Kelly advised major Internet and media clients on the increasing challenges of intellectual property and privacy protection for the digital age. In the public sector, he served as an education advisor in the Clinton Administration.

He holds a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, a master's degree in political science from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and part of the founding team for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Raman Khanna
General Partner, Information Technology,
ONSET Ventures

Raman Khanna has over 20 years of operating experience and 14 years of investment experience in information technology. 

Prior to becoming a managing director of ONSET Ventures, Mr. Khanna co-founded Diamondhead Ventures in June 2000 where he led the firm's investments in Cavium Networks (IPO), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco Systems), PassMark Security (acquired by RSA Security/EMC), Orative (acquired by Cisco Systems), Intraspect (acquired by Vignette), Serus, FirstRain and Nitronex.

Prior to Diamondhead Ventures, Mr. Khanna worked at Stanford University for 16 years in various roles, including chief information officer and chief technology officer. During his Stanford tenue, he was actively involved with many high technology startups as an angel investor, advisor and board member. His portfolio included Berkeley Networks (acquired by Fore Systems), Postini (acquired by Google), Siara Networks (acquired by Redback), SupportSoft (IPO), Shopping.com (IPO), Selectica (IPO) and Entercept Security Technologies (acquired by McAfee).

At ONSET Ventures, he specializes in enterprise and Internet technologies, information security and commercializing disruptive technologies developed at leading research universities. He currently serves on the boards of MixerCast, Serus, FirstRain and Nitronex.

He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Delhi University, a master's degree in computer science from Virgina Tech and an MBA from Golden Gate University.

Craig Newmark
Customer Service Representative and Founder,
Craigslist.org 

Craig Newmark is a senior Web-oriented software engineer with over 25 years of experience, including 18 years at IBM. He has become a leader in online community by virtue of running craigslist.org, the site he founded in 1995.

Using a common sense, down-to-earth approach, craigslist strives to make the Internet more personal and authentic, while advocating social responsibility through the promotion of small, non-profit organizations. Mr. Newmark continues to help the craigslist community, assisting with customer service issues like spam and scam complaints. He has been featured in the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek, TIME magazine, and Esquire magazine.

His community activities include being on the advisory boards of Climate Theatre and Haight-Ashbury Food Program, as well as supporting local writers through Grotto Nights. He also serves on the board of The Sunlight Foundation and as part of the National Advisory Council for DonorsChoose.org.

He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in computer science from Case Western Reserve University.

Craig's photo by JD Lasica.

Kim Polese
CEO,
SpikeSource

As CEO of SpikeSource, Kim Polese is responsible for guiding the company's business vision: enabling businesses to harness the power of open source as a flexible, reliable and cost-effective solution for business-critical needs.

Prior to SpikeSource, in 1996, she cofounded Marimba. As president and CEO, she led Marimba to profitability and a successful public offering. She then served as chairman until Marimba's acquisition by BMC Software in April 2004.

Before cofounding Marimba, Ms. Polese worked at Sun Microsystems and was the original product manager for Java, leading its launch in March 1995. Prior to Java, she worked in Sun's software division on object-oriented development environments. Previously, she worked at Intellicorp, Inc., helping Fortune 500 firms implement expert systems.

Ms. Polese serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a coalition of executives working to improve the economy, health and quality of life for all citizens of the region through advocacy on major public policy issues. She also serves on the board of the Global Security Institute and the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation. She is a Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Engineered Innovation.

She earned a bachelor's degree in biophysics from U.C. Berkeley and studied computer science at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Chris Shipley
Co-founder and Chairman, Guidewire Group
Executive Producer, DEMO 

Chris Shipley is a leading technology and product analyst. Best known as the executive producer of the DEMO Conferences for IDG Executive Forums, she has helped technology companies bring over 1,000 new products to market since 1996. As a founding partner and chairman of Guidewire Group, she analyzes emerging technology companies around the world to identify market opportunities and accelerate products to market.

Fortune Small Business magazine placed her on its "Top 10 Minds in Small Business," and the San Jose Business Journal named her a "Woman of Distinction." She has often been cited as a leading influencer by Marketing Computers magazine. Ms. Shipley has covered personal technology since 1984 and has worked as a writer and editor for a variety of technology and consumer media.

She holds bachelor of arts degrees in literature and communication arts from Allegheny College.

 

Thank you as well to the following individuals who participated in the Advisory Board for Tech Policy Summit in 2007 and 2008:

• Robert Atkinson - President of ITIF
• Mark Blafkin - VP of Public Affairs for ACT
• Carolyn Brandon - VP, Policy at CTIA - The Wireless Association
• Piper Cole - Former VP of Global Public Policy at Sun Microsystems
• Susan Crawford - Professor at the University of Michigan Law School
• James Fallows - National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly
• Sean Garrett - Partner at 463 Communications
• Lauren Gelman - Executive Director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society
• Laura Ipsen - SVP of Global Policy and Government Affairs at Cisco
• Robert Kramer - Vice President, Global Public Policy at CompTIA
• JD Lasica - President of the Social Media Group
• John Palfrey - Executive Director of Harvard's Berkman Center
• Mark Radcliffe - Partner at DLA Piper
• Mike Sigal - Cofounder and CEO at Guidewire Group
• Mozelle Thompson - Founder of Thompson Strategic Consulting
• Simon Wilkie - Executive Director at USC's CCLP