Who We Are

Vint Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the IEEE Medal of Honor, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 29 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year's "25 Most Intriguing People."

Michael Witmore

Michael Witmore is a Shakespeare scholar, humanist, and leader in the field of digital preservation and cultural accessibility who served as director of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 2011 to 2024. During his time as director, Witmore led an $80.5 million renovation of the Folger, which created extensive new public and exhibition spaces, expanded research and education facilities, and enhanced the library’s ability to share its collections with a global audience. 

Witmore’s work bridges the humanities and technology. In addition to bringing computational tools to the study of literature, he has sought, through initiatives such as Folger Digital Texts and the Mellon-sponsored "Visualizing English Print" project at UW-Madison, to preserve and extend access to cultural texts. Witmore is the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles; a research fellowship and curatorial residency at the Folger Shakespeare Library; and a predoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Perkins Prize for Narrative.

Witmore’s publications include Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England, co-winner of the Perkins Prize; Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion; Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Re- flections from Shakespeare; Shakespearean Metaphysics; and Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. His forthcoming works explore early modern wisdom literature and the evolving nature of digital inquiry in the humanities. 

Witmore earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar College and his master’s and doctoral degrees in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Satya's multi-decade research career has focused on the challenges of performance, scalability, availability and trust in information systems that reach from the cloud to the mobile edge of the Internet.  In the course of this work, he has pioneered many advances in distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Most recently, he has been viewed as “The Father of Edge Computing” for his seminal 2009 paper, and his pioneering contributions to the foundations of edge computing.  Satya is the Jaime Carbonell University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  He received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Richard Whitt

Richard Whitt’s career includes being a public policy attorney, technology strategist, business advisor, and entrepreneur. He spent over 11 years with Google, most recently as corporate director for strategic initiatives.

Richard was senior vice president for government relations and public policy with Twilio, and served as senior fellow in residence with the Mozilla Foundation. Richard also led tech and telecom public policy teams at MCI Communications, and worked as an associate at several Washington DC-based technology law firms. 

Richard currently heads the GliaNet Alliance, a coalition of technology companies building new markets anchored by Net Fiduciaries and authentic Personal AI agents. 

He is currently a senior fellow with the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy.

Keith Webster

Keith Webster was appointed Dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University in July 2013 and was additionally appointed as Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives in July 2015. He was installed to the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean’s Chair in 2021 and has a courtesy academic appointment at the University’s H. John Heinz III College. 

Keith has also held Deanships in major research universities in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Before joining CMU he was Vice President for Global Strategy at international publisher Wiley, based in the company's US headquarters. Keith has served as Chair of the National Information Standards Organization, is a member of the steering committee of the Coalition for Networked Information, and is a Trustee of OCLC, a global, nonprofit cooperative library organization with 30,000 members in more than 100 countries.

Keith is a professional futurist, known for blending foresight, change leadership, and digital transformation, who regularly consults with corporate, not-for-profit and professional organization boards. His professional interests include AI, research evaluation, and the economics of scholarly communication. He is a regular speaker on topics such as the future of communication and the impact of open science on publishing and libraries.

Todd Kelsey

Todd Kelsey teaches applied AI classes at Benedictine University. He has been a headline speaker at the NYC AI Summit, a TEDx speaker, and a featured guest on international television. He is author of over 20 books, including a recent free series on data and AI.