Marcelo Spina
www.p-a-t-t-e-r-n-s.net

Marcelo Spina is the founder and principal of PATTERNS, a Design Research Architectural Practice based in Los Angeles, USA and Argentina. PATTERNS aims to the manufacturing of artificially singular environments characterized by their full proximity and intimacy with the systems and forces that influence and rhythm everyday material life.  Marcelo Spina was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1970. He received his Degree in Architecture from the National University of Rosario, Argentina and from Columbia University in New York where he graduated from the AAD Program with honors and was the recipient of several design awards.  Recently completed projects include Land.Tiles, a micro temporary landscape installation in Los Angeles and Snake-Rice, an outdoor sculpture in Icheon, South Korea.

Margaret Wertheim
www.theiff.org

Margaret Wertheim is the founder and director of the Institute For Figuring, an organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. Based in Los Angeles, the Institute puts on lectures and exhibitions, publishes books, and hosts a website about the aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. Margaret is an internationally noted science writer and commentator, and the author of several books about the cultural history of physics, including Pythagoras’ Trousers a history of the relationship between physics and religion, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. She is currently working on the third volume in this trilogy, which uses the work of ‘outsider scientist’ James Carter as the basis for an exploration of the role of imagination in theoretical physics. Carter’s idiosyncratic science was the subject of an exhibition Wertheim curated in 2002 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Margaret has a BSc majoring in pure and applied physics (University of Queensland), and a BA majoring in mathematics and computer science (Sydney University).  She is a contributor to the New York Times Science Section and an Op-Ed contributor for the Los Angeles Times. She also writes the “Quark Soup” column for the LA Weekly (sister paper to the Village Voice) and is a contributing editor to Cabinet, a leading arts and culture quarterly. Margaret has contributed to more than a dozen anthologies including Architecture of Fear (Princeton University Press) and Prefiguring Cyberspace (MIT Press). She has lectured widely at universities and colleges across America and abroad - including Harvard, MIT, Oxford University, University of Oslo, University of Sydney, and Princeton Theological Seminary. Margaret has been a keynote speaker at the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, the International Design Conference Aspen, the “Sacred Space” conference at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Tutzing, Germany, and many others.

Mark Yim
www.me.upenn.edu

Mark Yim joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at U Penn in the fall of 2004 as Associate Professor and Gabel Family Term Junior Professor.  Prior to this, he was a Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) where he established a group developing modular self-reconfigurable robots.  These robots can change their shape to adapt to new tasks.  While the applications of these systems can be very broad, he is focusing on high mobility mechanisms, urban search and rescue, education, and reconfiguring spacecraft.  His other research interests include biologically inspired mechanims, haptics for virtual reality, flying robots and meso-scale MEMs devices. Honors include induction as a World Technology Network Fellow; IEEE Robotics and Automation Distinguished Lecturer, and induction to MIT's Technology Review TR100 in 1999.  He has over 30 patents issued (perhaps most prominent are ones related to the Sony PS2 and Microsoft Xbox joypad vibration control) and over 50 publications.  His work has received a significant amount of popular media coverage both in the US, Asia and Europe.