Theme: Leaps & Boundaries

The world is evolving at a far faster pace than ever before. Rapid advancements in technology allow us to take radical leaps forward in the blink of an eye, or the click of a mouse. But are the boundaries we set for ourselves enough to restrain us from reaching too far, too fast?

Union Debating Society
9a Bridge Street
Cambridge, CB2 1UB
United Kingdom

Christian Busch

Christian is the co-founder of Sandbox, the leading global community of young innovators, where he developed the hub-based structure and expanded the organization and community into 20 countries. He currently acts as Associate Director at the London School of Economics’ (LSE) Innovation and Co-Creation Lab, where his research focuses on (scaling) impact, social networks, and business model innovation, and he teaches several MSc- and executive education courses at the LSE. He has been named as one of The Economist’s ‘Ideas People’, Diplomatic Courier’s ‘Top 99 Under 33 Influencers’, JCI’s ‘Ten Outstanding Young People in the UK’, a TEDster, and a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

Aubrey de Gray

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

Andy Zaltzman

Andy has firmly established himself in the vanguard of British comedy with his unique brand of political satire. In spring 2012, Andy performed a run of sold out shows in New York where he also recorded two sets on John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show for Comedy Central. Alongside John Oliver, Andy co-wrote and hosted two series of the BBC Radio 4 show Political Animal, based on their satirical live stand-up show. Andy continues to host and curate Political Animal, with ongoing live performances featuring special guest stand-ups, including a sell-out London run at the Soho Theatre in Spring 2012. Together, John Oliver and Andy have co-written and presented The Bugle, an ongoing series of satirical podcasts which produced over 178 episodes in association with The Times, before becoming independently run in January 2012. Andy has written and hosted Andy Zaltzman’s History of the Third Millennium, Series 1 of 100 and has made regular appearances on topical panel quiz show The News Quiz and The Now Show for BBC Radio 4. His diverse TV and Radio features have earned him Time Out’s recognition as “The best political comedian in the business.”

Asim Haneef

Asim Haneef is the Director of Development at Bamyan Media. In 2013, he developed and successfully launched El Mashrou3 (The Project), Egypt’s first reality TV show about regular and social entrepreneurs for Al-Nahar, the third biggest TV network in the country. The groundbreaking show attracted millions of TV viewers and a large social media community as it sought to highlight the ingenuity, passion and skills of some of the youth of the country.

Dan O'Neill

Dan O’Neill is a lecturer in ecological economics at the University of Leeds, and the chief economist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). His work focuses on the changes that would be needed to achieve a prosperous non-growing economy, and alternative ways of measuring progress besides GDP. He is co-author (with Rob Dietz) of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources, an international best-seller which has recently been made into a short film. When he isn’t doing research or teaching, Dan enjoys hiking in the Yorkshire Dales and singing songs about the misguided pursuit of economic growth.

John Egan

John Egan is a multi award winning entrepreneur, economist, writer and CEO. He is currently a board member and CEO of Sandbox, a global network of millennial leaders and innovators. Previously he has started and sold businesses in the engineering sector and has written and spoken extensively on the future of banking. You can find out more at www.iamjohnegan.me or @iamjohnegan

Lance Howarth

Lance joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation as CEO in September 2013 to drive the charitable mission and to help deliver on the educational promise of the Raspberry Pi. Prior to joining Lance spent 20 years working at ARM Holdings PLC, a global leader, FTSE40 member and the UK’s largest technology company. During his tenure at ARM, Lance held a number of key leadership roles including GM and EVP Media Processing and EVP of Marketing. He holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and an MSc from Brunel University. Lance also sits on the board for Code Club and the strategy advisory board for Computing at Schools which continues to play a key role supporting the adoption of the new Computing curriculum published by the Department of Education.

Robyn Scott

Robyn Scott is a social entrepreneur and author. She is Co-Founder of OneLeap, which helps the world’s leading organisations be more entrepreneurial by working with a global community of experienced entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. She’s also co-founder of Intros, which helps people be more generous with their networks, Mothers for All, which teaches entrepreneurship skills to AIDS orphan caregivers, and Brothers for All, which helps former inmates find dignified work and become positive agents of change in their communities in South Africa. Her first book was an acclaimed memoir about growing up in Botswana against the AIDS epidemic. She’s currently writing her second book, the true story of maximum security prisoners who’ve adopted AIDS orphans. She is an Ambassador for the Access to Medicine Index, one of WIRED’s 50 People About to Change the World, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She has a a BSc in Bioinformatics from Auckland University and an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Scholar.

Scott Schnaars

Scott Schnaars is the General Manager of EMEA for Badgeville, the global leader in gamification. His background includes sales & management roles at leading technology companies including WebEx, Motorola & Yahoo, the common ground being that these are all companies that had great technology, but adoption issues. His passion for gamification and reputation management stems from his previous dealings with enterprise and consumer technology companies that all faced adoption issues. He believes that game, reputation and social mechanics are the future of interaction and engagement helping technology companies to realize their vision and return on their investment for technology services. Scott lives in London with his family.

Simone Schnall

Simone Schnall is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Cambridge where she directs the Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory (http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/directory/ss877@cam.ac.uk). Her work combines insights and methods from social psychology and cognitive science to understand how various processes related to cognition and emotion interact. In particular, she is interested in how people’s bodily cues shape their internal states and their judgments of the external world. Recent topics have included the effect of emotion on morality, and the role of physical ability on perceptual judgments. Simone’s findings routinely receive coverage in the popular press, including the New York Times, Economist and New Scientist and she is committed to sharing research findings with the general public.

George Bell

George is a current MBA student at the Said Business School, Oxford. Prior to moving to the UK George practised as a consultant and business development advisor in Australia helping companies manage change in ambiguous and constrained environments. Now a member of the Queen’s College Oxford, George is a keen follower of disruptive technologies, nascent ecosystems and the increasing blurred interaction between imagination and innovation.

Sara Serrades Duarte

Sara is a PhD student in neuroscience with a very strong commitment and motivation to increase access to education. The combination of her childhood in Mozambique, her previous experience as a teacher and the opportunity of being a student at University of Cambridge made her realise the central role universities can have in addressing the world’s development needs. As a result of studying the potential of universities in the generation of social innovation, she co-founded SecondGO, a social start up that extends the educational opportunities of university students to others, and became the president of Beyond Profit, the social entrepreneurship society at Cambridge.

Brian R. Little

Professor Brian R. Little received his early education in British Columbia and his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Oxford, Carleton and Harvard Universities and was Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at Cambridge University from 2011-2013. For three consecutive years Brian was elected by the graduating classes of Harvard as a “Favorite Professor.” He is an internationally respected researcher in the fields of personality and motivational psychology. Professor Little currently lectures to psychology students and EMBA students at the Cambridge Judge Business School and he is a Fellow of the Well-Being Institute at Cambridge. He aspires to play professional basketball and has a personal project of growing a foot and a half within the next few months.

Mr Fogg

Oxford’s Mr Fogg first came to the public’s attention in 2005 with a self-released demo which somehow ended up being a record of the week on BBC 6 Music. Since then he has released a string of singles and two studio albums, both of which were recorded in Iceland with composer and record producer Valgeir Sigurdsson – the man behind albums by Björk, Damon Albarn and Feist. Sonically, the two records focus equally on mechanical and organic elements, with distorted synth bass lines and intricate electronics bumping up against trombone or a string quartet. The addictive, emotive vocal melodies than bring the whole thing together ensure that it is music with a human, beating heart. Collaborations along the way have included Broadchurch composer Olafur Arnalds, Crewdson of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig project, Raffertie (the sound of the BBC’s Sherlock trailers), and electronic producers Howie B, Ital Tek, Maribou State and Graphics.

Shlomo

Internationally acclaimed beatboxer and World Loopstation Champion SHLOMO creates an incredibly energetic live show like nothing you have seen before: jaw dropping, inspirational and totally absorbing. A Guinness World Record holder, Shlomo gave up astrophysics to perform his amazing vocal pyrotechnics. It was a good move. Since then he has won global acclaim and worked with some of the biggest names in music including Bjork, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Martha Wainwright, Imogen Heap, The Specials, DJ Yoda and even comedians the Mighty Boosh. In the process he has consistently pushed the boundaries of beatboxing, bringing the art form to new and unexpected audiences through such diverse collaborations.

Ampisound

Since day one, Ampisound has been focused on producing original and creative parkour productions whilst ensuring to stay deeply rooted within the community it grew from. Utilising HD-DSLR’s as the future standard of filmmaking equipment, Ampisound aims to remain an innovator through a diverse assortment of progressive editing techniques and camerawork, whilst each piece features a carefully selected soundtrack, often custom mixed. Through a combination of choreography, beautiful filmmaking, athlete involvement and an appreciation of the unknown, Ampisound strives to create beautiful moments, instead of just capturing them.