Speakers include architect, artist and Umbrellium founder Usman Haque on empowering people to transform their cities and technologist, designer and writer Tom Armitage on adapting existing city systems for smartness, and communications and change strategist Katz Kiely on designing digital solutions to city challenges.
David Bausola was a "creative technologist" and the CEO of the digital agency Philter Phactory.
The role of a great technologist is to master of the art of the possible.
It makes him the sort of technologist you would expect might look on tomorrow with unbridled optimism.Not all future technology meets with his approval, though.
"You can now, with a single chip, create most of the capabilities that you would have found in Sputnik, but, of course, orders of magnitude faster," says Mason Peck, a former chief technologist at NASA and now a professor at Cornell University.The most ambitious project to date is a flock of 28 nanosats, each one three CubeSats in size (ie, 30cm long).
Mr Vardi has long been Israel's most famous technologist.
Mr Ozzie is also level-headed, hands-on and a brilliant technologist.
Bre Pettis, founder of MakerBot, an affordable 3D printer, was a "technologist".
Google, which, of course, must be able to read its customers' e-mail in order to inflict advertisements on them, nevertheless relies on people trusting it to guard their data, observes Dr Green".There's a lot of anger out there," says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, a lobbying group.
"If we wanted to be on the safe side in terms of regulation, we probably would need 95 individual data centres," says Chuck Hollis, a technologist at EMC, the leading maker of storage gear, which owns Mozy, a cloud service that allows users to back up their data.There are technological fixes to this problem, too.
"Convergence really means the freedom for consumers to use any service under any circumstances they choose to," says Ben Verwaayen, the boss of BT. "It is a question of convenience, enriching people's lives, because we can provide communications, information and entertainment the way they want it," says Mark Wegleitner, chief technologist at Verizon.
