Christina has over 15 years of experience as a classroom teacher, after-school and museum lab teacher, educational program manager and instructional designer/curriculum developer. As the Lead for the NASA Ames Educational Technology Team and NASA Ames Informal Education, she oversaw a team that developed over 10 interactive multimedia and curricular products including numerous online design challenges. As an Educational Specialist and Museum Program Developer at The Tech Museum of Innovation, Christina developed engineering design challenges and teacher professional development that made use of The Tech’s Design in Mind learning model. More recently, Christina has been engaged in school reform efforts focused on supporting the full development of young adolescents.

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Illah is an Associate Professor of Robotics and head of the Robotics Masters Program in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was on leave for the 2004 calendar year and was at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute, director of the Center for Innovative Robotics and director of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab. He is also co-PI (Principal Investigator) of the Global Connection Project, home of the Gigapan project. He is also co-PI of the Robot 250 city-wide art+robotics fusion program in Pittsburgh. He is director of education for the NSF-funded ERC, Quality of Life Technologies. His current research projects include educational and social robotics and community robotics. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms, as well as mobile robot navigation. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millenium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was acquired by Witness Systems, Inc. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

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Scott Ellis is the Chief Operating Officer of the New Teacher Center (NTC), and is responsible for many aspects of strategic planning, financial analysis, and operations for the organization. NTC works with school districts around the US to help them develop and implement intensive training and mentoring programs for new teachers, with the goal of helping new teachers stay longer and become better teachers faster, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In his career before NTC, Scott was a consultant and manager with over 10 years experience working with senior executives at Fortune 500 companies. During nearly 8 years at Hewlett Packard Scott served several roles in strategy and operations. He spent over 3 years managing an internal analytical consulting organization whose role was to help the various HP businesses make better data-driven decisions. Scott also served as a consultant in this organization and worked as a supply chain architect in HP’s server business. Before joining HP Scott worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a strategy consulting firm. He has an MBA from Stanford and an undergraduate degree in government and economics from Harvard.

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Maynard has worked as a senior engineering and robotics professional in government and the private sector for the last 25+ years. He has extensive experience in managing interdisciplinary projects of international and commercial importance at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), in the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley and at various technology start-ups. Maynard is an expert in robotics and intelligent machine systems and has published and presented his work internationally. He won scholarships to Stanford University and the International Space University in France and was a two-time finalist for the U.S. Astronaut Corp. Maynard holds a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering Design from Stanford University where he emphasized robotics and international security and arms control. He also has a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Sailesh is currently a Director of Engineering at Kosmix, a cutting edge internet startup. Previous to that, Sailesh worked at the NASA Ames Research center where he developed software for controlling the next generation of Mars Rovers. During his time at NASA, he also was actively involved in BotBall and FIRST robotics competitions where he saw the tangible impact that robotics has on young children. Before that, Sailesh worked on robots to assist the elderly at the University of Michigan. He holds degrees from IIT Madras, Virginia Tech and University of Pittsburgh.

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Seth is a consultant in the information technology industry and an elected school board member in San Carlos, California. He has over 20 years of experience in media and technology, including executive positions in both start-up companies and large enterprises that include finance, marketing, business development, technology and general management. In addition to having run a number of start-up businesses, Seth operates his own consulting firm for clients focused on go-to-market strategy, operations and business development. He has extensive experience in social media, marketing technology and enterprise software. Previously, Seth held senior positions at Interwoven, Optimost, Bluefish Wireless, PocketScience and Ziff-Davis. He began his career as an investment banker. Seth holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is also serves on the Board of the San Mateo County School Boards Association.

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Ashish is the Chief Executive Office of SNS Technologies (SNS), a company that he started 11 years ago which works with entrepreneurs and startups in the software products industry to help them during the life-cycle of its products or technology-enabled services, with the goal of helping the companies to focus on customer development. In his career before SNS, Ashish was a manager with pcOrder.com where he led the initiative of improving process for data collection and quality for the internet startup. During his 4 years with Trilogy Software, Ashish served several roles in consulting organization and product development wherein he invented a rules-based engine for the manufacturing vertical. Ashish has an MS in computer science from University of Houston and an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from University of Pune, India.

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