HISTORY

Check out the details in the yearly SDF archive.

PAST MAIN SPEAKERS *Position at the time of participation
  • Al Gore 2005 Al Gore Former Vice President of the United States
  • Eric Schmidt 2007 Eric Schmidt Chairman & CEO, Google
  • Anne Sweeney 2007 Anne Sweeney Co-Chair, Disney Media Networks; President, Disney-ABC Television Group
  • Bill Gates 2008 Bill Gates Chairman, Microsoft
  • James Cameron 2010 James Cameron Director, Avatar / Chairman & CEO, Lightstorm Entertainment
  • Larry King 2011 Larry King Former Host, Larry King Live
  • Gloria Steinem 2011 Gloria Steinem Feminist Writer and Organizer
  • Werner Vogels 2012 Werner Vogels Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Amazon.com
  • Alain de Botton 2013 Alain de Botton Philosopher & Writer, <Essays in Love, Architecture of Happiness> / Founder, The School of Life & Living Architecture
  • Tim Berners-Lee 2013 Tim Berners-Lee Inventor, World Wide Web / Director, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • Kil-Nam Chon 2014 Kil-Nam Chon Professor Emeritus, KAIST / Professor, Keio University / Pioneer of the Asian Internet
  • JB Straubel 2015 JB Straubel Co-founder & CTO, Tesla
  • Kip Thorne 2015 Kip Thorne Theoretical physicist / Executive Producer, Interstellar
  • Steven Pinker 2016 Steven Pinker Professor of Psychology, Harvard University / Author, The Better Angels of Our Nature & The Blank Slate
  • Cathy O’Neil 2018 Cathy O’Neil Data scientist, mathematician, The author of Weapons of Math Destruction
  • Rose McGowan 2018 Rose McGowan Actress, director, activist, TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers
  • Ju-Ho Kim 2019 Ju-Ho Kim Professor in the KAIST School of Computing
  • Zeynep TUFEKCI 2019 Zeynep TUFEKCI Techno-sociologist / Professor at the University of North Carolina