Keynote Speakers

John Gero is a Research Professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and at the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering, George Mason University and a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Formerly he was Professor of Design Science and Co-Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, at the University of Sydney. He is the author or editor of 46 books and over 550 papers and book chapters in the fields of design science, design computing, artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, design cognition and cognitive science. He has been a Visiting Professor of Architecture, Civil Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Design and Computation or Mechanical Engineering at MIT, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia and CMU in the USA, at Strathclyde and Loughborough in the UK, at INSA-Lyon and Provence in France and at EPFL-Lausanne in Switzerland. His former doctoral students are professors in the USA, UK, Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

He has been the recipient of many excellence awards including the Harkness Fellowship, two Fulbright Fellowships, two SRC Fellowships and various named chairs. He is on the editorial boards of numerous journals related to design science, computer-aided design, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering and is the chair of the international conference series Artificial Intelligence in Design, the new conference series Design Computing and Cognition and the international conference series Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design.

Professor Gero is also an international consultant in the field of computer-aided design, artificial intelligence and technology policy.

Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. With Kim B. Clark, she is involved in a multi-year project to study the process of design and its impact on the structure of the computer industry. She and Clark have authored Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity, the first of a projected two volumes on this topic. Volume 2, in progress, will focus on Architecture and Strategy. Baldwin received a bachelor's degree in economics from MIT in 1972, and MBA and DBA degrees from Harvard Business School. She developed and taught Mergers & Acquisitions, a second-year MBA course.

She has served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards. Within Harvard University, she is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and serves on the policy and admissions committee of the joint Ph.D program in Information Technology and Management. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband, Randolph Hawthorne.

Professor Jay Kesan's academic interests are in the areas of patent law and policy, intellectual property, entrepreneurship, internet law/regulation, digital government (e-gov), agricultural biotechnology law, and biofuels regulation. He directs the Program in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the College of Law and is Group Leader of the Business, Economics & Law of Genomic Biology (BioBEL) theme at the Institute of Genomic Biology. At the University of Illinois, Professor Kesan holds positions in the College of Law, the Institute of Genomic Biology, the Information Trust Institute, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and the Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics.

He received his J.D. summa cum laude from Georgetown University, where he received several awards including Order of the Coif, and served as Associate Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Prior to attending law school, Jay Kesan-who also holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering-worked as a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. He is a registered patent attorney and practiced at the former firm of Pennie & Edmonds LLP in the areas of patent litigation and patent prosecution. In addition, he has published numerous scientific papers and obtained several patents in the U.S. and abroad.