WHO WE ARE







Judges and Advisors




We are convening an incredible panel of judges from the worlds of storytelling, technology, political science, and policy, as well as a slate of prominent advisors. 





JUDGES
Public AI prize

Gideon Lichfield is a journalist whose comfort food is science fiction. Raised in the UK, he's been a science writer, a foreign correspondent on three continents, and editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review and WIRED. In 2021 he edited Make Shift: Dispatches From the Post-Pandemic Future, a Covid-era science-fiction anthology, for MIT Press. He's currently a fellow at Harvard University's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and writes Futurepolis, a newsletter about how to reinvent democratic governance for the 21st century.




Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired, an award-winning magazine he co-founded in 1993. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking; founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years; and the author of multiple best-selling books about the future of technology. His newest is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for a pretty good life. He is best known for his radical optimism. He also coined the word "protopia," for which the Protopian Prize is named.


Arati Prabhakar has spent her career turning imagination into practical reality. As President Biden’s science and technology advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), she helped set a course for artificial intelligence, health outcomes, climate and clean energy, and innovation for a prosperous and secure America. She previously served as Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and as Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the private sector, she was a venture capitalist and the founder of an innovation nonprofit. A Caltech-trained engineer and applied physicist who has been part of technology transformations from semiconductors to biology to AI, she now advocates for publicly funded R&D to achieve our nation’s aspirations for the decades ahead.

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels, including After the Flare, which won the 2018 Philip K. Dick Special Citation. He works for the audio technology company Sonos, where he leads sustainability and the Sonos Foundation, which focuses on ecoacoustics and music education. Before Sonos he championed digital rights around the world at Access Now, a tech nonprofit. Deji graduated from Stanford Law School and Yale College.


Hannu Rajaniemi is a Finnish-American science fiction author, mathematical physicist, and biotech entrepreneur whose work explores the future of intelligence, identity, and society. He is best known for the acclaimed novel The Quantum Thief and its sequels, as well as later works such as Summerland. Rajaniemi holds advanced degrees in mathematics and physics, including a PhD in string theory from the University of Edinburgh. He is co-founder and CEO of Helix Nanotechnologies, which develops cutting-edge mRNA technologies, and frequently speaks on long-term futures and transformative science.
Democratic Futures prize

Ruthanna Emrys Gordon is a cognitive psychologist and science fiction writer. She is particularly fascinated by the psychology of emerging technologies and their role in governance. This has driven her to projects as diverse as analyzing online disinformation campaigns, tracking narratives about nanotechnology, and exploring the future of democracy. She is the author of A Half-Built Garden, a solarpunk novel about crowdsourced decision-making, watershed management, and arguing with aliens. She currently lives in the Netherlands, where she works as an independent consultant.




Karl Schroeder is a Toronto-based science fiction writer and futurist with a degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation and 12 published novels. He is an accomplished public speaker, having given keynote addresses in Athens, London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow and Washington. Karl made his reputation writing far-future adventures, but being a parent in the era of climate change has forced him to reconsider his obligations. Starting with his novel Stealing Worlds, he has refocused on using what he’s learned as a futurist to paint as accurate a picture of our near-future prospects and perils while remaining (he hopes) entertaining.


Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. They are the author of several books, including Automatic Noodle, an instant USA Today bestseller, The Terraformers, which was nominated for the Nebula Award, and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. They have a monthly column in New Scientist magazine, and are a member of the Flaming Hydra collective. 



Ida Yoshinaga, speculative media scholar and Assistant Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, coedited with Gerry Canavan and Sean Guynes Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction, and serves as coeditor of Liverpool University Press’s Science Fiction Film & Television journal. With Sonja Fritzsche, Hugh O’Connell, Guangzhao Lyu, and Patrick Brock, she’s editing the upcoming collection on world speculative literatures/media, (Re)Defining World SF.  A producer on short films and animations from minority writer-directors, Yoshinaga is finishing her first monograph, De-Centering Disney: Cultural Speculation and “Screen Writing” Labor in the Fantasy-Extraction Factory.







Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, a prize for “outstanding individuals who contribute to inter- and transdisciplinary projects linking politics and technology,” awarded jointly by the Friedrich Schiedel Foundation and the Technical University of Munich. Previously, he was professor at George Washington University’s Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs. He works on a variety of topics, including the relationship between democracy and information, the security consequences of international economic networks, and international political economy.
ADVISORS








Audrey Tang Ambassador-at-large and
first Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan




Lisa Schirch
Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and veteran peacebuilding strategist








Suzette Brooks Masters Democracy Thought Leader




B Cavello
Director of Emerging Technologies at Aspen Institute




Josh Tan Public AI & Metagov Founder, Fellow at Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society



Bruce Schneier
Founder, the International Workshop on Reimagining Democracy; cybersecurity expert and lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School




Ed Finn  Founding Director, Center for Science and the Imagination, ASU












PRIZE PLANNING COMMITTEE


Planning Committee


  • Liz Barry 
  • Val Elefante
  • Gideon Lichfield
  • Ruthanna Emrys Gordon
  • Melissa Regan

Website by Topiary.
    With special thanks to Catherine Geanuracos, Katherine Gorman, Bobbi Rakova, Nick Garcia, Katherine Elkins, Jake Hirsch-Allen, and Joshua Tan for your contributions.

    Credit to Jess Yeung for graphics and Jenny Fan for branding inspiration.

    WHO WE ARE