Walter will also be hosting a book signing immediately following Monday's Opening Session (10:30am) in the Impact Bookstore, Level 2

Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).

Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th editor in 1996. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

He is the chairman of the board of Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in underserved communities. He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate to serve as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States. He is vice-chair of Partners for a New Beginning, a public-private group tasked with forging ties between the United States and the Muslim world. He is on the board of United Airlines, Tulane University, and the Overseers of Harvard University. From 2005-2007, after Hurricane Katrina, he was the vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.

In addition to speaking on the main stage, Katie's on-site activities at Impact will also include:

• Moderating the Impact 'Women's Panel' on Tuesday, May 1 at 5:15pm in Palazzo E, Floor 5
• Participating in the Impact 'Annual Social Networking' event on Tuesday, May 1 at 4:00pm at the Social Playground located in the Impact Solution Center

Katie Linendoll is an Emmy Award-Winning Associate Producer (ESPN's SportsCenter), an Emmy Nominated TV Personality (A&E'S We Mean Business), a technology expert and a dedicated sports fanatic.

On-air, Katie is the host of Spike TV's All Access Weekly - bringing you the world of tech, gaming and comics every Thursday at midnight and on Spike.com. Katie also works CNN's tech beat and hosts the NHL Network's "Around the Rink". As a producer of her own segments, she travels the country to discover the most unique stories and innovations.

Recent career highlights include a game of Jeopardy against IBM's supercomputer Watson, driving a life-sized Mario Kart, "detoxing" in digital rehab and sharing a stage with Lady Gaga.

Katie contributes regularly to CBSNews.com's "Health Pop" and People Style Watch Magazine. She has dished out tech expertise to Fitness Magazine, The Nate Berkus Show, Forbes.com, Parents.com, The Early Show, The Today Show, Yahoo Finance, Oprah.com, Style Network, ABC News Now and dozens of radio stations across the US and Canada.

As a technology host at HSN, she is responsible for over 20 million dollars in electronics sales. She has also worked on media projects with Dell, HP, Hyatt, IBM, Cadillac, Polaroid and Lincoln.

Katie holds a bachelor's degree in Information Technology New Media from The Rochester Institute of Technology. In her free time, she volunteers with Candlelighters, a non-profit dedicated to children undergoing treatment for cancer in NYC.

Don McMillan graduated from Stanford University with a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982. He went to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories where he worked as part of the team that designed the world's first 32-bit Microprocessor. He then moved to the Silicon Valley (San Jose, California) where he worked at VLSI Technology as a computer chip designer. During his 6 years at VLSI he designed more than 50 integrated circuit chip designs many of which are still out there in systems today.

However, after winning the 16th Annual San Francisco International Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1991, Don turned in his chips for a microphone. He went on to be $100,000 Grand Champion on "Star Search." He's had numerous television appearances including "The Tonight Show" on NBC, CNN's "The Larry King Show", MTV's "Half Hour Comedy Hour", and A&E's "Evening at the Improv." Nowadays, you can catch Don headlining comedy clubs from the "Improvisation" to "Catch-A-Rising Star" across the country.

Don starred in the award winning feature length film "Don: Plain & Tall" an independent feature about an engineer who tosses it all away to become a stand-up comic (sound familiar?). "Don: Plain & Tall" received the award for "Best Feature & Comedy" at the Breckenridge Festival of Film and the Back East Film Festival. Don has also appeared in: "Air Bud - World Pup", "Life Without Dick", "Macon County Jail", "Party Crashers", "Fanatics", and "TeenBoy". You most likely have seen Don as the star of fifteen national commercials for Budweiser Beer. He plays the Bud delivery guy who mans the "freshness hotline" and protects the world against "skunky" beer. He can also be seen in commercials for 7-11, Franco-American Ravioli, Little Caesar's Pizza, ServiStar Hardware, and United Airlines. Don has guest starred on the TV series "Star Trek: Voyager", "Babylon 5", "City Guys", and "Step by Step". He has also been profiled in both "Entertainment Weekly" and "TV Guide".

Don has not lost contact with his high-tech roots. He has performed over 200 shows for major corporations around the United States including IBM, Dell, Apple, Cisco Systems, and HP. Don's corporate show utilizes his unique background to take a lighthearted look at computers, technology, and the high-tech lifestyle. He is the only stand-up comedian working who is using PowerPoint and references "Avagadro's Number", "DRAM", and he Beta tests all his jokes.

Creative Director, Social Chocolate. Author of The New York Times bestseller, Reality Is Broken.

Imagine a world where every challenge is a quest - where the harder a task is, the more people want to do it. Where people take pleasure in failing and come back invigorated every time they fall. Where they communicate spontaneously with their collaborators to pool their knowledge towards shared solutions.

It turns out that world already exists. And if you draw on its secrets, you can transform your business: that creative collaboration, that effortless grasp of new technology, that very 21st-century connectivity and that power to solve complex problems can all be yours.

Your guide to that world is Jane McGonigal. And that world? It's the world of...gamers.

Gamers?

In her engaging, forward-thinking book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal makes the case that the gamer spirit - an attitude of fun, dedicated, collective problem-solving - is our greatest asset as we face the social, economic, and environmental problems of the 21st century. She argues that game designers are effectively happiness engineers, experts in making difficult tasks engaging, and that we should draw on their smarts as we frame the challenges of our time.

Jane herself is a specialist in this field, a designer of alternate reality games, where a real-life activity is re-framed as a game. The activity could be as mundane as household chores or as epic as surviving peak oil or establishing local sustainable businesses, the subjects of two of Jane's own games: whatever the challenge, we can face it more boldly if we bring to it a gameful state of mind.

But as Jane explains, in her quirky, spirited way, all of this is more than just a question of re-framing. It's about bringing back to contemporary life the kind of heroism, epic purpose, and communal striving that so many of us struggle to find in our lives. With Jane's help, you can understand how to channel that drive to revitalize your company - and fill our world with epic wins.

Credentials and Honors

• Creative Director, Social Chocolate
• Director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future, a non-profit futures research group based in Palo Alto, California
• Author of The New York Times bestseller, Reality Is Broken
• PhD, game research, the University of California at Berkeley
• Named by Oprah Winfrey as one of the twenty most inspiring women in the world, O Magazine, 2010
• Honored by Game Developer Magazine as one of the 50 people making the biggest impact in games
• The New York Times featured her as one of 10 scientists with the best vision for what's coming next in 2011
• Creativity Magazine's Creativity 50 2011

In her more than 25 years with IBM, Marie has held a variety of technical and executive roles in IBM's hardware, software, services and corporate finance groups. In August 2010, Marie Wieck was named to her current position as general manager of Application & Integration Middleware (AIM) business unit. In this role, she leads an organization of more than 7,500 software development, marketing, services, and sales professionals. She is responsible for IBM's WebSphere software portfolio and other strategic middleware products, including Web application servers, transaction and messaging systems, integration, and business process management solutions.

Prior to this role, Ms. Wieck was worldwide portfolio leader for Strategy Outsourcing in IBM Global Technology Services (GTS). In this capacity, she managed the portfolio of services offerings that help customer outsource their IT infrastructure for improved quality and value.

Ms. Wieck has held other leadership roles in IBM including offering development for middleware services, service oriented architecture and cloud initiatives, driving IBM's software strategy, industry solutions, internet standards, and zSeries product development. She started her career in Poughkeepsie, NY doing mainframe systems architecture and performance simulation.

Marie holds an M.B.A. from New York University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.S. in Engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), the National Association of Female Executives (NAFE), and the Engineering Advisory Council for The Cooper Union. She is co-chairperson of IBM's Global Work/Life Council. She won the SWE Work/Life Balance Award in 2005, the President's Citation from The Cooper Union for her contributions to technology, and an IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Award for her work on mainframe performance.

Kristen Lauria is the vice president of marketing for IBM Mobile Enterprise and Application and Integration Middleware (AIM). Kristen leads all aspects of global marketing for the multi-billion dollar division that includes segment marketing for SOA, Business Process Management, and the WebSphere brand. Her leadership extends beyond IBM Software Group and includes driving IBM's mobile enterprise computing thought-leadership initiative and market development.

In this role, she is responsible for advancing IBM's strategic growth initiatives with a global ecosystem of clients and partners. Her scope of leadership includes execution in 170 countries and spans strategy and market intelligence, awareness and advertising, market management, demand generation, pipeline execution, and IBM launches and events.

Previously, Kristen was vice president of Marketing for IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions. She led the establishment of a new market category for Social Business, which IBM projected to represent nearly $100B in new opportunity. In 2009, Kristen spearheaded the "Lotus knows" campaign to extend the market reach of the recently expanded portfolio. The campaign drove a 27-point increase in unaided awareness in the exposed markets. Kristen joined IBM in 2003, where she has held a broad range of positions, including vice president, Marketing and Strategy, IBM Global Financing. In this role, she standardized the global Financing portfolio of products, streamlining offerings by 80 percent. Prior to joining IBM, Kristen served as director of Product Marketing and Product Management at Akamai Technologies, where she led product line go-to-market strategies and OEM service partnerships that accounted for over 10 percent of the company's 2002 revenue. She began her career at Xerox Corporation, where she led a corporate-wide initiative to redefine Xerox's time-to-market process.

Kristen received her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. While pursuing her MBA, Kristen assisted the Xerox Chief Engineer in the development of the Center for Innovation in Product Development at MIT. Kristen is the mother of two children and resides in Connecticut with her husband, Mark.

David Farrell is vice president, Worldwide Sales for IBM's WebSphere Software division. In this role, Mr. Farrell sets global sales strategy and leads a team of over 1800 sales, technical sales and channel sales professionals. His mission is to provide clients with world class application and integration middleware solutions enabling superior business outcomes.

Prior to his current role, Mr. Farrell was vice president, Lotus Worldwide Sales, focused on providing clients with comprehensive solutions to meet their collaboration and communications business needs. Previous assignments included vice president, Lotus Strategic Initiatives and vice president, Lotus Software Sales for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He has held numerous leadership roles at IBM in sales, strategy, marketing and business development.

Mr. Farrell received an MBA from the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University and a BBA in International Marketing and Finance from the University of Georgia.

Jason R.McGee, IBM Software Group (jrmcgee@us.ibm.com). Mr. McGee is a Distinguished Engineer (DE) and Chief Architect for WebSphere Cloud Computing. Jason is currently responsible for architecture and development of technologies and products related to Platform-as-a-Service and running middleware on cloud infrastructures.

Previously, Jason has served as Chief Architect of WebSphere Extended Deployment (comprised of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WebSphere Computer Grid), WebSphere sMash, and WebSphere Application Server on distributed platforms. Jason is a Senior Architect on the WebSphere Foundation Architecture Board. Jason joined IBM in 1997 and has been a member of the WebSphere Server team since its inception. Jason graduated with a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Virginia Tech in 1995.

Steve Mills joined IBM in 1973 after graduating New York's Union College. He has held various executive leadership positions in IBM since 1989.

He has played a leading role in the growth of IBM Software Group since its inception in 1995. In 2000, he assumed the role of Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Software Group.

In 2010, he was named to his current position adding hardware and systems to his responsibilities. In this capacity, he is responsible for directing approximately 110,000 employees spanning development, manufacturing, sales, marketing and support professions.

IBM's product business contributes more than $40B of IBM's revenue. IBM's industry-leading products provide critical business integration infrastructure that powers more than 100,000 enterprises around the world.

 

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Phil Gilbert joined IBM in January 2010 as a result of its acquisition of Lombardi Software, where Phil served as President and CTO. Phil leads the Business Process Management segment for the IBM Software Group, which includes business process management, business rules, events and business monitoring.

Phil is a recognized leader in the software industry, having held managerial & executive positions in consulting and industry. He has led three successful start-ups, and is a frequent speaker around the world not only for IBM, but also as a BPM thought leader on topics of technology, governance, strategy and culture. Phil is a past Chair of the Object Management Group's BPM Steering Committee and is a founding member of the Process Knowledge Initiative, a collaborative industry and academic endeavor creating an open source body of knowledge on process management. He has been awarded four patents in the areas of business process and distributed transaction management.

Phil graduated as a Pe-et (top ten) senior from the University of Oklahoma in 1978 and lives in Austin, Texas.

Rod Smith is an IBM fellow and Vice President of the IBM Emerging Internet Technologies organization, where he leads a group of highly technical innovators who are developing solutions to help organizations realize the value of big data. His early advocacy in the industry has played an important role in the adoption of technologies such as J2EE, Linux, Web services, XML, rich Internet applications, and various wireless standards.

As an IBM Fellow, Rod is helping lead IBM's efforts around big data analytics and the application of IBM Watson like technologies to business solutions, helping companies make better decisions more quickly for improved business outcomes. His early identification of emerging technologies has led to a sustained record of achievement in the global software community. Rod has authored numerous invention patents and disclosures, and is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the TJ Watson Design Excellence Award. He is also a long time member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Rod is a Computer Science graduate of Western Michigan University, and holds a M.A. and B.A. in Economics with a concentration in Math from Western Michigan University.

Beth Smith is Vice President of WebSphere development in the Application and Integration Middleware Division of IBM Software Group where she is responsible for the WebSphere portfolio. Beth leads a worldwide team of over 6,000 employees across 25 locations. She assumed this position in September 2009.

Previously, Beth was Vice President of Business Development for WebSphere where she led the division's worldwide initiatives around mergers, acquisitions, and business partner programs. During her tenure, IBM acquired ILOG as a key addition to its Business Process Management portfolio.

From 2004 to 2008, Beth was vice president, WebSphere Business Process Management and Industry Solutions where she led a worldwide software development team responsible for the strategy, architecture, delivery, and support of IBM's WebSphere Business Process Management offerings. During her career, Beth has held a variety of management and technical roles across IBM; prior assignments include director, DB2 for z/OS and IMS Product Manager.

Beth joined IBM in 1987 after graduating from North Carolina State University with a BS in Computer Science. In 2000, Beth received the Tribute to Women in Industry award from the YWCA of Santa Clara Valley.

Jerry Cuomo is an IBM Fellow, VP, and Chief Technology Officer for WebSphere. He provides technical direction to the WebSphere portfolio and leads the technical executive leaders and development teams to cultivate the future of WebSphere.

Jerry drives innovation into the products and works across IBM's product portfolio and across brands to ensure that products work together to deliver high customer value. He is engaged in a number of advanced technology studies for the next generation of innovation and value and is focused on several areas including Cloud, Mobile, Virtualization and Workload optimization and advanced analytics.

Mobile is one of Jerry's top technology trends for 2012 available on his blog, which can be found by searching on "Jerry's Trends 2012."

Bridget van Kralingen is Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services, encompassing IBM's global consulting, systems integration and applications capabilities for clients in all major industries.

She joined IBM from Deloitte Consulting, where she was Managing Partner for the Financial Services Sector in the United States.

Bridget was named to Fortune's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list in 2011. In 2005, she was named by Euromoney as one of the 100 most influential people in Finance; and was named one of Consulting Magazine's Top 25 Consultants for 2006.

Bridget is a member of the Board of Directors of the Royal Bank of Canada. She also serves on the advisory board of Catalyst, a non-profit organization that expands opportunities for women in business.

Bridget holds a Masters degree in Business from the University of South Africa and Bachelors and Honours degrees in Commerce from the University of Witwatersrand.