2025 Presenters
Mike Berkley ’95 is a composer and technologist. He studied music composition at Middlebury College and began pursuing a career in film scoring before his path diverged to the technology industry. He spent 25 years in technology, leading product management at Spotify and Paramount and founding two media tech startups. Most recently, Mike was the chief product officer at FuboTV and Axios, where AI played an increasingly critical role. Mike has since retired from tech to focus on creative pursuits, leading to the creation of Emma, a rock opera about AI.
Kay Firth-Butterfield is the CEO of Good Tech Advisory. In 2024 she was a TIME 100 Impact Awardee and Who’s Who Emerging Innovator and was recognized in Who’s Who in America and Forbes 50 over 50. Her new book Coexisting with AI: A Guide to Living, Loving, and Working with AI will be published by Wiley in November 2025. She is the former head of artificial intelligence and quantum and member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum and is one of the foremost experts in the world on the governance of AI. She is a barrister, former judge and professor, technologist, and entrepreneur who has an abiding interest in how humanity can benefit from new technologies, especially AI. She was the world’s first chief AI ethics officer in 2014. Kay is the author of books on human rights, AI, and modern slavery. She is a board member of many renowned organizations, including the Polaris Council for the Government Accountability Office, the advisory board for UNESCO International Research Centre on AI, the advisory boards of SwissRE and Fathom, and the board of Earth Species Project. She is an executive advisor to the Cantellus Group, a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, and a fellow at New America in their Future of Work and Innovation team. She serves on the advisory board of various international endeavours in responsible AI, including the OECD/IEEE Global Trust Challenge and UKRI TAS Hub. She has been consistently recognized as a leading woman in AI and leadership, including by The New York Times.
David Ellis ’09 is a Miami-based entrepreneur, product marketer, and film producer, and his work sits at the nexus of community building, technology, and entertainment. At Vizi, which he cofounded and leads as CEO, he has developed real-time group-chat and curated-meetup features that unite solo travelers and city newcomers around shared interests, transforming fleeting encounters into lasting connections. He is passionate about leveraging AI to launch new products, blending technical expertise with market insight to solve real-world problems. Before founding his own ventures, David spent 16 years in marketing and entertainment. He began his career in Hollywood at ICM and Paramount Pictures, then served as director of brand strategy, advertising, and digital at Starr Companies. Most recently, as senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, he shaped global campaigns and partner programs across Azure, Xbox, and GitHub. He drew on his film and media studies degree from Middlebury as associate producer of Good Bad Things, now available on Apple TV and Hulu. A passionate speaker on entrepreneurship, travel innovation, and AI-driven community building, he helps audiences turn bold ideas into scalable products, cultivate vibrant networks, and harness emerging technologies to forge meaningful human connections.
Parker Harris is the CTO of Slack, and the cofounder of Salesforce, as well as a member of the company’s board of directors. He oversees Slack’s world-class engineering team and sets the technical vision for the company. Parker is passionate about the power of cloud computing and its ability to help organizations digitally transform and become more customer-centric. Since cofounding Salesforce in 1999, Parker has had an indelible impact on the company—driving its technology strategy, championing customer success and innovation, and fostering an ecosystem of partners and advocates across the globe. Parker has spearheaded many technology initiatives at Salesforce that deliver productivity, reliability, and exceptional user experiences to companies at scale—notably, Hyperforce, the Salesforce Platform, and Lightning Experience. Before Salesforce, Parker cofounded cloud computing company Left Coast Software and worked at Metropolis Software, a pioneer in field sales force automation. Parker has a BA in English literature from Middlebury College. He resides in San Francisco.
Melanie Mitchell received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1990 and has held faculty or research positions at the University of Michigan, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Oregon Graduate Institute, and Portland State University. She is currently a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her recent research focuses on conceptual abstraction and analogy making in humans and in artificial intelligence systems. She is the author or editor of six books and over 100 scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was short-listed for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing. Melanie is the recipient of the Senior Scientific Award from the Complex Systems Society, the Distinguished Cognitive Scientist Award from UC Merced, and the Herbert A. Simon Award of the International Conference on Complex Systems. Her public outreach on science includes an online course, “Introduction to Complexity,” an ongoing quarterly column for Science Magazine, a Substack newsletter on AI, and a 2024 podcast series titled The Nature of Intelligence.
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and the widely translated memoir The Long Goodbye. In her cultural criticism, she explores illness, grief, AI, and the body, challenging oversimplified narratives. Her most recent poetry collection, Sun in Days, was named a Top Ten Poetry Book of the Year by The New York Times; and her debut collection of poetry, Halflife, was a finalist for Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. Both a writer and an editor, she has worked at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review, where she launched the Slate Audio Book Club, one of the first literary podcasts. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, a Front Page Award, and other honors, she is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and the editor of The Yale Review.