Craig Becker

        Craig Becker (aka Jessica Qin in SecondLife) is the Global Architect for IBM’s Emerging 3D Internet and Virtual Business EBO. He is a member of the original team that spearheaded IBM’s movement into the 3D Internet space, and he led the design and construction of IBM’s public virtual world presence in SecondLife. Working with Linden Lab, he successfully set up the world’s first "corporate SecondLife grid" behind IBM’s firewall, and led the development team to design a virtual conference facility within that secure environment.

        Craig holds a BS and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an IBM Master Inventor and an artist, and his hobbies include science fiction and motorcycling. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is happily married and the father of two wonderful children.

Tony O’Driscoll

        Tony O’Driscoll is a Professor of the Practice at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Dr. O’Driscoll teaches, researches and consults in the areas of strategy, innovation and technology management, services management, and management consulting. During his 18-year industry career, Tony held several leadership positions with IBM and Nortel Networks in the areas of Strategic Business Planning, New Product and Service Development, Services Science Research and Human Capital Management. Tony was a founding member of IBM Global Service.s Strategy and Change consulting practice. Dr. O’Driscoll.s research interests lie at the intersection of Business, Innovation, Technology and Learning. His current research focuses on how emerging technologies can rapidly disrupt existing industry structure and business models and examines how organizations adapt and evolve in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain business environment. Tony is also the author of Achieving Desired Business Performance, a comprehensive review of the application of Human Performance Technology (HPT) to improve workplace performance.

        Too often radically new technologies are predictably applied to automate the past, bad assumptions and all. In this respect the application of virtual world technologies appear to be no different. Currently we find ourselves in the necessary but largely unproductive stage of the digital avatar in a digital environment looking at digitized documents. To move past this we must explore the sensibilities of 3D technologies that fundamentally differentiate it from other collaboration, communication and learning applications. From that point we can then begin to explore how to best apply these technologies in new and different ways to change how we live, work and learn.

Marshall Scott Poole

        Marshall Scott Poole is a David and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar, Professor in the Department of Communication, and Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scott has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Texas A&M University. His research interests include group and organizational communication, information systems, collaboration technologies, organizational innovation, and theory construction.  He is the author of over 120 articles and book chapters. His articles have appeared in Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Research, Small Group Research Management Science, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and Academy of Management Review, among others. Scott has co-authored or edited ten books including Communication and Group Decision-Making, Theories of Small Groups: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Organizational Change and Innovation Processes: Theory and Methods for Research, and The Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation. Scott has been named a Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, and is recipient of the Steven A. Chaffee Career Productivity Award from the International Communication Association. Current research interests include team behavior in massive multiplayer online games, structuring of communication and information technologies in groups, and the intersection of group and network theory in explaining large, dynamically changing groups and intergroup networks.

Eilif Trondsen

        Eilif Trondsen is the Research and Program Director of the Virtual Worlds Consortium for Innovation and Learning (VWC) at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI) in Menlo Park, California. The focus area of his research and consulting at SRIC-BI - a spin-out of SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) - is the use of technology for business performance improvement and learning. He has 28 years’ experience at SRIC-BI and at SRI International, leading or contributing to a variety of projects for U.S. and foreign clients in the private and public sectors. For ten years, Eilif held the position of Research Director of the Business Intelligence Program (now the Scan program) at SRI and currently leads VWC (www.sric-bi.com/vwc). In his tenure at SRI and SRIC-BI, Eilif has given numerous presentations on various eCommerce, eLearning and virtual worlds topics at conferences and to SRI clients around the world. Eilif has also the author and co-author of numerous publications on eCommerce, eLearning and virtual world topics.