Professor Rivest is an Institute Professor at MIT. He joined MIT in 1974 as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is a co-author (with Cormen, Leiserson, and Stein) of the text, Introduction to Algorithms. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security, now named RSA Security (the security division of EMC), Versign, and Peppercoin. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, electronic voting, and algorithms.

SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group and chair of the Sloan Fellows MBA Program Committee. He co-founded and currently leads the popular Global Entrepreneurship Lab (GLAB) course – over the past 20years. MBA students in GLAB have worked on more than 500 projects with start-up companies around the world.

He is the coauthor, with Jon Gruber, of Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.

Johnson is on leave as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. From 2012 to 2019, he was a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group.

Johnson has been a member of the private sector Systemic Risk Council since it was founded by Sheila Bair in 2012; this group is now chaired by Sir Paul Tucker. From April 2009 to April 2015, he was a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. In March 2016, Johnson was the third distinguished visiting fellow at the Central Bank of Barbados.

“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail”, Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013. In April 2015, the Washington Examiner placed Johnson at #11 on their list of New Voices for 2015. In November 2015, Johnson joined the advisory council of Intelligence2 Debates.

Over the past decade, Johnson has published more than 300 high impact pieces in the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, The Financial Times, and Project Syndicate.

“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research on economic development, corporate finance, and political economy is widely cited.

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He also helped to found and run the NBER Africa Project; four volumes were published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

Johnson holds a BA in economics and politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in economics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Source: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/simon-johnson

Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

Executive Director

Deb Roy is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the Laboratory for Social Machines and is Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab. He leads research in applied machine learning and human-machine interaction with applications in designing systems for learning and constructive dialog, and for mapping and analyzing large scale media ecosystems.

Roy is also co-founder and Chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit social venture that is developing and operating the Local Voices Network to foster constructive public conversations across political and cultural divides. Roy was co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs, a media analytics company that analyzed the interactions between television and social media at scale. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, Twitter’s largest acquisition of the time. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist.

An author of over 150 academic papers, his popular TED talk Birth of a Word presents his research on his son’s language development that led to new ideas in media analytics. A native of Canada, Roy received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Bio from Media Lab Webpage

Robert M. Townsend is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. He is a theorist, macroeconomist, and development economist who analyzes the role and impact of economic organization and financial systems through applied general equilibrium models, contract theory, and the use of micro data. He is the author of several books, most recently Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems (MIT Press, 2020). Other writings include Chronicles from the Field (2013), Financial Systems in Developing Economies (2011), Households as Corporate Firms (2010), The Medieval Village Economy (1993), Financial Structure and Economic Organization (1990), and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles. Townsend is an Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He was the recipient of the Frisch Medal in 1998, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2011, and a second Frisch Medal in 2012 for the structural evaluation of a large-scale microfinance program in Thailand. Townsend received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota and his B.A. from Duke University.