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Jean-Francois Abramatic is the chairman of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. Formerly Associate Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (1997-1998) and Director of Development and Industrial Relations at INRIA (1992-1999), he was responsible for establishing the European branch of W3C in partnership with MIT LCS in 1995. He was the general chairman of the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference that was held in Paris in May 1996. Jean-Francois was asked by the French government to prepare a report entitled "Le Developpement Technique de l'Internet". The report was published in June 1999. His areas of expertise include networking, image processing and graphics. Jean-Francois received his Master's degree from Ecole des Mines in Nancy and his PhD from the University of Paris VI. He was selected for the ICANN Board by the Protocol Supporting Organization. He served on the ICANN Board from October 1999 until September 2000.

Alan Kotok lived from November 9, 1941 to May 26, 2006. He was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book *Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution*, describes Kotok and his fellow classmates at MIT as the first true hackers. Alan Kotok was W3C Associate Chair, MIT site manager and head of the W3C Systems Team. A member of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, he helped to build the legendary computer game Spacewar. He helped create in the Origins of Computer Chess and in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

Ben Bradlee, born in 1921, vice president and executive editor of the *Washington Post* when that newspaper published the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that initially exposed the Watergate scandal. Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1942. He began his journalism career in 1946 as a reporter at the New Hampshire Sunday News. From 1948 to 1961 he wrote for the *Washington Post* and *Newsweek* magazine, working variously as a Washington, D.C., bureau reporter and as a European correspondent. While a reporter for *Newsweek*, Bradlee lived near then-Senator John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Leaning's research and policy interests include issues of public health, medical ethics, and early warning in response to war and disaster, human rights and international humanitarian law in crisis settings, and problems of human security in the context of forced migration and conflict. She has field experience in problems of public health assessment and human rights in a range of crisis situations (including Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Kosovo, the Middle East, former Soviet Union, Somalia, the Chad-Darfur border, and the African Great Lakes area) and has written widely on these issues. Dr. Leaning serves on the boards of Physicians for Human Rights (an organization she co-founded), Amnesty International, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Oxfam America, International Rescue Committee, The Humane Society of the United States, and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross. She is visiting editor of the British Medical Journal, serves on the editorial board of Health and Human Rights, and is a member of the Board of Syndics at Harvard University Press. From 1999 to 2005, Dr. Leaning directed the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, during which time Dr. Leaning also served as editor-in-chief of Medicine & Global Survival, an international quarterly.

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity Press 2017). He is also the author of The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015). Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), he worked with the Social Science Research Council as Director of the program on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006-09). During 2005-06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, where he took on a number of roles in the negotiations leading to the independence of South Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009.