"TECHNOLOGY IN THE NEW GLOBAL CONTEXT: Rethinking Social Responsibility"

2002 Student Pugwash Northeast Regional Conference

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Tiffany Shlain

Honored as one of Newsweek's "Women Shaping the 21st Century," Tiffany Shlain, 31, is the founder, CEO and creative director of The Webby Awards, the leading international honors for Web sites and individual achievement in creativity and technology. She is also co-founder of The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, the 370-member judging academy that presents the annual awards.

Since 1996, Tiffany has directed the critically-acclaimed awards show has received rave reviews from sources ranging from MTV to the BBC, which praised it as "a testament to the creativity of the new medium." The sold out audience of 3000 experience a unique show which includes top talent, the internet's lead creators, original films, live performances, experiments in art and technology and five word acceptance speeches. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as a celebration of "sites that pave important paths to the Internet's next phase," The Sixth Annual Webby Awards will be held in 2002.

In addition to her work with the The Webby Awards, Tiffany appears regularly on ABC's Good Morning America as the program's expert on Internet issues, covering topics such as online ethics, privacy, e-commerce, and virtual communities.

An award winning filmmaker, Tiffany recently directed a documentary on Intel Founder, Gordon Moore (known for Moore's Law) narrated by Harrison Ford, and creates many original films for each Webby Awards ceremony. She is currently writing and directing a film about women's rights for Planned Parenthood.

Tiffany has been profiled in a diverse range of media, from The New York Times, USA Today , Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair to The Guardian (U.K.), Stern (Germany), and The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) .

She is invited to lecture and show her films worldwide to such organizations and institutions as The California Governor's Conference for Women, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Doors of Perception Conference in Amsterdam and The Sydney Opera House. Drawing on her experience with The Webbys and filmmaking, Shlain speaks on technology's affect on culture and technology's past, present and future trends.

About Tiffany Shlain: A San Francisco native, Shlain has been intrigued by the technology world since she first got her hands on an Apple computer at age 14 in 1984. In high school in 1987, she co-founded an organization called UNITAS, Uniting Nations in Telecommunications and Software, which proposed that American and Russian students should communicate with each other via computer to strive for world understanding. From this proposal, she was invited to the Soviet Union as a student ambassador. She visited the Soviet Union in 1988 to discuss UNITAS the summer before she started her freshman year at UC Berkeley. In college, her love of technology led her to filmmaking. Shlain received her B.A in film from the University of California at Berkeley where she was selected as a Valedictorian speaker in 1992. She currently combines both her passions of filmmaking and technology with The Webby Awards. She serves on the Board of Governors for the Commonwealth club of California, the nations oldest and largest public affairs forum, and sits on the advisory boards for Comdex and UC Berkeley Institute of Design . She has studied filmmaking at New York University in 1991 and leadership at Harvard Business School in 2001. She lives in San Francisco with her husband Ken Goldberg, an artist and professor of robotics at UC Berkeley.