Aneesh Chopra was appointed as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States by President Obama on May 22nd 2009.  In this role, Aneesh worked to advance the President’s technology agenda by fostering new ideas and encouraging government-wide coordination to help the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing health care costs, to improving higher education.

Prior to his appointment, he served as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia from January 2006 until April 2009.

Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known speaker and authority on accessibility and web development. He is the lead of Simply Accessible Inc., a leading firm that delivers insightful and creative accessibility consulting to Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private sector clients.

Derek has a reputation for inspiring and exciting his audiences with practical demonstrations and techniques for making web sites and applications easier for everyone to use.

Derek will be leading a half-day workshop at edUi on Web Accessibility.

A software developer and programmer, Jared founded User Interface Engineering in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques.

Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute and teaches seminars on product usability. He is a member of SIGCHI, the Usability Professionals Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE.

Jared is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He can be seen at conferences for web professionals around the world including An Event Apart, UX London and UX Immersion 2012.

Jason has been at the forefront of Web culture for over 18 years as a designer, writer and teacher. He is the Director of User Experience at Forum One, an interactive agency with clients that include the Environmental Protection Agency, The Aspen Ideas Festival, and The Half the Sky Foundation.

As well as being a core contributor to Wired’s GeekDad blog, Jason has written over a dozen books and hundreds of articles, dealing with a wide range of digital media topics.  His recent books include CSS3 Visual Quickstart, Fluid Web Typography and Speaking in Styles: The Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers.  Over the last 10 years, Jason has spoken to audiences at some of the leading events in digital media, including SXSW, Voices That Matter, Macworld, WebVisions, WebDirections, NEXT, and HOW Live.

Read more about Jason on his blog jasonspeaking.com. Follow Jason on Twitter and on Facebook.

Jay Blanchard is a Texas-based web developer, designer and consultant. In addition to managing information technology and application development departments in the industry, he has published articles on content management, PHP, MySQL, jQuery and software application documentation.

He has served as technical editor for books on subjects ranging from content management systems and location-based services to using PHP and MySQL for creating e-commerce sites. His latest projects include several business specific, web-based customer provisioning and billing systems.

Jay developed a passion for efficient and effective web design well over a decade ago and has become fascinated with jQuery, having a burning desire to help others learn how to use jQuery effectively within the framework of other web technologies. He has transferred some of that fascination into his book Applied jQuery (Peachpit Press).

Jeff Gothelf has been speaking about Lean UX, writing a book on it, and enthusiastically championing the practice within Agile environments like TheLadders.com.

He’s built his renowned career as a UX designer and information architect designing elegant, efficient, and sophisticated products that are used by millions of people via AOL, Webtrends, and Fidelity.

Today, he’s running Proof, a Lean UX consultancy that helps both organizational teams and independent clients get the design solutions that solve real problems and gets designers out of the deliverables business.

Stephanie Hay is a writer, project manager, and information architect with an uncanny ability to seamlessly guide users from point A to point B. She believes that understanding the online behavior of target audiences is the key to enabling positive user experiences.

Stephanie writes energizing content that compels people to buy, vote, contribute, and connect. She’s helped start-ups, non-profits, national businesses, and global companies speak genuinely to their audiences.

This co-founder of FastCustomer with an M.S. from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University has worked with organizations like George Mason University, Viget Labs and the American Council on Education.

Whitney Hess runs a user experience strategy consultancy based in New York City. She believes empathy builds empires.

As the lead user experience strategist for The King Center Imaging Project – the digitization of more than 1 million documents and photos from Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal family archive – Whitney facilitated a product strategy workshop, conducted user research and developed personas to define the target users for the living memorial’s new website.

Her most robust research project to date was for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website redesign, the result of which was a set of eight design personas to communicate attitudes, motivations and behaviors of the institution’s key constituents, including teachers, students, family historians, academics, activists, donors and general visitors.

Whitney has a passion for elevating educational experiences and received a Master in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and a BA in Professional Writing and HCI, both from Carnegie Mellon University.

She writes about improving the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain.