Amy Steagall
Chief Information Security Officer, Stanford University IT
Amy Steagall is the Chief Information Security Officer at Stanford University overseeing Stanford’s efforts to protect its computing and information assets and to comply with information-related laws, regulations, and policies.
Prior to joining the Stanford team in 2020, Amy retired from the United States Air Force after 25 years of distinguished and honorable service. Throughout her career, she led large organizations and teams, culminating in her role at the Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber at NSA Texas. There she steered cyber mission teams operating in complex security environments and specializing in offensive and defensive cyberspace operations.
Amy holds a Master of Science in Cybersecurity Law from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and a Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity Management and Policy from the University of Maryland.
James Landay
Denning Director, Stanford HAI | Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
James Landay is a Professor of Computer Science and the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He specializes in human-computer interaction. Landay is the co-founder and Denning Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Prior to joining Stanford, Landay was a Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City for one year and a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington for 10 years. From 2003-2006, he also served as the Director of Intel Labs Seattle, a leading research lab that explored various aspects of ubiquitous computing. Landay was also the chief scientist and co-founder of NetRaker, which was acquired by KeyNote Systems in 2004. Before that he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Landay received his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1990, and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His PhD dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and an ACM Fellow. He is an ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award winner. He served for six years on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee.
Thomas Mullaney
Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by Courtesy, Stanford University
Thomas Mullaney is Director of SILICON. He is a Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author or lead editor of 8 books, including How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (Norton, 2026 Forthcoming), The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Where Research Begins (University of Chicago Press, 2022, with Christopher Rea), The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017, winner of the Fairbank Prize), and Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (UC Press, 2010). He earned his BA and MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and his PhD from Columbia University. For the past 15 years, his research, publications, conference planning, and coursework have focused expressly on asymmetries in the global information and language technologies, with a keen focus on writing systems that have been systematically marginalized and excluded from the modern information age.
Yiying Lu
Artist, Designer, and Creative Leader
Yiying Lu is an award-winning artist, designer, and creative leader working at the intersection of art, technology, culture, and human experience. She is the creator of Twitter’s iconic Fail Whale and has designed and successfully proposed six emojis adopted into the Unicode Standard, including the dumpling 🥟 and boba tea 🧋.
She previously served as Global Creative Director at 500 Global and as a San Francisco Arts Commissioner. She currently leads Happy Creative Land, a San Francisco-based innovation studio, and serves as an Adobe Global Creative Ambassador and a committee member of the UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford.
Her creative collaborations have included Disney, Apple, Google, Airbnb, Adobe, and NYU Shanghai, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TIME, The Atlantic, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. She has been recognized by Fast Company as one of its Most Creative People in Business, by Microsoft as a Top 10 Leader in Innovation, and by the Shorty Awards as its inaugural winner in Design.
Born in Shanghai, educated in Sydney and London, and based in San Francisco, Lu brings a cross-cultural perspective to the ways design and storytelling create connections across cultures, communities, and generations.
