For over 30 years, Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people alike and helped a generation of users embrace interaction design. He is best known as the "Father of Visual Basic" and is the founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy.

Robert Reimann has spent the last 25+ years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, and consultant. He has led dozens of web, desktop, and device-based interaction design projects, for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Robert has lectured on interaction design and UX methods and principles at major universities and corporations, and to international industry audiences.

Robert was a founding director and first President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He has also held advisory board positions for AIGA Experience Design, the Information Architecture Institute, and UC Berkeley's Institute of Design (BiD) and was a board member of Design Museum Boston from 2010-2012. With Alan Cooper, Robert is co-author of two bestselling editions of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design.

Robert's past positions include Principal Interaction Designer at PatientsLikeMe and Sonos, Associate Creative Director at frog design, Manager of User Experience at Bose, and Director of Design R&D at Cooper, where he played a key role building their design practice, and in the development and refinement of their goal-directed design methods, including personas and scenario-based design. Robert is currently a Director of Experience Design at athenahealth.

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Christopher Noessel is a veteran in the UX world: designing products, services, and strategy for the health, financial, and consumer domains, among many others.

Christopher has been doing interaction design for more than 20 years (longer than we've even been calling it that). He co-founded a small interaction design agency where he developed interactive exhibitions and environments for museums, and he worked as a director of information design at international Web consultancy marchFIRST, where he also helped establish the interaction design Center of Excellence. He was instrumental in crafting the pair design practice while at Cooper, while working with clients from worldwide media companies to local startups.

Christopher was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where his thesis project was a comprehensive service design for lifelong learners called Fresh. The project was presented at the MLearn conference in London in 2003. He has since helped to visualize the future of counterterrorism as a freelancer, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern health care in his role at Cooper.

Christopher has written for online publications for many years, and was first published in print as co-author of the interaction design pattern chapter in the textbook edited by Simson Garfinkel, RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. His Spidey-sense goes off at random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences around the world about a wide range of things, including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, the Interface Parenthesis and the future of interaction design, and the relationship between science fiction and interface design.