Career: Executive Director Ushahidi, TED Senior Fellow, Blogger
Interests: Photography, Architecture, Mobile Sensors, African Futurism
Hometown: Eldoret, Kenya

Juliana Rotich is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi, the crowdsourcing platform that leverages mobile phones and the internet to change the way information flows. Ushahidi is a web based reporting system that utilizes crowdsourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. In the Kenyan scenario it was used to map out incidents of violence. Ushahidi then grew to be an open source platform that has been used in various situations such as the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, the Palestine conflict crisis, Japan’s Earthquake and the Lybian conflict.
Prior to Ushahidi Juliana has worked in the telecommunications industry for over ten years.  She is originally from Kenya, with a Computer Science degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a technology, budding African Futurist and TED Senior Fellow. She co- founded Mobisoko, a mobile marketplace for language and location relevant apps in Africa. She also writes the well-respected ‘Afromusing’ blog, typically with a focus on African tech and renewable energy. She often speaks at international conferences about technology, innovation, media, open source, crisis mapping and Africa; Past conferences she has spoken at include Lift, DEMO, TTI Vanguard, TransMediale, WSIS, DLD Women, Guardian Activate World Economic Forum -Davos, and ARS Electronica. She was named one of the Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper and top 2 women in Technology 2011.

Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free & open source software for information collection, visualization &  interactive mapping to  democratizing information, increasing transparency & lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories (Crowdmap, SwiftRiver). “Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Swahili, and was a website initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout in 2008.  Since then Ushaidi has grown to a focused organization and now consists of a strong team of volunteer developers primarily in Africa, but also Europe, South America and the U.S. It is a disruptive organization that is willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing the traditional way that information flows.

Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi. As the Ushahidi platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server. It is the fastest, simplest installation of the Ushahidi platform. Within minutes you’ll be up and running with your own installation, mapping reports events and visualizing information.

SwiftRiver is a free open source platform that helps people make sense of information in a short amount of time. The platform was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster.  In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations that need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more.

Juliana´s TED Story: “I met two of the three co-founders of Ushahidi at TEDGlobal 2007, a conference that was a seminal moment for Africa, and for me. TED not only brought together online friends and kindred spirits, thereby seeding what later became Ushahidi, but it also changed my whole perspective about Africa, and the world. Since 2007, my life has taken an arc that I could not be happier about. I hosted the second annual TEDxNairobi, where the ideas worth spreading that TED lit in the TED Fellow’s minds, get passed on to others in the Kenyan community. As a TED Senior Fellow, I have had the incredible opportunity to make friends from around the world, and within the TED community, friendships that I treasure as we continue this journey of sharing knowledge and living our lives as active change agents in this world.”

More:
LinkedIn: Juliana
http://www.ted.com/fellows/view/id/31 (2011/03/16)

www.ushahidi.com
Twitter:@ushahidi
vimeo: Ushahidi
Facebook: Ushahidi
Crunchbase: Ushahidi
Wikipedia: Ushahidi

www.crowdmap.com
Twitter:@crowdmap
Facebook: Crowdmap

Swiftriver
Twitter:@swiftriver
Facebook: Swiftriver

www.afromusing.com
Twitter:@afromusing

Other articles/links/videos:

Japan:

Die Zeit: Ushahidi: Wissen, was wo in Japan passiert (2011/03/16)
GOOD: Earthquake in Japan: Help Google and Ushahidi Rescue Trapped Citizens and Reunite Families (2011/03/11)
Scienceray: Google and Ushahidi Serving Japan (2011/03/16)
Jonathan Stray: UN asks Ushahidi to produce Crisis Map of Lybia (2011/03/08)
Global Pulse: Crisismappers Extend UN Capacity in Lybia (2011/03/04)
Guardian.co.uk: Top 100 women: Technology – Juliana Rotich (2011/03/08)
Video: Interview Juliana Rotich on DLD (2011)
Global Voices: Japan: Earthquake Crisis Mapping on Ushahidi (2011/03/15)
Ushahidi: Crisis Mapping Japan´s Earthquake and How You Can Help (2011/03)
Geocommons: Japan Radiation Report Data Stream from Ushahidi (2011/03)
Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship (TCTV) (01/12)

Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship [TCTV]

Egypt:

Ushahidi: Crowdmapping Egypt (2011/01/25)
Diary of a Crisis Mapper: Ushahidi Egypt: When Open Data is Not so Open, or When People Just Don´t Get it (2010/11/20)

Ushahidi´s Juliana Rotich introduces Crisis Mapping in short:

Career: Theoretical Physicist. Professor at Yale, Harvard, Case Western Reserve and Arizona State University. Bestseller author e.g. “The Physics of Star Trek”.
Interests: Mountain Bike, Fly Fish, Scuba Dive
Hometown: Phoenix (AZ), USA

“I became a scientist in part because I read books by other scientists, such as Albert Einstein, George Gamow, Sir James Jeans, etc, when I was a child, and my popular writing returns the favor. One of my greatest joys is when a young person comes up to me and tells me that one of my books motivated them to become a scientist.

I believe science is not only a vital part of our culture, but is fun, and I try and convey that in my books and lectures. I am honored that Scientific American referred to me as a rare scientific public intellectual, and that all three major US Physics Societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics, have seen fit to honor me with their highest awards for research and writing.

My research focuses on the beginning and end of the Universe. Among my contributions to the field of cosmology, I helped lead the search for dark matter, and first proposed the existence of dark energy in 1995.”

(LMK, Amazon Biography)

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is an American Theoretical Physicist. In 1982, he received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from Carleton University and his Ph.D. from the MIT. In 1985, he became assistant professor at Yale University and Associate Professor (1988). From 1993 to 2005, he was professor of astronomy and Chairman of Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University.
In August 2008, he joined the faculty at Arizona State University as Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and the Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and Director of University’s Origins Initiative. In 2009, he helped inaugurate this initiative with the Origins Symposium in which 80 of the world’s leading scientists participated, and 3000 people attended. He currently serves on advisory board of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) and was elected to the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
He regularly appears in national media for public outreach in science and has written many editorials, e.g. New York Times.

More:
Facebook Fanpage
Lawrence M. Krauss Faculty Website

Wikipedia: Lawrence M. Krauss
Media Bio of Lawrence Krauss

Lawrence’s books on Amazon
Lawrences books, publications, lectures an other media and public appearances

Other articles/links/videos:
Video: “A Universe From Nothing” by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009