Dan Dubno

Co-Host

“Since he was little, Dan loved changing hats. Each transforms him into a new person: one day cowboy, then fireman, FBI agent, or bomb squad technician. His rambunctious imagination allows him to see things that don’t exist YET. It’s the root of his inventiveness, seasoned with Dan’s ability to connect people and ideas and the fearlessness to con, cajole, and convince others to do the new and remarkable, creative.” -Mike Dubno

Dan Dubno is a broadcaster, technologist, presenter, inventor, and “connector”.  Dan won multiple Emmy-awards at PBS and CBS producing segments, shows, and appearing on-camera as “Digital Dan” where he humorously introduced America to new technologies. Dan founded Blowing Things Up, an organization that brings innovation and companies together. A frequent speaker in the early days of TED, Dan introduced the world (and the founders of Google) to “Keyhole”, which became “Google Earth.” Dan is Contributing Editor for Popular Mechanics where he highlights new technology through his feature stories and opinion pieces.  Dan is a popular presenter at technology, business, and policy conferences around the world.  He curates technology-focused events like the famed Google I/O AfterHours “technology playground” and the secret Google X GadgetFiesta.  He is a member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee.

He’s been to the bottom of the ocean in the deep-sea submersible Alvin in a scientific expedition to observe chemosynthetic life at the Galapagos Rift. His hobbies include making fireworks, devouring textbooks, testing gadgets, and growing poisonous plants.

Michael Dubno

Co-Host

“Michael Dubno is my younger brother. Our mother prayed every year she wouldn’t kill him. He still hasn’t forgiven me for exploding dry ice in a milk bottle… even though he only got a few stiches in his wrist…a mere flesh wound.  He’s a great roboticist, a brilliant computer programmer, and a very rich dude.  He has every possible tool: lathes, milling machines, and welders in his amazing basement shop. I have conned him into many volunteer jobs over the years, among them, co-chair of FIRST Robotics in New York City.  Profiled in Popular Mechanics, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal. He knows answers to questions in a ridiculously broad number of areas and I’m thankful to my mother for letting him live.”  -Dan Dubno

Mike spends most of his free time in his basement workshop.  He is a self-taught software developer, machinist, welder, electronics designer, and tinkerer.  He is one of the originals in the modern “Maker” movement.

He has researched and built prototypes of the Antikythera Mechanism, the first known computing device, which was found in an ancient shipwreck off a Greek isle.  Always building and creating, Mike is hard at work on “Tenta-lux” – a chandelier with six robotic tentacle lamp arms that seek and illuminate objects.  Mike’s Sand Table is a highly-evolved automatic mandala-drawing mechanism in which a magnetic marble carves endless patterns, pictures, and messages on a bed of sand.

As a teenager, Mike Dubno wrote a top-selling video game and parts of the CP/M operating system (before DOS or Windows!)  Before GPS, Mike built a robot that could accurately navigate, talk, find things, and pick them up. He automated his home decades before the technology became commercially available.

Mike also had “day jobs” as the Head of Global Markets and Risk Technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch; as the CTO/Chief Scientist and partner at Goldman Sachs; and a board member of Cerebellum Capital, an innovative hedge fund based on machine learning.

Mike also works to make the world a better place - interim CTO for Senator Obama’s first presidential campaign; as a member of a Homeland Security taskforce to advise and assist the TSA; as a board member of CSNYC, a charity dedicated to providing software education to all; and as the co-chairman of FIRST in New York City, a charity which inspires and engages students in the studies of science and technology.

As a journalist reporting on social justice issues for over 30 years, Grace Kahng has reported and produced for PBS McNeill-Lehrer NewsHour, ABC News, CBS News 60 Minutes, Harpo Productions, NBC News Dateline and TODAY Show. Kahng has been awarded journalism’s highest honors, including numerous National Emmy Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for International Reporting, the George Foster Peabody Award, Sidney Hlllman Award for Social Justice and the Amnesty International Journalism Award, among others. She has dedicated her career to investigating human rights abuses domestically and abroad. Career highlights include exposing U.S government malfeasance in the rape and torture of an American nun in Guatemala, the illegal dumping of military toxic waste by the Pentagon and the ’92 groundbreaking reporting on the largest case of priest pedophilia and cover up by the Catholic church. In 2005, Santoki Productions began it’s human trafficking series Sex Slaves in America, with a mission to expose the burgeoning industry based on the enslavement of women and children in the U.S.