Keynote speaker:
JAN EGELAND
Director
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Former United Nations Under-Secretary General for
Humanitarian Relief & Emergency Relief Coordinator

Jan Egeland of Norway was Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator from August 2003 to December 2006. From 1999 to 2002, he was the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser.Egeland co-initiated and co-organized the Norwegian channel between Israel and the PLO in 1992, which led to the Oslo Accord of September 1993.

As undersecretary, Egeland led the joint efforts in providing relief in the wake of a number of disasters - including the devastating earthquake in Bam, the Indian Ocean earthquakes and tsunami, the South Asia earthquake, the drought in West Africa, the drought and flooding in the Horn of Africa, and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. He traveled to the frontlines of conflicts to bring world's attention to the suffering in places like Darfur, Sudan, Colombia, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Egeland is currently director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His book,
A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2008.

Nicholas Negroponte is founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child
non-profit association (www.laptop.org). He is currently on leave from MIT, where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology. A graduate of MIT, Negroponte was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. Conceived in 1980, the Media Laboratory opened its doors in 1985. He is also author of the 1995 best seller, Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. In the private sector, Nicholas Negroponte serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine.

Formerly the Special Envoy to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Mr. Stephen Lewis is co-Director of AIDS-Free World, a new international AIDS advocacy organization, based in the United States (www.aids-freeworld.org).

Stephen Lewis’ work with the United Nations spanned more than two decades. He was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/ AIDS in Africa from June 2001 until the end of 2006. From 1995 to 1999, Mr. Lewis was Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF at the organization’s global headquarters in New York. From 1984 through 1988, Stephen Lewis was Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In addition to his work with AIDS-Free World, Mr. Lewis is a Professor in Global Health, Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is also a Senior Advisor to the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. Mr. Lewis is co-chair of the Leadership Programme Committee for the XVII International AIDS Conference, which will be held in Mexico City in August 2008. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and is the chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation in Canada (www.stephenlewisfoundation.org).

In 2006, Stephen Lewis’ best-selling book, Race Against Time won the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Award for non-fi ction book of the year and Mr. Lewis was named the CBA’s Author of the Year for 2005.

Mr. Lewis holds 26 honorary degrees from Canadian universities and is a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest honour for lifetime achievement. In 2007, the Kingdom of Lesotho (a small mountainous country in Southern Africa) invested Mr. Lewis as Knight Commander of the Most Dignifi ed Order of Moshoeshoe. The order is named for the founder of Lesotho; the knighthood is the country’s highest honour.

Terence Blanchard, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is a Grammy award-winning jazz trumpeter, composer and film score writer. His newest album, A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina) has been nominated for two Grammy Awards (2008): "Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album" and "Best Jazz Instrument Solo" for his work on the song, "Levees."

"This is what we are called to do as artists," says the trumpeter, bandleader, arranger and film-score composer. "We document our social surroundings and give our impressions of events. The problem with Katrina is that the devastation is so vast there's only been a trickle of art so far. We're all still digesting what went on and what continues to happen. It's like an unending story. For me, like so many others, it's taken a moment to get my mind around all this. I knew I needed to express this musically to keep the story alive"... "Requiem tells the story that needs to be heard so that people will continue to talk about what happened after Katrina". - Terence Blanchard.