Adam Mossoff is Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He is a Founder and past-Executive Director of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP now C-IP2). His academic research has been cited by the Supreme Court, by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and by federal agencies.

Professor Mossoff has been invited to testify several times before the Senate and the House on proposed patent legislation, and he has spoken at numerous congressional staff briefings. His writings on patent law and policy have appeared in The New York Times, Forbes and many other media outlets. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Copyright Alliance and has served as past Chair of the IP Committee of the IEEE-USA. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he chairs Hudson's Forum for Intellectual Property, is a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and is a member of the CIPU board of directors. 

At 15 Akeem Shannon was bullied for being different; at 19 he flunked out Howard University; at 23 at was committed to a mental hospital; and at 28 he appeared on Shark Tank, after which he was able to scale his business, Flipstik, to $10+ million, and convince Snoop Dogg he was a branding genius.

Determined to redeem himself Akeem himself after dropping out of Howard, where he was on full scholarship, he worked at several Fortune 500 companies and a major FinTech company where he was a top sales associate. He made a great living  but was not fulfilled. Akeem’s uncle, a NASA engineer, told him about a reusable adhesive based on the feet of geckos that NASA had developed in the 1970s. This would lead to Flipstik, a gravity-defying phone accessory.

In 2018 Akeem taught himself to write a patent, file trademarks and launched his product on Kickstarter. The next few years would be a journey of ups and downs. He applied to Shark Tank in 2019 but after months of talks with producers, was not selected to appear on the show. He participated in a music competition that ultimately help him land a deal with a business mogul who would introduce him to executives at AT&T and to the Rapper Snoop Dogg. They would help him connect with the Shark Tank producers in 2020 and he finally landed a spot on the show.

In 2022 Flipstik would grow 1000% landing distribution nationwide in Target, BestBuy, AT&T, T-Mobile, QVC, and others. The device is now sold in over 3000 retailers and launched five new products in 2023.

Akeem works as a volunteer mentor and biz coach at Big Brother Big Sister, UMSL Accelerate, Arch Grants, and NFTE. He also partnered with The Brookings Institute on the Olin Brookings Commission to level the playing field in Venture capital for unrepresented minorities and women. Akeem's story was featured at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” exhibition in Washington, and in INC Magazines top 50 fasting growing consumer product companies in 2023.

Brian Hinman is Chief Innovation Officer at Aon Intellectual Property Solutions.  Mr. Hinman is part of the senior leadership team, where he helps lead efforts for Aon to establish market-accepted standards for assessing IP assets. Mr. Hinman has more than 30 years of experience in the IP field and in 2023 was inducted by IAM into the IP Hall of Fame.

Prior to joining Aon, Mr. Hinman served as chief IP officer at Philips, based in the Netherlands, where he led a worldwide team of more than 400 IP professionals in nine countries. He engaged in many forms of IP monetization, including patent, technology, and brand licensing, design patents, know-how and the formation of IP ventures. Prior to Philips, Mr. Hinman was Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Unified Patents Inc, Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing at IBM, Verizon, and InterDigital, and was founding CEO of Allied Security Trust.

Bruce Beman is Managing Director of Brody Berman Associates, a management consulting and communications firm that serves innovative businesses. Brody Berman has supported more than 200 innovative businesses and portfolios since 1988, as well as many law firms and their clients. In 2016, he co-founded CIPU, which he serves as chairman. Bruce is responsible for five books about the business of IP, including From Ideas to Assets. His articles have appeared in Forbes, Nature Biotechnology, National Law Review and The New York Times. 

'Understanding IP Matters,' a podcast series he hosts, gives guests the opportunity to share their IP story, e.g. the journey from creator ro entrepreneur. The Intangible Investor column he writes currently appears on IP Watchdog. The column had appeared in every issue of IAM magazine from 2003 to 2019, 97 in all. IP CloseUp, a weekly update on trends he publishes, is read in more than 60 countries and has received more than 390,000 visits. He hosts CIPU's top-3 IP podcast, 'Understanding IP Matters,' currently in its third season. Bruce holds a Masters’ Degree film scholarship from Columbia University, where he taught for four years and completed course work and comprehensives for the Ph.D.

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Danny Marti oversees the global public affairs function at Tencent, one of the largest technology and entertainment companies in the world. At Tencent, Danny serves as a member of the Tencent Americas Management Committee, He also serves on various external boards, including Tequila Works (Madrid), Funcom (Oslo), the Emory Law Alumni Board, and the International Trademark Association (INTA).

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Danny has had a career in both public and private service dedicated to IP and innovation law and policy. He served at the White House as President Obama’s U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (“IP Czar”) and was sworn into office by then-Vice President Biden. Earlier, Mr. Marti served as Head of Global Government Affairs at London-based RELX Group (Elsevier and LexisNexis), a FTSE 100 provider of scientific, technical and medical information and analytics, legal information and decision-making tools. He has served as Vice Chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center; and as Managing Partner of the Washington, D.C. office of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton. He is a graduate of Emory University School of Law (JD) and Georgetown University (BA).

Efrat Kasznik is President of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP valuation and strategy consulting firm. Ms. Kasznik also serves as a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she has been teaching MBA and executive education classes for over a decade. Efrat has over 25 years of IP consulting experience, focusing on assisting IP holders across industries with the valuation, commercialization, and monetization of their intangible assets. She helps clients, ranging in size from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups, with IP and business valuations in support of licensing deals, IP and technology acquisitions, M&A transactions, financial reporting, strategic planning, and fundraising. She also frequently serves as a testifying expert in disputes involving IP and startup valuations and damages, in civil litigation and in family court. 

Efrat currently serves on the Board of LES USA-Canada, as well as on the Board of the LES Silicon Valley Chapter. She is Chair of the upcoming LES 2022 Annual Meeting in San Francisco (October 2022).  Efrat has been recognized as one of the top IP strategists in the world by IAM 300 for 9 years in a row (2013-2021).  She has been a co-founder, CFO and Board member in several startups, and is an active mentor and advisor in the startup community, where she has worked with hundreds of startups, accelerators and incubators in Silicon Valley, Europe and Israel.

James Conley is clinical professor of technology at Northwestern University. He serves on the faculty of both the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is a faculty contributor in the Kellogg Center for Research in Technology & Innovation and serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Segal Design Institute (NU IDEA). Beyond academia, Professor Conley is an inventor, an active advocate of IP education for business and other students and leads seminars globally for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Professor Conley was appointed a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce Trademark Public Advisory Committee (TPAC) of the Patent and Trademark Office and has been an expert and author for the UN based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He serves on the board of several companies and the US Intellectual Property Allliance and the Illinois Intellectual Property Alliance. Professor Conley's research investigates the strategic use of intangible assets and intellectual properties to build and sustain competitive advantage. Kellogg School of Management, under Professor Conley’s leadership, partnered with CIPU on the 2021 IP Awareness Summit.

Jerry Ma is an executive, technologist, and registered patent practitioner currently serving as Director of Emerging Technology at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Jerry hails from an industry background including management and senior technical roles at Facebook AI Research, Quora, and Hummingbird Regtech. He has overseen initiatives resulting in the world’s first public-domain superhuman Go bot and the first deep neural network to be trained on the known protein universe.

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Jerry is an avid developer and scientist, publishing at venues such as ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and S&P. He has explored diverse topics including the mathematics of nonconvex optimization, quasi-linguistic structure in proteins and passwords, and energy-based neural modeling of atomic structures. As an educator, Jerry has taught computer science & mathematics in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings. Jerry earned an A.B. in Economics and the Classics from Harvard University.

Mark Cohen heads the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law School.  Previously, Mark was Senior Counsel, China in the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, after serving as a visiting professor at Fordham Law School (2011-2012). Prior to that time, he served in such functions as: Director, International Intellectual Property at Microsoft Corporation; Of Counsel to Jones Day’s Beijing office; and Senior Intellectual Property Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2004- 2008). Mark holds a J.D. degree from Columbia University (1984), an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Chinese Language and Literature (1979) and a B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in Chinese Studies.

Michael Waltrip is managing director of the Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC’s) Intellectual Capital Management and Xerox’s Intellectual Property Strategy and Commercialization groups. He heads intellectual property monetization for both PARC and the rest of Xerox, while leading the creation of policies, training and strategy for IP development and commercialization across the organizations. In 2023, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) joined SRI, bringing together two iconic Silicon Valley research organizations to build, expand, and scale capabilities.

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Michael applies his experience in venture investments, diligence and portfolio management, as well as complex commercial transactions, to lead a diverse set of activities ranging from early-stage portfolio assessment and development to the negotiation and structuring of transactions. He has led a wide variety of engagements from large scale sponsored research with corporate sponsors such as Samsung, Dai Nippon Printing, 3M, SolarWorld, Microsoft and Alcon to the spin-out of PARC technology into venture-backed start-ups. Before joining PARC in 2005, Michael was counsel to the Acer Group’s venture funds in the US, where he was responsible for all legal matters for US investments.

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Before joining PARC in 2005, Michael was lead counsel to the Acer Group’s venture funds in North America, where he was responsible for all legal matters for North American investments. Michael comes from the software industry and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Hastings College of the Law. In addition to his duties at PARC and Xerox over the years, and now SRI, Michael continues to maintain a close ties to the venture world, advising venture funds and start-ups across a variety of topics.   

Talal Shamoon is the CEO of Intertrust, which he joined in 1997 as a member of the research staff. After holding a series of executive positions, he was named CEO in 2003 when Sony and Philips acquired the company. As an early pioneer of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in the late 90s, Talal led Intertrust’s business and technology initiatives in the entertainment and media industries, which includes significant licenses with with most IT, consumer electronics and mobile manufacturers and service operators.

Prior to joining Intertrust, Talal was a researcher at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, where he focused on digital signal processing and content security. Talal sits on the boards of  iwhiteCryption and Kiora, and he chairs the board of directors of Planet OS. A recognized inventor and published author, Talal holds B.S., M. Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University.

At 27 Tiffany Norwood raised over $670 million dollars to fund a startup to build the first global digital radio platform and launch three satellites into space. The capital helped to establish XM Radio. As one the first successful black female tech entrepreneur, Tiffany's career has spanned 52 countries, 30+ years and seven startups. Tiffany established her first start-up as a teenager and had been granted a patent by the age of 23. Her ventures have ranged from the first one-strap backpack to the automation technology behind self-install kits for broadband internet, and a virtual reality gaming platform. In 2022, she was named Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year.

Tiffany has led some of the first digital content licensing deals, including those with Bloomberg News and CNN International. She was also an early collaborator with the Fraunhofer Institute on their MPEG technologies. Tiffany is the Founder and CEO of Tribetan, a company that teaches entrepreneurship and innovation literacy as a life skill and the human science of success. Venues with which she has consulted include the European Parliament, Yale, the USPTO, KMPG and the South African Embassy. Her dream is that the science of turning imagination into reality is as well-known to the core curriculum as reading, writing, and math. Tiffany received an MBA from Harvard and a Bachelor’s in Economics with a concentration in statistics and electrical engineering from Cornell.