Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. She also organises Science Hack Day San Francisco, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend.
Spotting a theme here? Ariel is mad about science and does everything she can to make it more accessible to everyone. Take a look at her keynote on Hacking Space Exploration at OSCON last year.
The Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy
Don't panic: the next big science revolution isn't just for asteroid miners or CERN scientists.
Just as science fiction has often shown the way to future inventions, the act of hacking is now generating prototypes that act as footholds for future explorations, discoveries and epiphanies in science. This presentation takes you on a tour of our universe (from black holes and dark matter to exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and shows you how you can actively explore the final frontier through getting excited and making things.