Senator Al Franken was born on May 21, 1951, and grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. He graduated from Harvard in 1973, where he met his wife Franni. They've been married for 33 years, and have two children: daughter Thomasin, 28, and son Joe, 24. Al spent the last 37 years as a comedy writer, author, and radio talk show host and has taken part in seven USO tours, visiting our troops overseas in Germany, Bosnia, Kosovo and Uzbekistan - as well as visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait four times. In 2008, Al was elected to the Senate as a member of the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Party from Minnesota, and was sworn in July of 2009 following a statewide hand recount. He currently sits on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee; the Judiciary Committee; the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and the Committee on Indian Affairs. Al is a long-time advocate for affordable, accessible health care, an economy that works for our middle class, the protection of a secure retirement, the promise of a 21st century education for our kids, and the creation of a green economy that creates jobs and improves our environment.

Don't quit your big company job just yet to go work for that sexy startup. At this panel, seasoned professionals give their tips on how to successfully drive innovative ideas inside big companies. Whether you want to add social media to your company's web presence, adopt hot new technology, or have the next big business idea, we'll tell you how to accomplish it, even in the face of management that still prints out their email.

Japan has ubiquitous high-speed coverage and a voracious appetite for tech gadgets, however, their tools have developed with entirely different features than other countries. For example: Japan's ""Galapo-phones"" commonly include streaming TV and multi-character sets, Mixii and Gree each have more than 30 million users on their social networks, and Yahoo is a whole different experience from US counter-part. With meteoric growth in Twitter and network tools, Japan aims on becoming the regional leader for emerging social web technologies -- much like their early leadership in consumer electronics and gaming industries. This presents opportunities for collaboration and partnerships but localizing requires more than translation. This panel will discuss the unique characteristics of Japanese web and mobile market including tactics for connecting to markets, identifying opportunities, and outreaching to audiences, plus understanding unexpected cultural nuances and consumer expectations.

Can "tweeting" release Oxytocin? Does looking through your friends' Facebook photos or reading the newsfeed impact your mood? This panel will look at how the internet and social networking actually impacts how we feel and will explore opportunities for using technology to help people feel better. We'll discuss the current research as well as innovative sites, applications and other virtual interventions designed to improve our mental health with an emphasis on young people (16-24).

The old way of thinking tells small businesses to worry about competitors. Worrying takes the focus off the business. By collaborating with competitors the focus remains on the client and business goals. Take for instance the WordPress theme design company StudioPress. StudioPress recommended other theme design companies to add to the Page.ly power ups page. Because of these actions and more, they've increased their recognition, branded themselves as a benevolent leader, and gained respect within the community. GangPlank, a collaborative workspace, started as a few web firms who decided to share their business secrets. They decided to combine their efforts and work together under the same roof. There was enough room for more so the space was opened up to the public. Now the space has increased from 5k sq ft to 16k sq ft and is funded by the city of Chandler. Learn these tactics and more from a highly qualified panel of experts who live this philosophy daily.

PBS KIDS has been designing non-commercial websites and interactive games for kids for over 10 years. Making an interactive product that appeals, engages and is usable by a child is not as simple as using Comic Sans and replacing an “S” with a “Z”. Children's abilities change rapidly and producers need to ensure that products are developmentally accessible. This session will focus on designing for two audiences: pre-readers (3-5) and readers (6-8), through case-studies revealing how and why design choices were made based on experience, user testing and informed guesses.

Artists working with the Internet have to adapt, adopt, and respond to a continually developing medium with ever expanding potential. In this panel, we'll talk with leading artists about their practice and the current state of Internet art. Artists will discuss how recent developments, like the boom in online video, the proliferation of social media and mobile technologies, and the introduction of HTML5, have prompted new artistic strategies and aesthetics. The conversation will foreground how artists are often the first to experiment with and think through the new possibilities and limits of new technologies. Rhizome is a leading organization dedicated to Internet art. Rhizome supports artists working at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools and media.

Ever wonder what keeps so many people from launching a new endeavor or scaling a creative venture into something exponentially more impactful? More often than not, the answer isn't a lack of ideas, money, a team or a plan...it's far more primal. The answer is fear. Instead of brainstorming new ideas, in this session you will discover how to move from ideation to action, overcome the three greatest fears that hold creatives, artists and entrepreneurs back, and find a more stable path to success.

Art, education, economics, propaganda. Games are arriving at the forefront of media to become an important way to engage entire generations of people. What's different from before? Five billion people are replacing the most common communication device, the simple cell phone, with a full-fledged gaming system in their pocket. There are multiple ways to publish and distribute games over the Internet and to the masses. For many, game creation is becoming a regular activity, as tools become both easier to use and more powerful for people without programming knowledge. This panel will cover unique perspectives on how games are becoming more meaningful forms of expression and a significant tool for communicating ideas.

This session is about how the history of Print Design is becoming an important influence in the evolution of Interaction Design. As a craft, design for printed media has a rich history. Several generations of designers have pushed its boundaries in countless directions. It has been shaped over several hundred of years as both a functional and aesthetic discipline, with a deep foundation of principles, practices, theories, and professional dialogue. In comparison, Interaction and UI Design is still a relatively young field. Its history has largely been driven by technology and functional goals. The dialogue around it has been centered on usability, which has been its purpose in the context of technological advancement. The visual language of UI has evolved from that standpoint: that it should evoke the familiar, analog experience of tools, buttons, knobs, and dials. That foundation has led to a very specific visual language in interactive experiences. In the past ten years however, the relevant technologies that support the design of Interfaces - displays, processing speeds, and rendering engines - have matured to a point that they provide a more capable canvas for design. Meanwhile, our culture has become visibly more comfortable with the technologies that surround it.

How is social media changing the TV experience for good? Over the past ten years, we've seen television become truly interactive, from SMS voting on American Idol to real-time audience feedback via Twitter and Facebook becoming a part of everything from CNN to Oprah to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. At the same time, web series have built millions of viewers on places like YouTube, iTunes, and XBox Live. Now a new wave of always-connected mobile apps, set-top boxes, and gaming platforms are making entertainment more social, location-aware, and connected than ever. Our panel of producers of hit TV shows and top web platforms will talk about how they're enabling social viewing and collaboration between producers, stars, and audiences in real time to create new kinds of TV experiences.

The future of entertainment is one of uncertainty and opportunity. As traditional formats like television and movies lose eyeballs to video games and user-generated content, where is this creative revolution taking us? Join one of leading voices in scripted internet content, Felicia Day, in discussing the journey that took her from a video shot in her garage to a four season production deal with Xbox and Sprint. She will speak about harnessing social media to build her show "The Guild" to over 100 million views, and building upon her success to produce her upcoming web series with EA/Bioware, "Dragon Age: Redemption". There has never been a better time to be an independent creator, learn from one of the innovators.

Ever wonder why Google isn't very helpful in finding something fun to do tonight? Search engines have gotten really good at finding information that literally matches our keywords, but they fall short when our needs and priorities are either hard to express or hard to match directly to the target content. These limitations are giving rise to a new set of search experiences based on semantic understanding and recommendations that are personal, social, and contextual. Companies like Netflix, Yelp and Pandora have kicked off the first wave of new search. By focusing on searching by how we naturally think, talk and feel about the matter at hand, we can begin to find information that's relevant to us both logically and emotionally. In this panel, we will look at the emerging technologies and user experiences that are creating the next big thing for the search industry.

The business plan, as a tool to lure potential investors, secure early customers, and guide the direction of your business, is a dying construct. Smart entrepreneurs realize that a prototype is worth a thousand business plans. This panel will focus on prototypes as a tool to accelerate the success of your business, and will have a particular emphasis on the role of prototyping in business modeling, fund raising, product development, and sales. We'll talk specifically about how prototyping can allow you to more efficiently allocate resources (both talent, time and money), discover customers’ unmet needs, outsmart the competition, and move potential investors from interested to infatuated.

The centerpiece of the urban lifestyle is an extensive, reliable public transportation system. Transit riders are embracing smartphones, 3G, 4G and even tablets. These tools can help us get better information, faster. Learn what changes are giving information in real-time and for trip planning. The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) created NotifyNYC in 2009 "to enhance NYC's emergency public communications to the public." NotifyNYC allows NYC residents to sign up for transit notifications in a format of their choice, SMS, email, voice recording, Twitter or RSS for any or all boroughs. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) website offers developers a huge amount of resources including a comprehensive API with schedules, station information and real-time service updates. This panel will examine creative new projects that enhance our lives as city residents on the go, including how these websites and applications could reduce costs, bureaucracy and response time in public transit.

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As individuals and companies across the world rely more and more heavily on social media, data visualization has become sine qua non in not only displaying analytics and metrics, but also in understanding macro and micro trends by platform, network and individual. This panel will explore information design, data visualization, relationship mapping and statistics -- and how they all fit together to create compelling infographics, data visualizations and dynamic dashboards in hot pursuit of the holy grail of information design: make it more digestible and more human. Proposed by well-known data visualization firm JESS3 (see especially: The Conversation Prism and The State of the Internet), the panel will not only share insights into what makes a good infographic or social media data visualization, but also seek to explore the significance of these graphics in relation to the expanding reach and uses of social media as not just tellers of social media stories, but part of larger content-based communications strategies.

Based on lessons learned during research for the #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Body, this session will look at how to systematically hack the human body. From losing 100 pounds to running 100 miles, lifting 500 pounds or holding your breath for 5 minutes -- what are the limits? From screw-ups (emergency surgery, anyone?) to importing stem-cell growth factor from Israel for black market injections, Tim will discuss the promises, pitfalls, and methods of cutting-edge self-experimentation.

Google, via its rich snippets, has reported that microformats has a 94% usage share (as compared with RDFa etc.). So how does the future look for microformats? In this session, we'll look closely at real problems with implementing microformats in HTML5 and how this can be done, and whether there will be a continuing place for them. We'll also look at emerging technologies and techniques, such as RelMeAuth and discuss advanced user techniques. As Microformats passes through it's 5th birthday, we'll discuss the highs and lows of the project.

Susan Crawford is a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Susan co-led the FCC Agency Review team for the Obama-Biden transition (11/08-1/09), and served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009). She teaches internet law and communications law, and is a member of the boards of Public Knowledge and TPRC. She was a member of the board of directors of ICANN from 2005-2008 and is the founder of OneWebDay. One of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology (2009); IP3 Awardee (2010), World Technology Network Awardee (2010); one of Prospect Magazine’s Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future (2011).

Social media is becoming an essential tool for activists in repressive societies. In 2009 the Iranian government expelled foreign media and jammed international broadcasts. For the BBC's Persian TV emails, video, Twitter and Facebook postings from Iran became the main source of news. Groundbreaking stories were complied using material from viewers and listeners. In the Xingjian province of China government censors were defeated by a tweet - news of a popular uprising amongst the regions Uighurs in this remote province leaked out to the world's media. A military clampdown ensued, but not before foreign media got to the region and heard the Uighurs grievances. Conversely the oppressors use the same social media tools, partly to spread disinformation about their activities, but also in the cases of groups such as the Taliban, to push their beliefs. The panel will discuss how censorship and suppression is made more and more difficult to hide by the social media revolution, and the impact of this for traditional media organizations.

The public infrastructure of our cities are obscure structures whose workings are not accessible to most citizens. What if every sensor in our cities would have a Web API anyone could access in real-time and mashup? Open and easy to use Web platforms that enable efficient integration, processing, storage, and access to the enormous amount of data digital cities generate are increasingly needed, and we'll explore the various technologies that are making such solutions possible. Furthermore, we'll go much more beyond the technical aspects of such a platform to address the more controversial implications of such an Orwellian scenario. Hopefully, this session will provide a forum for the different disciplines involved in the design of future cities to establish a common ground for better interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding in this area.

In a highly-anticipated return to SXSW, an all-star lineup of designers, coders, and entrepreneurs compete to pitch their worst business ideas in short lightning rounds. Winner gets funded by a real VC.