Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies at the University of California Berkeley, where she also runs the UC Berkeley Disability Lab. Her research is on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan and the United States. In 2006, she published Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, an ethnography of sign language and deaf social movements. Her second project on psychiatric disabilities and community based recovery resulted in two ethnographic films and a book titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). Her books, films, and articles have resulted in numerous prizes including the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the SVA Short Film Award, and David Plath Media Award. While finishing a book on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan, Nakamura is currently collaborating on research involving the impact of artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) on disability communities. She has also previously served as the co-president of the Society for Disability Studies and as a commissioner and past-Chair of the Oakland City Mayor's Commission on People with Disabilities.

Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn Brown (also published widely as Lydia X. Z. Brown) is an internationally recognized advocate, community organizer, community builder, and scholar-activist whose work addresses interpersonal, corporate, and state violence targeting disabled people at intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Ly Xīnzhèn is Assistant Teaching Professor of Disability Studies at Georgetown University, founding Executive Director of The Autistic People of Color Fund, and is creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. They serve as past president and treasurer of the Disability Rights Bar Association, Disability Justice Committee representative to the National Lawyers Guild board, and a gubernatorial appointee to the Maryland Commission on LGBTQIA+ Affairs. Disability Justice and abolition are their political homes as an organizer; as a feminist critical legal studies scholar, they work in critical race and disability theory and in science and technology studies.

Outside of their scholarship and organizing work, Ly Xīnzhèn is director of public policy at National Disability Institute, where their work advances financial freedom and economic justice for disabled people via law and policy. Formerly, Ly Xīnzhèn was policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology and an associate at Georgetown Law's Institute for Tech Law and Policy, where they led the only policy and advocacy project in the United States focused on disability rights, algorithmic harm, and technology justice for several years. Most recently, they co-authored a research and policy report on labor, disability rights, and emerging tech in the workplace for National Disability Institute and New Disabled South.

Nicole Holliday is an Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.  Before joining Berkeley in 2024, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from New York University in 2016. Her research focuses on what it means to sound black, both phonetically and socially, and from the perspectives of speakers and listeners, both human and computational. She is especially focused on how both human listeners and machines make social judgments about voices, and how this impacts issues of inequality. Her work has appeared in scholarly venues such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, Laboratory Phonology, and American Speech. She has made media appearances in outlets such as the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post. She also runs a popular Tiktok account where she posts about linguistics and current events.

Robin Netzorg (she/her) is a 6th year PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley, advised by Professors Gopala Anumanchipalli and Bin Yu. Her research focuses on interpretable models of speaker identity that quantifies expert perception of voice quality, with an aim to apply these methods to gender-affirming voice training and speech therapy as assistive tools. She believes strongly in the potential for machine learning to support, not replace, human expertise, and has tried to accomplish this via community-driven design and collaboration. 

Ken-ichiro YABU is a project researcher with RCAST (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology) and IOG (Institute of Gerontology) in the University of Tokyo. He has muscle weakness in his whole body and uses an electric wheelchair. And he has moderate speech articulation disorder.

He is engaged in research on assistive technology for the people with disabilities and the elderly.

Abraham Glasser is a born-Deaf, native American Sign Language (ASL) signer who occasionally uses his voice that has a Deaf accent. He is an Assistant Professor in the Accessible Human Centered Computing program at Gallaudet University. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), his research investigates technologies, AI, and accessibility for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, including speech, sign language, and immersive technologies.

Yukinori Tamaki is a social worker and the representative director of Hyogo Prefecture Consultation Support Network, General Incorporated Association.

Yukinori Tamaki was left with cerebral palsy after being in a state of asphyxia during birth. He attended local schools for elementary and junior high school, but attended a boarding school for disabled people for high school.

After graduating from the second division of the Faculty of Social Welfare at Nihon Fukushi University, Yukinori Tamaki became immersed in the independent living movement at the Mainstream Association of Independent Living Centers. He currently serves as the Representative Director of Hyogo Prefecture Consultation Support Network, General Incorporated Association, and as an advisor for the rights protection and dissemination promotion and consultation support of the Nishinomiya City Social Welfare Council, a social welfare corporation.

Yukinori Tamaki appeared on NHK Educational TV's Baribara, which ended in March this year, for 16 years.

Yang Yang is a Speech Therapist based in Tokyo, Japan. She was born and raised in Shanghai, China mainland. After getting her bachelor’s degree in China, she obtained the master’s degree and passed the national certification of Japan last year.

She has had a developmental stutter (or stammer) since she was 6 years old. This experience led her to the field of speech and language pathology. 

She’s also one of the founding members of “Slow Order Cafe”, a project that runs a series of pop-up events staffed entirely by young people who stutter.  She believes more voices from the stuttering community should be heard.