ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Sebastian Thrun
Robotics professor // Stanford University

AUTOPILOT AUTOS Sebastian Thrun is out to prove that robotic cars are safer than those driven by humans. He and a group of students won the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge—a 132-mile race through the Mojave Desert in which cars made their way with no input from humans, either from within the car or remotely. Last year, in the Darpa Urban Challenge, cars had to deal with stoplights and simulated merging. Carnegie Mellon won that event; Stanford took second. Darpa (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is part of the Defense Department, and the Pentagon is keenly interested in robots (think Terminator). So does Thrun worry about influencing the military as opposed to Detroit? "A life saved is a life saved," he says. —Owen Edwards

ENTERTAINMENT
Tina Fey
Writer, actress, producer // NBC

FUNNY GIRL When Tina Fey quit Saturday Night Live in 2006 to create, produce, and star in NBC's 30 Rock, she left as a trailblazer. During her nine-year tenure at S.N.L.—widely known as a boys club—Fey became its first female head writer and pushed other women in the cast (notably Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch) into recurring roles while becoming an audience favorite herself. In November, Fey took to the streets with members of the Writers Guild of America. Despite her position as an actress and producer on 30 Rock, she became one of the central faces of the strike. When S.N.L. went back on the air after the strike was over, the boys club chose Fey to host the first show. —Claire Hoffman

TECHNOLOGY
Danny Hillis
Co-founder // Applied Minds

PARALLEL PROCESSOR If you do a Google search for "Danny Hillis," the results pop up in a fraction of a second, thanks to technology that Hillis himself pioneered. In 1983, while finishing his doctorate at M.I.T., Hillis co-founded Thinking Machines, which developed the concept of parallel computing: tackling big computational problems using many small computers instead of a single mainframe server. That technology helps Google handle the world's search queries. Hillis later spent five years as an Imagineer at Disney, where he dreamed up theme-park-related ideas, and he now runs a company called Applied Minds, which solves intractable R&D problems for corporate clients. The firm is helping G.M. improve automobile safety, Northrop Grumman find new ways to stabilize spacecraft, and Herman Miller design workspaces. In his free time, Hillis is building a mechanical clock that's designed to run for 10,000 years. —R.F.

FASHION
Marc Jacobs
Co-founder // Marc Jacobs International

EVOLUTIONARY FORCE By the time everyone catches up to his latest look, Marc Jacobs has often moved on. He has made a career of reinventing himself, both in his designs and in his evolving personal style, which the fashion world pays almost as much attention to.

• "I joined Parsons in 1983, and he graduated in 1984, so I knew him as a senior. He did a collection of knitwear that celebrated New York City, pieces with the skyline on them—phenomenal. The proposal for that sat in my office for years. It's in the Parsons archive."
  —Tim Gunn, chief creative ­officer of Liz Claiborne and former chairman, fashion department, Parsons School for Design
• "He is the electricity that gives international credibility and sizzle to New York Fashion Week. Without him, we would be totally screwed. Everyone wants to know what Marc is doing, wearing, thinking. Whose diamonds is he wearing in his tanned earlobes?"
  —Simon Doonan, creative ­director of Barneys New York

FILM
Steven Spielberg
Co-founder // Dreamworks SKG

CELLULOID HERO After a 30-year career in Hollywood making movies like Jaws, the Indiana Jones series, and Saving Private Ryan, ­Steven Spielberg seemed like a logical choice to be called in as artistic adviser for the Beijing Olympics this summer. But after increasing pressure from groups upset over China's business dealings with Sudan—where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed by a government-supported militia—Spielberg very publicly opted out of the role. His rebel move may provoke business groups to take similar action, and it frees him to focus on other causes, such as helping seriously ill children through his Starlight Starbright foundation. —George Quraishi