Garry Kasparov became the youngest world champion ever at 22 in 1985 and spent twenty years as the world's top-rated player. His legendary matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 made him a central figure in artificial intelligence and the evolution of the human-machine relationship. He retired from chess in 2005 to become a leader of the Russian pro-democracy movement against the rising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. He is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and has become a powerful voice for individual freedom worldwide. As a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, Kasparov specializes in interdisciplinary collaboration and, as he puts it, "how our technology can make us more human." He is a member of the executive board of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics.

Kasparov's latest book is Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, which details his legendary matches against Deep Blue and shares his optimistic insights into our human plus machine future. His 2015 book Winter Is Coming detailed the rise of Putin's Russia as well as Kasparov's persecution and self-exile, and it serves chilling warnings of reactionary forces gathering in the West.