Peter B. Kaufman

Business, television, & online media

Peter B. Kaufman (pbk@intelligenttv.com), a writer, teacher, and filmmaker, is the founder and executive producer of Intelligent Television and the Google-funded Intelligent Channel. He executive produces Intelligent Television’s media and directs the company’s research and strategic consulting work.

Mr. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning and is a member of the Knowledge Futures Group. He previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning; as co-chair, with the BFI’s Paul Gerhardt, of the U.K. government’s JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; as an expert consultant on access strategies for the Library of Congress Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound; and as co-chair, with WGBH’s Karen Cariani, of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He also has served as director of strategic initiatives for the digitization provider Innodata; president and publisher of TV Books, a publishing company he founded and sold to Lorne Michaels’s television and film company Broadway Video; founder and executive director of PUBWATCH, a nonprofit organization that supported the publishing and bookselling industries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the collapse of totalitarianism in Europe; and director of publications at the East-West Institute, a foreign policy think-tank in New York City. He has served as a consultant to numerous educational and cultural heritage institutions in the United States and abroad, including most recently Columbia University Press, the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision, the Library of America, and Wiki Education.

Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Mr. Kaufman writes and produces video about media, education, history, and society. His 2021 book, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, is out now from Seven Stories Press, and his current work, The Moving Image: A User’s Guide, will be published by the MIT Press in the fall of 2024. He has published work in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Publishers Weekly, Scholarly Publishing, Slavic Review, and the Times Literary Supplement and also in a 1986 volume, Spacebridges: Television and U.S.-Soviet Dialogue.

Jeff Ubois

Archiving and access solutions

Jeff Ubois (jeff@intelligenttv.com) is currently on leave as a Program Officer for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He has long served as a consultant to libraries, museums, archives, and foundations engaged in mass digitization. He is particularly focused on new approaches to personal digital archiving and working for a variety of U.S. and EU-based organizations engaged with moving image preservation, including Beeld en Geluid in the Netherlands.

Prior to these associations, Mr. Ubois was a consultant to Thirteen/WNET, the public broadcasting station in New York City, and a staff research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he investigated access to television archives. For the Internet Archive, he has worked on managing orphan works, maintaining archival integrity, and managing the collection and retention of digital library usage data. He has worked as a consultant to the Sunlight Foundation, OCLC, Cisco Systems, and the Smithsonian Institution, and has been published in First Monday, D-Lib, Release 1.0, ACM Interactions, Computerworld, and the Journal of Digital Information.

Mary Albon

Research and development

Mary Albon (albon@intelligenttv.com) is a research associate with Intelligent Television. Ms. Albon has over 20 years of experience in education, media, and management. Presently she is a consultant to Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc., serving as commissioning editor for B&N’s Library of Essential Reading and working on the development of new book series. Previously she served as manager of international field-based programs and corporate relations at the F. W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College; associate director of Pubwatch, a nonprofit organization supporting the publishing industries in Eastern & Central Europe and the former Soviet Union; program officer at the Foundation for a Civil Society, where she managed the Project on Justice in Times of Transition; and publications editor and program officer at the Institute for East-West Security Studies. Ms. Albon has designed and implemented a wide array of high-level international academic and policy programs and conferences focused on Eastern & Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central America, and Northern Ireland. She also has worked as a public relations consultant in Moscow. Ms. Albon is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and she is a fellow of the 21st Century Trust.

Jack Brighton

Jack Brighton

Online media and web development

Jack Brighton is a producer and instructor in multimedia storytelling at the University of Illinois College of Media, and a web developer and media archivist at Illinois Public Media. He presents workshops on Internet media, media preservation, and web development at academic and media industry conferences. He serves as co-chair of the AMIA Open Source Committee, and on the PBCore Resource Group established by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. From 2002 to 2007 he chaired the University of Illinois Campus Webmasters, and in 2003 he formed the University of Illinois Educational Media Group to foster collaboration on best practices in Internet media for higher education. He is also co-founder and steering team member of the University of Illinois Center for Multimedia Excellence, and the Preservation Working Group. Jack also serves on the Technical Committee of the Champaign-Urbana Big Broadband Project, known as UC2B.

Vanessa Roth

​Filmmaker/Social impact relations

An Academy Award, duPont-Columbia, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker, Ms. Roth has been writing, producing and directing pivotal social issue documentaries for more than a decade. Her work, which combines filmmaking with national social outreach campaigns, has received worldwide acclaim and distribution. Her films have been given primetime slots on PBS, HBO, Discovery, A&E and the Sundance Channel, and have been featured on Oprah, NPR, as the media centerpiece of the 2008 Bill and Melinda Gates Education Forum, and as part of the official Youth Inaugural events in DC in 2009. Some of her award-winning films include: Taken In: The Lives of Americas Foster Children, Close to Home, Aging Out, Schools in the 21st Century, The Third Monday in October, 9/11s Toxic Dust, Freeheld, No Tomorrow, and The Teacher Salary Project. Ms. Roth holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Columbia University.

Alex Kroll, Jr

Advertising, underwriting, corporate sponsorships

Alex Kroll, Jr. has served many of the world’s largest corporate clients in broadcast media advertising and underwriting campaigns for over 20 years as Senior Copywriter, Creative Director, Senior Writer, and Copywriter at Young & Rubicam, PriceWeber, Babcock-Rickert Advertising, the Leo Burnett Company, Ammirati & Puris, and, most recently, Siegel+Gale, the premier branding and strategic consultancy and part of the Omnicom Group. Mr. Kroll, who is also a novelist and producer, received his Russian degree from Princeton University in 1985. Mr. Kroll and Mr. Kaufman visited the Soviet Union together in 1979, accelerating the process that culminated in the end of the Cold War.

Richard Lorber

Richard Lorber

​Film

Richard Lorber is chairman and CEO of Kino Lorber Inc., Lorber Media Inc., and president and CEO of Lorber HT Digital. He started the film and distribution company Fox Lorber Associates, Inc., in his apartment in 1981. He built it into a worldwide media business with 40 employees and $20 million a year in revenues. Best known for its home video label, Fox Lorber distributed critically acclaimed foreign films, award-winning independent features, and classics. After selling the company to WinStar in 1996, Mr. Lorber became co-chairman of WinStar TV and Video.

Mr. Lorber has spent over 20 years in education and publishing as an art critic, editor, and teacher. He has worked in education for the Museum of Modern Art, served on advisory panels for the New York State Council on the Arts, edited the quarterly journal Dance Scope, written regularly for Artforum and other periodicals, and served as Assistant Professor on the graduate faculty of New York University and on the faculty of the New School. He has earned bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.