Each day of the SXSW Interactive Festival, March 9–13, brings a special presentation from top thought leaders in the industry. Find the most up-to-date information on keynotes for 2012 below. Stay tuned to this website in the coming months for more announcements regarding other keynotes at the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

BARATUNDE THURSTON

Saturday, March 10 at 2:00pm

Politically-active, technology-loving comedian Baratunde Thurston will be the opening keynote speaker for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

Baratunde co-founded the black political blog, Jack & Jill Politics, serves as Director of Digital for The Onion and appears on cable news regularly to say smart things in funny ways. He is currently writing his first book, How To Be Black (Harper Collins, 2012).

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AMBER CASE

Sunday, March 11 at 2:00pm

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and user experience designer from Portland, Oregon. She has been featured in Forbes, WIRED, and many other publications, both in the United States and around the world. Her main focus is mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, and reducing the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding.

Case has spoken at TED on technology and humans and was featured in Fast Company 2010 as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies at Wieden+Kennedy and on major applications at Vertigo Software. She is @caseorganic on Twitter.

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RAY KURZWEIL conversation with LEV GROSSMAN

Monday, March 12 at 2:00pm

Legendary visionary Ray Kurzweil will join writer Lev Grossman from TIME Magazine for a mind-expanding conversation about our future on Monday, March 12.

Ray Kurzweil (left) has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray's website Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written four national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray's latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Lev Grossman (left), a senior writer for TIME, covers arts, media and technology and is also TIME's book critic. Additionally, he oversees TIME's "Inventions of the Year" package and the "Ideas that are Changing the World" issue. He joined TIME in 1997 and was named senior writer for TIME in 2008. Grossman has written several TIME cover stories, including the profile of Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity.

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JENNIFER PAHLKA

Tuesday, March 13 at 2:00pm

Challenging the tech community to change the world for the better is a big part of the core mission of SXSW Interactive. With this idea in mind, we are very excited to announce that Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, will be our keynote speaker for Tuesday, March 13.

Code for America works with talented web professionals and cities around the country to promote public service and reboot government. Before starting Code for America, Pahlka spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the Game Group, responsible for GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, CA with her daughter and five chickens.

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Past keynote speakers at the SXSW Interactive Festival have included Jonathan Abrams, John Battelle, Stewart Brand, Valerie Casey, Ana Marie Cox, Mark Cuban, Felicia Day, Al Franken, Henry Jenkins, Jaron Lanier, Brenda Laurel, Eli Pariser, Craig Newmark, Howard Rheingold, Frank Warren, Evan Williams, Will Wright and Mark Zuckerberg.

Photo of Baratunde Thurston (top) by Minday Tucker, photo of Amber Case (middle) by Kris Krug. Ray Kurzweil photo by Helene DeLillo - courtesy of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. Lev Grossman photo by Joseph Moran - courtesy of TIME Magazine.