AUCA Commencement Ceremony speaker

February 25, 2014

Benjamin W. Slivka to Speak at 2014 AUCA Commencement Ceremony

Benjamin W. Slivka, a technologist, investor, and philanthropist with a passion for learning, will be the keynote speaker at the AUCA commencement ceremony to be held on May 31, 2014.

Mr. Slivka, who lives near Seattle, Washington (US), spent 14 years at Microsoft along with brief stints at Amazon.com and IBM. At Microsoft he worked on OS/2, MS-DOS 6, and Windows 95, and he started and led the Internet Explorer team through the release of IE 3.0 in 1996.  He also installed the first production LAN, proposed the FAT32 file system, led the team that wrote the Win32 API specification, created CAB files, and in his 1995 memo “The Web is the Next Platform”, accurately predicted that the future of software development was the Web, not Windows.

After leaving Amazon.com in 2000, Mr. Slivka shifted his focus to “angel” investing and education reform.  He co-founded DreamBox Learning in 2006 to build a new kind of learning software, and he remains an investor after selling the company to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in 2010. 

Mr. Slivka and his wife Lisa created the Wissner-Slivka Foundation in 1997, primarily focused on supporting education.  In 1998, Mr. Slivka joined the Board of Trustees of Northwestern University, where he also spends time advising student entrepreneurs.  He earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Science and a BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern in the early 1980s.

“I am extremely happy that Ben has accepted the invitation of our faculty to receive an honorary professorship from AUCA and address our students at commencement,” said Andrew Wachtel, President of AUCA.  “Ben represents precisely what we hope to see in our graduates.  He was able to use his education not merely to better himself, but to create products used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.  And having done that extremely successfully, he has chosen to give back to improve the communities in which he lives.  In addition, he is an engaging speaker and unorthodox thinker, who will challenge our students to imagine and pursue their own visions of a future in our rapidly changing world.”

“I am honored and delighted to be given this chance to share my thoughts with AUCA students and the broader AUCA community,” said Mr. Slivka.  “Though I have traveled extensively – to Dubai, France, Germany, India, Japan, Qatar, and Switzerland in just the past four years – this is my first trip to Central Asia.  I look forward to learning more about the history, people, and culture of Kyrgyzstan, with the aim of making my remarks most relevant and useful.”

AUCA will graduate more than 200 students at its 18th commencement ceremony.  All of them will receive diplomas accredited by the Kyrgyz Ministry of Education, and 75% will also receive an American diploma accredited by Bard College (NY).

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