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The following are distinguished speakers and
emcees at AC2005. They are all doing important work understanding and
guiding accelerating planetary change. Talk titles and abstracts are below.
Click on speaker name for offsite speaker biography, where available.
Click Biographies
and Read Aheads for all speaker bios and related links, or
click Bio and Read Ahead under each speaker for their own bio and links.
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Keynote
Daniel G. Amen, MD
Medical Director and CEO, Amen
Clinics, Inc.; Author, Change
Your Brain, Change Your Life; Monthly columnist for Men's
Health Magazine
SPECT and the Future of Mental Health
Abstract: According to National Institutes of Mental Health
director Thomas Insel, brain imaging is the next major advance in
clinical psychiatry. Dr. Daniel Amen has been using brain imaging
in clinical practice for the past 14 years. His clinics now have
the world’s largest database of brain scans related to behavior.
The work has given him many insights on better ways to improve patient
care and prevent illnesses that are so expensive to our society.
In this lecture, Dr. Amen will share the lessons he has learned
from imaging, the roadblocks to further progress, and ways to use
this technology to benefit society in general.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Janna Anderson
Assistant Professor, Elon
University's School of Communications; Director,
"Imagining the Internet" Predictions Database; Author
of the upcoming, Imagining
the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
Imagining the Internet
Abstract: In the "awe" stage of the late
1980s and early 1990s, internet stakeholders and skeptics predicted
the new tool would bring the death of privacy, an end to the current
concept of "property," a paperless society, 500 channels
of television, world peace, and the extinction of the human race
after a takeover engineered by intelligent machines. Pervasive networks
are changing our lives, and smart people are motivated to act by
the ideal that better social choices can be made if the coming impact
of the intersecting of
humankind's knowledge is pre-assessed as accurately as possible.
The more intelligent preliminary analysis we elicit, the better
our chances of good outcomes. "Imagining the Internet"
is an initiative led by Elon University and the Pew Internet &
American Life Project to gather prescient statements into a collective
repository for use by everyone concerned about the future. From
the public internet's earliest days, select theorists, philosophers
and scientists saw it as merely an early manifestation of what is
to become a collective consciousness, a neobiological civilization
with a global mind or godmind. Even today, those concepts go far
beyond what most world citizens would acknowledge as the future
of artificial intelligence; most people don't understand the potential
ahead, necessitating better exposure of informed predictions on
as many platforms as possible.
Bio
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Emcee
Sonia Arrison
Director of Technology Studies, Pacific
Research Institute (PRI)
Bio
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Change Leader
Ruzena Bajcsy
Director, CITRIS (Center
for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society);
Former Assistant Director, National Science Foundation, CISE;
Former Director, GRASP,
U Penn
What Should Be the Ultimate Goal of Our Education?
Abstract: The goal of education is to reach every
child/person at their level of cognitive capabilities. This was
the basic idea behind the tutoring system at Cambridge and Oxford
universities. Today Information technology (IT) promises to facilitate
the Individualization of Teaching and Learning. There is no
one way to teach; teaching and learning involves memorization, abstraction,
problems solving, exploration and discovery. All these components
must be adjusted to the individual levels of the student.
We will discuss what IT can do to help in this endavour.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Peter Barrett
CTO and GM of Engineering, Microsoft
TV
IPTV’s Promise and Creation of the Networked Digital
Home
Abstract: Mr. Barrett will discuss the continuing
evolution of IPTV and its impact on content developers and distributors
in providing consumer entertainment and information services in
the networked digital home. He will discuss IPTV’s evolution
as it helps transform the television set into a central link of
the next-generation networked home; how broadband ubiquity is impacting
connected consumer services; and describe the technologies underlying
the digital lifestyle concept that provides consumers with entertainment
and information at home, at the office, and on the go. Attendees
will learn:
• IPTV – what’s here, what’s now
• IPTV’s impact on music, TV, movies, games, education,
productivity, and communication.
• From chips to content – partnering to build the networked
home ecosystem
• System-on-a-chip (SOC) developments and likely trends
• IPTV’s impact on acquisition of TV channels; pay-per-view
access; and instant channel changing.
• IP video content development and the current state of digital
rights management issues
• The Internet as a key facilitator of distributed entertainment,
notably in the delivery of TV content in the networked home.
• Accommodating the multi-TV home reality; meeting the multi-headed
STB
Bio
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Foresight
Tutorial
Peter
Bishop
Chair and Professor, MS
in Studies of the Future program, U of Houston
Tutorial Title: Futuring 101: Successful Models In Foresight
Consulting
Abstract: The faster change goes, the more acutely
we need to develop foresight in our global, institutional, and personal
affairs. In this intimate, daylong tutorial you'll get an overview
from three different foresight leaders of the practices they use
to prepare their clients for our complex future, as well as learn
how to add greater foresight proficiency to your own organization
and personal life. If you are interested in consulting in this growing
field, either as a professional or informally within your organization,
you don't want to miss this chance for small group interaction and
extensive Q&A with some highly successful change leaders.
Developing strategic foresight goes beyond the conventional time
horizon of strategic planning, which is typically three to five
years, depending on industry. There are many methods available,
and successful and questionable practices abound. Come learn the
basics and best-class examples of foresight development, forecasting,
and foresight consulting from some highly successful practicing
experts, and some of the history and future of this fascinating
field from the founder of the leading futures studies graduate program
in the United States. [More]
Bio
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Change
Leader
T. Colin Campbell
Professor Emeritus, Division
of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University; Author, The
China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted...
Changing the World One Bite at A Time
Abstract: Nutrition is a concept that focuses on the physiological
activities of individual food chemicals or nutrients that function
through specific reactions to effect change. Such focus specifies
the quantities of nutrients to be consumed, the amounts of nutrients
present in foods and food products (as in food labels), the chemical
structures of nutrients and related analogues, the quantities of
nutrients causing disease outcomes and other adverse effects, and
the biochemical reactions that explain functionality, among others.
This scientific focus has multiple implications. In scientific research,
experimental studies are designed and interpreted to identify specific
nutrients and their activities (as in the conduct of randomized
clinical trials of the effects of individual nutrients and as in
the statistical adjustment for confounding in human observational
studies). In commerce, a multi-billion dollar nutrient supplement
industry encourages the consumption of specific nutrients to gain
health and prevent disease, foods are fortified with specific nutrients,
new drugs are sought that affect specific nutrient modified reactions,
and the 'nutritional' value of food is judged by its content of
specific nutrients. Many observers now consider nutrients to be
'nutriceuticals' and disease prevention by dietary and nutritional
means to be 'chemoprevention'. This eviscerates nutrition as a natural
biological science and turns it into something akin to a pharmaceutical
science and a marketplace technology.
Such a view may make marketplace sense for the few but it does not
make health sense for the many. Moreover, it seriously short-changes
an understanding of nutrition and its impressive ability to maintain
health and prevent disease. This is a serious problem that assigns
nutrition a very low priority among biomedical disciplines when
it should have the highest. The future health of individuals, their
societies, their environmental surroundings and their planet will
not long survive unless this highly reductionist view of nutrition
is changed.
Bio
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Change Leader
Jamais Cascio
Senior Contributing Editor, WorldChanging;
Writer and foresight consultant
Rise of the Participatory Panopticon
Abstract: The value of mobile phones with cameras
as a way of capturing events in one's life—as demonstrated
in London in early July of this year—will be further enhanced
as these devices become more powerful, with better cameras, more
capabilities and higher-bandwidth connections.
Work now underway at a variety of research groups will allow close
to 24/7 coverage of one's life, with the mobile phone transforming
into a "personal memory assistant." This will be driven
initially by personal desires, but will come to play an increasingly
important role in collaborative "sousveillance" for security,
environmental monitoring, and keeping watch on the watchmen. But
these capabilities will not be without a cost -- from a staggering
lack of privacy to an inescapable collision between what we can
remember and what is controlled by intellectual property regimes.
Bio
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Foresight
Tutorial
Tom Conger
Consulting Futurist and Founder, Social
Technologies
Tutorial Title: Futuring 101: Successful Models In Foresight
Consulting
Abstract: See tutorial
page.
Bio
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Change Leader
Esther
Dyson
Editor, Release 1.0
and Editor at Large, CNET Networks
The Accountable Net
Abstract: Some people think "the government"
(or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for
that matter) should be regulating the behavior of all the entities
on the Net. I don't believe government (or ICANN) is up to that
task, especially not on the worldwide Net. But I do believe that
the entities on the Net can regulate one another, if systems are
set up properly and if individuals have the information they need
to choose the peer-to-peer regulatory system they prefer. Call the
whole set-up "the accountable Net."
Real reputation-based and quality-controlled competition among
top-level domains (TLDs) would not be a solution to everything,
but it would be one more important step towards cleaning up the
Net. Either those who use domain names need to be accountable to
those they interact with, or those who register the domain names
need to be accountable for them, in a way visible to individuals
and the public. This accountability needs to be specific and granular,
so that one can separate the good from the bad. Otherwise, the public
will hold the Net as a whole accountable for the actions of its
malefactors.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Mark Finnern
Collaboration Manager, SAP
Developer Network; Blogger,
O'Reilly Network; Board Member, ASF;
Founder and Host, Bay Area
Future Salon; Co-Producer, Accelerating Change Conferences
Introduction to Intelligence Amplification
Abstract: Growing up I always wished that I had
a grandfather around that I could ask anything and everything. Now
we have Google and Wikipedia. It takes intelligence to create a
software virus, even more a biological virus. But that's not the
kind of intelligence we want to amplify. The better question is
how to amplify wisdom and maybe we should also shoot for Artificial
Wisdom instead of AI.
Bio
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Change Leader
David Fogel
CEO, Natural
Selection, Inc.; Author, Blondie
24: Playing at the Edge of AI; Founding Editor-in-Chief,
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary
Computing
Accelerating Problem Solving by Combining Machine Learning
and Human Learning
Abstract: Intelligence may be viewed as the ability
to adapt behavior to meet goals in
a range of environments, yet artificial intelligence has focused
traditionally on replicating human behaviors in software. This approach
has achieved some very visible successes, including for example,
Deep Blue, the chess machine that defeated Garry Kasparov in May,
1997. The approach is limited, however, to address problems for
which people already have the answers.
In contrast, computational intelligence methods, such as evolutionary
computing, can afford a computer with the ability to learn how to
solve complex problems without relying on human expertise. A synergistic
effect can be obtained by combining simulated evolutionary learning
and human learning. Examples will be given in the areas of games,
including checkers and chess, and other real-world applications
in industry, medicine, and defense. Speculation on the future capabilities
of these combined learning mechanisms will be offered.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Dileep George
Founder & Principal Architect, Numenta
Understanding the Neocortex to Accelerate Our Understanding
of Intelligence
Abstract: We are at a juncture where great progress
has been made in the understanding of the workings of the human
neocortex. This gives us a unique opportunity to convert this knowledge
into a technology that will solve important problems in computer
vision, artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.
In this talk, based on joint work with Jeff Hawkins, I will describe
the state of our understanding of neocortical function and the role
Numenta is playing in the development of a new technology modeled
after the neocortex.
Bio
and Read Ahead
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Change Leader
and Foresight
Tutorial
George Gilder
Editor in Chief, Gilder
Technology Report; Author, The
Silicon Eye; Senior Fellow, Discovery
Institute
Tutorial Title: Futuring 101: Successful Models In Foresight
Consulting
Abstract: See tutorial
page.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Marcos Guillen
Founder and CEO, Artificial Development,
developers of CCortex neural computing platform
Cortical Emulators Rapidly Coming to Market
Abstract: Artificial Development's CCortex (http://www.ad.com/tech.html),
a realistic virtual brain simulation presently running on a supercomputer,
will soon become a commercial product, targeting medical and cognitive
research, security & surveillance, and autonomous systems. CCortex
Developer Box, a custom rack-mounted system to be available during
the first quarter of 2006, includes a 64 bit Spiking Neural Network
Engine. Each box can represent up to 250 Million Neurons, with 11,000
synapses each. Alternatively, it can update a data matrix of 1.5
Billion synapses, 10 times per second, for real-time applications.
CCortex Development Boxes can also be clustered together, increasing
both the speed and the neuron count. A detailed virtual simulation
of most of the human brain, excluding the cerebellum, will be available
as a single rack system during the second quarter of 2006.
The CCortex project began in 2003, and is the world’s first
virtual brain, a 20-billion neuron simulation of the Human Cortex
running on a supercomputer. The main cluster has been running non-stop
since September 2003, and has already undergone 7 major revisions.
The data that drives CCortex is a unique synthesis of multiple AD
research projects, including the Cortical Database, which uses real
neurological data from the neuroscience literature. Each neuron
is assigned hundreds of variable parameters, and is connected to
thousands of others to mimic the full extent of connectivity between
real neurons in the brain. A team of 40 researchers and programmers,
headed in India by Dr. Adity Gudi, have been updating the Cortical
DB around the clock for 14 months, extracting, analyzing, and modelling
the parameter sets used in the database.
While similar projects were recently announced, CCortex has been
quietly running for two years. Three different teams of neuroscientists,
engineers and programmers have been working in the US, EU and India
to improve the algorithms governing CCortex. The wealth of intellectual
property harvested during this two-year head start has positioned
Artificial Development as the first company capable of delivering
the first generation of biologically-inspired cognitive system.
Bio
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Special Host
of "Q&A with Ray"
Moira Gunn
President and CEO, The
Tech Nation Group; Host, Tech
Nation and BioTech Nation
Bio
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Change
Leader
Bruno Haid
Head of Strategy, System
One, merging social software, semantic web, and AI
Complementing Worlds: Social Software, Protocols & Algorithms
Abstract: We are currently witnessing the maturing
of the web from a technical distribution and communication channel
to a new, formally independent medium. Social Software enables individuals
to articulate, organize and communicate themselves in a digitally
addressable way, and with the rise of reasonable Semantic Web concepts
this is happening in a language shared by social as well as technical
systems. As more and more walls are being torn down between humans
and machines, we must ask what is the role of protocols and algorithms
in the emerging field of synergetic intelligence.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Marti Hearst
Professor, School of Information
Management and Systems, UC Berkeley; Science Advisory Board
for Search, Yahoo!
Challenges of Conversation
Abstract: Getting to a more natural, conversational
user interface for information retrieval will require solving a
number of difficult problems in the years ahead. There are clear
inadequacies to our current search engines, and we'll consider several
of them, in particular the lack of query assists. Better question
answering would be an important step towards a more conversational
experience.
As Jean Véronis notes, it would be nice if you didn't have
to wade through pages of people complaining about their tedious
day when the “boring” you are looking for concerns drilling
techniques. There are some signs of progress in automatic language
processing, and social search is an important and powerful new source
of meta data. But the era of truly conversational machines may take
longer to arrive than we think.
Bio
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Change
Leader
(Live via Video)
Robert Hecht-Nielsen
Computational Neurobiologist, Institute
for Neural Computation; Professor in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, UC-San Diego
The Fundamental Mechanism of Cognition
Abstract: This talk describes the recently announced
comprehensive confabulation theory of vertebrate cognition, including:
the fundamental mathematical principles involved, an illustrative
example of a computer implementation of these principles, and an
overview of how the theory proposes cognition is implemented by
human cerebral cortex. Cognition is starkly alien in comparison
with existing neuroscience, computer science, and AI concepts. For
example, cognitive functions (seeing, hearing, speaking, planning,
origination and control of movement and thought processes, etc.)
lack any algorithm. Instead, all cognitive functions are implemented
as learned spatiotemporal ensembles of simple, mutually interacting,
optimizations. The interactions take place via knowledge links (of
which humans have billions) established in response to meaningful
pairwise co-occurrences; essentially as postulated by Donald Hebb
in 1949.
The optimization procedure used in cognition, confabulation, is
implemented by a winner-take-all competition within a cortical module
(neuronal attractor network). Each cortical module, of which humans
have thousands, effectively develops, and permanently stores, a
long list of symbols, and implements confabulation when commanded
by its single analog control input. Movement and thought processes
(actions, sequences of deliberate, precisely coordinated, analog,
muscle and/or cortical module contractions) are themselves stored
using knowledge links. Whenever any confabulation yields a decisive
conclusion, an associated action (behavior) is triggered. Thus,
the theory also offers an explanation for the almost continual emergence
of behaviors during wakefulness.
Bio
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Change Leader
Joichi
Ito
Blogger; CEO and Founder,
Neoteny Co., Ltd.;
VP International and Mobility, Technorati;
Chairman, Six Apart Japan
The Rise and Future of Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy
Abstract: In our conversation we'll explore the
rise of "amateur" content, open source, fan subs, and
remix culture, and watch some video clips supporting these increasingly
important ideas. I'll describe how I think the "sharing economy"
might work out, and our discussion can go down the blogging/citizen
journalist road, the music/movie distribution road, the open source
road, or all three depending on which way we want to take it.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Neil
Jacobstein
President and CEO, Teknowledge
Corporation, Chairman of AAAI’s
17th Innovative
Applications of AI Conference, July 2005
The Evolution of AI Applications
Abstract: Since the early 1980’s the systematic
codification of knowledge in computer languages has enabled a wide
range of useful applications in industry and government. These applications
may include performing complex tasks such as planning, monitoring,
design, risk assessment, diagnosis, training, process control, classification,
and analysis. Applications have been developed in fields as diverse
as biotechnology, space flight, manufacturing, security, paleontology,
construction, energy, music, military, intelligence, banking, telecommunications,
news media, management, law, emergency services, agriculture, and
treaty verification. None of these systems exhibited general intelligence,
but each was an incremental contribution to our ability to harness
the power of knowledge. These systems also had structural limitations,
both technical and cultural.
Fortunately, a confluence of factors, including advances in neurosciences,
the advent of large scale ontologies and the semantic web, the emerging
development of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing, and the
exponential increases in computing hardware speed and memory, will
eventually enable us to overcome many of the technical barriers
to advances in AI. However, the cultural and organizational problems
involved in the coevolution of machines and humans will still need
to be addressed systematically.
Please see http://jurvetson.blogspot.com
for background information.
Bio
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Change Leader
Shun-jie
Ji, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Graduate
Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University; Managing Editor,
Journal of Futures
Studies; CEO, Institute
for National Development, Taiwan
Sir, Why Futures Studies?
Abstract: I will address the most frequently asked
student question at Tamkang University: why do I need courses in
Futures Studies to receive my degree? Future-oriented education
has a long history at Tamkang. Our founder, Dr. Clement C.P. Chang,
introduced it here in 1968. It is one of the three pillars of our
educational policy: globalization, information-oriented education
and future-oriented education. All 27,000 Tamkang undergraduates
are required to take courses to better think about personal, organizational,
and global futures. Tamkang offers core futures courses in five
major areas: society, technology, economy, environment, and politics.
Traditional universities have required courses in history and current
affairs, but litle or nothing on the future, which is puzzling in
our modern age. In a recent national review, Tamkang was rated
Taiwan's best private university. Perhaps this is some reflection
on our educational policy. As our founder has said, in a rapidly
globalizing and technological world, we believe universities should
develop and offer cutting-edge core courses in "recognizing,
adjusting to, and creating the future." I will share my journey
as first a Futures Studies student and now instructor, coming from
a background in political science. I grew up in this field along
with all of my students at Tamkang.
Bio and
Read Ahead |
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Change
Leader
Steve Jurvetson
Managing Director, Draper
Fisher Jurvetson
Open Genes, Memes and Dreams
Abstract: What is the hidden value of open collaborative
exchange and network effects in biotech, nanotech, innovation, venture
capital, and co-evolutionary dynamics in general? How do we recognize,
collateralize, and amplify that value?
I will briefly discuss examples from the VC business, Internet entrepreneurship
and synthetic genomics (reengineered life forms). The abstractions
and conclusions are a work in process, and so I hope a lively discussion
will ensue.
Background: Empowered by the digitization of the information systems
of biology, we have entered an innovation Renaissance – a
period of exponential growth in learning, where the power of biotech,
infotech and nanotech compounds the advances in each formerly discrete
domain. Biology is often the muse. Perhaps biology will drive the
future of intelligence and information technology – not literally,
but figuratively and metaphorically and primarily through powerful
abstractions.
Based on people’s interests, the discussion topics may include:
IA vs. AI: “augment early and often” or “find
solace in symbolic immortality”, genetic free speech and the
First Amendment, path dependence in evolved AI, supra-human emergence
in open collaborative systems, the dichotomy of design vs. evolutionary
search, or perhaps quantum computational equivalence.
Please see http://jurvetson.blogspot.com
for background information.
Bio
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Change Leader
Ronald Kaplan
Manager of Research in Natural
Language Theory and Technology, PARC;
Principle of the Center
for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University
Converging on Conversation
Abstract: Computer interfaces are much better
now than they were ten years ago. But they still aren't very good.
Ordinary people count themselves lucky when a machine does what
they want or a search engine actually provides useful information
(cf. Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button). It isn't that
the machine is incapable or unwilling to follow instructions or
access relevant documents, the problem, after all these years, is
a failure of communication. We can't be very subtle if all we can
do is poke at a screen with a graphical user interface, walk down
a menu tree of preset choices, or type in a few query terms.
What we need is the full expressive power of ordinary language
to tell a machine what we want—and then have the machine understand
and obey, perhaps asking for reasonable clarification from time
to time. Natural conversation has always seemed a distant goal,
but there has been increasing investment and rapid progress on all
the technologies that must converge to make it possible. The Conversational
User Interface is not here yet—but it may not be that far
away.
Bio
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Investment
Tutorial
Mike Korns
Intelligent Agent Investing Pioneer; Chairman, Korns
Associates
Tutorial Title: Making the Future Work for You: A Successful
Investor Teaches You How to Safely and Profitably Manage Your Own
Account
Abstract: This tutorial is for anyone who wants
to get significantly better at managing all or part of their own
investments. Whether you are a low or high net worth individual,
a beginning or experienced investor, you will learn skills to better
make and manage your own investments.
Mike Korns, Founder and President of Korns Associates, and CEO,
InvestByAgent, wants you to know the strategies he has learned over
the years as a self-made investor with no prior financial education
or qualification. The disciplined application of basic strategies
anyone can learn has brought him wealth as a professional investor
for more than a decade. Mike presently makes multi-million dollar
annual returns, and regularly beats the stock market averages, including
during these last few turbulent years. For many, investing is a
complex and habitually difficult topic. This is a rare opportunity
to gain experience on these issues directly from a successful multimillionaire
investor in a relaxed tutorial environment.
If you are comfortable leaving all your investing to sales agents,
large institutions, and professionals, this isn't the course for
you. But if you would like to learn the inexpensive, uncomplicated
strategies of successful self-made investors, this is a unique opportunity
to learn how to safely grow your savings capital to where it will
greatly exceed your annual income from all other activities.
Basic investment strategies explained include buying and selling
equities, fixed income, safe option hedges appropriate for an IRA,
and risk management to help you navigate occasional market crashes.
We'll visit online resources from The Motley Fool, Value Line, and
other sources, and you'll get a sense of what works and what doesn't
for the busy professional with no prior financial education. Mike
will also outline a few advanced strategies in agent-based trading,
including genetic algorithms, that can be used by those with a technical
bent to gain superior market returns.
Bio
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Keynote
Ray Kurzweil
CEO, Kurzweil
Technologies; Author, The
Age of Spiritual Machines; Award-Winning
Inventor
When Humans Transcend Biology
Abstract: Early in the twenty-first
century, intelligent software will underlie everything of value.
The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first
century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate.
Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example,
DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and
human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster
pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth
every year. The well-known Moore’s Law is only one example
of many of this inherent acceleration. The size of the key features
of technology is also shrinking, at a rate of about 4 per linear
dimension per decade. Three-dimensional molecular computing will
provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well
before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained
in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process
well under way.
We are rapidly learning the software programs called genes that
underlie biology. We are understanding disease and aging processes
as information processes, and are gaining the tools to reprogram
them. RNA interference, for example, allows us to turn selected
genes off, and new forms of gene therapy are enabling us to effectively
add new genes. Within one to two decades, we will be in a position
to stop and reverse the progression of disease and aging resulting
in dramatic gains in health and longevity.
The fraction of value of products and services comprised by software
and related forms of information is rapidly asymptoting to 100 percent.
The deflation rate for information technologies, both hardware and
software, is about 50 percent per year, providing a powerful deflationary
force in the economy. Despite this, the information technology industry
grows around 18 percent per year, now comprises 8 percent of the
GDP, and is deeply influential on the rest. Within a couple of decades,
the bulk of the economy will be dominated by information and software.
Once nonbiological intelligence matches the range and subtlety of
human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it because of
the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as
well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.
Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in the environment,
our bodies and our brains, providing vastly extended longevity,
full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses,
experience "beaming," and enhanced human intelligence.
The implication will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating
species and the evolutionary process it spawned.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Sr. Denise Lawrence
Advisor of Academic Affairs, Certificate
Program in Education in Values and Spirituality, Brahma
Kumaris World Spiritual Organization
The Role of Meditation in Intelligent Learning
Abstract: Meditation, in particular Raja Yoga
Meditation, alters the quality and process of thought. Thought processes
are influenced by prevailing ideas thus limiting an individual’s
ability to perform creative thinking and moral reasoning. Intelligent
learning needs to come out of the box.
Conventional learning is based on the conventional scientific method
and relies upon external acquired data. This limits intelligence
to input through the five senses and disregards the entire world
of intuition, association, memory, inspiration, subjective analysis
and many other facets of consciousness.
Meditation unlocks this hidden treasure store. Meditation also
shows you how to go into deep silence and tap the well-spring of
original thought. Meditation enables you to focus and demands that
your thinking is disciplined, coherent and contiguous. Whether you
are an information technology professional, a virtuoso musician,
a successful entrepreneur, your personal and professional life are
enhanced and brought into healthy balance through regular meditation
practice.
Bio
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Change
Leader
Alex
Lightman
CEO,
IPv6 Summit, Inc., an Innofone.com
Company, and Author, Brave
New Unwired World
Globalization
to the Edge
Abstract:
As
the world flattens and our horizons widen, new challenges have opened
up, even as many of yesterday's innovations are becoming commodities.
China and India are rising fast, and there are strategic dangers
to be avoided. Moderate forces in Islam must prevail, and we have
the ability to play a valuable role in that process. Our proliferating
global networks and emerging Brave
New Unwired World are creating unprecedented opportunities
for individual empowerment. We are building an Equitocracy by implication
if not yet by name, but we are still a long way from where we can
be. One way to accelerate positive change is to promote better standards
for future-critical platforms, a role we are playing with IPv6 on
a global level. Practicing good leadership and taking personal responsibility
for change are more important today than ever before.
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Change
Leader
Patrick Lincoln
Director, Computer Science
Laboratory, SRI International
Prospects for Computing at the Right Level of Abstraction
Abstract: Along with the increasing value of the
IT portion of products, services, and the entire economy has come
increasing reliance on automated computing systems, and decreasing
visibility by users and designers into the critical properties of
these systems. Thus it is beneficial to provide designers and users
tools and methods enabling them to understand and improve the trustworthiness
of complex digital systems. Such tools are much more useful if the
level of abstraction of human interaction and computational analysis
are raised as far as possible.
We should enable rapid analysis and understanding of the critical
properties of complex systems, even when the complex systems under
study involve tight interactions with human components. We should
do this before we strongly align our interests with automated systems
(betting our retirement portfolio on a network of machines running
fragile operating systems, betting our life on fly-by-wire aircraft,
betting our national defense on networked systems). Recent rapid
advances in automated reasoning make this plausible, though much
more effort is required.
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Change
Leader
Julian Lombardi
(with David A. Smith)
Principal Architect, Croquet
Project; Manager, Division
of Information Technology, U Wisconsin-Madison; Software designer
and former biology professor
The Social Dimension of Croquet
Abstract: Croquet is a distributed, media rich,
peer-to-peer environment that brings a powerful realtime interactive
social dimension to the Internet. Every object and application is
inherently collaborative from the ground up; there is no longer
a seperate "collaborative environment" divorced from a
single-user application space, rather, every aspect of Croquet can
be part of a multi-user shared experience. In removing the barriers
between applications and collaboration, Croquet treats human relationships
as a first class citizen. It's no longer just a network of documents
and information, it's a network of people.
Croquet is totally open, totally free, works bit identical across
most major platforms, and is easily ported to new systems. It is
a combination of rich media and simulation capabilities and network
architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing
among its users. Its 3D interface provides a rich social dimension
that provides them with a powerful context for collaboration within
which to work and play together. The rendering architecture is built
on top of OpenGL.
Croquet's treatment of distributed computation assumes a truly large
scale distributed computing platform, consisting of heterogeneous
computing devices distributed throughout a planet-scale communications
network. Applications span machines and involve teams of users,
enabling broad band, media rich, persistent conference spaces. In
contrast with the more traditional architectures we grew up with,
Croquet incorporates replication of computation (both objects and
activity), and the idea of active shared subspaces in its basic
interpreter model. More traditional distributed systems replicate
data, but try very hard not to replicate computation. But, it is
often easier and more efficient to send the computation to the data,
rather than the other way round. Consequently, Croquet is defined
so that replication of computations is just as easy as replication
of data.
Bio
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Keynote
Thomas Malone
Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT
Sloan School of Management; Founder and Director of the MIT
Center for Coordination Sciences; Author, The
Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization,
Your Management Style, and Your Life
The Future of Work
Abstract: This talk will suggest that we are in
the early stages of a profound increase in human freedom in business
that may, in the long run, be as important a change for businesses
as the change to democracies was for governments. For the first
time in human history, information technology now makes it possible
to have both the economic efficiencies of large organizations and
the human benefits of small ones: freedom, motivation, creativity,
and flexibility. To take advantage of these possibilities we need
to invent new—more decentralized—ways of organizing
work (such as loose hierarchies, democracies, and markets), and
we need to think about how these new organizations can be designed
to help us get more of whatever we really value as humans.
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Change
Leader
Harold Morowitz
Biophysicist; Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural
Philosophy, George Mason University; Author, The
Emergence of Everything
Living Cells and the Smallest Self Replicating Robots, What
Nanoscience and Biology Can Do For Each Other
Abstract: Self replicating robots and living cells
both take up components from the environment and assemble two identical
units starting with one unit. As nanborobots become progressively
smaller the building blocks and energy sources also decrease in
size. An experimental generalization of autotrophic life is that
the inputs are molecules of less than 200 daltons. A challenge to
nanotechnology is to reach that limit.
If achieved the nanochemistry used will either map onto biochemistry
or not. If not, contemporary earth based biochemistry is not a unique
solution and the question "What Is Life?" has been generalized.
This is of extreme importance to astrobiology. If no alternative
chemistries can be devised, the result argues for the uniqueness
of biochemistry. Other biological generalizations such as survival
at zero Kelvin may be used to mutually understand life and self
replicating nanobots.
Bio
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Change Leader
Peter Norvig
Director of Search Quality, Google;
Author, Artificial Intelligence:
A Modern Approach (the wold's leading textbook in AI)
AI in the Middle Between Authors and Learners
Abstract: So far we know of exactly one system
in which trillions of facts are transmitted to billions of learners:
the system of publishing the written word. No other system comes
within a factor of a million of this performance benchmark. This
is despite the fact that the written word is notoriously imprecise
and ambiguous.
In the early days of AI, most work was on creating a new system
of transmission -- a new representation language, and/or a new axiomization
of a domain. Well-structured data was manipulated by sound means.
One near future for AI is "in the middle" between author
and reader. It will remain expensive to create knowledge in any
formal language but AI can leverage the work of millions of authors
by understanding, classifying, prioritizing, translating, summarizing
and presenting the written word in an intelligent just-in-time basis
to billions of potential readers.
Bio
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Change Leader
Beth Noveck
Associate Professor of Law Director, New York Law School
Institute for Information
Law and Policy; Director, Democracy
Design Workshop; Founder, conferences
Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence for our Intellectual
Property System
Abstract: The patent system is broken. The United
States Patent Office, which was intended to foster innovation and
the promotion of progress in the useful arts, instead, creates uncertainty
and monopoly. Underpaid and overwhelmed examiners routinely approve
petitions without review. They struggle under the burden of 350,000
patent applications per year. As a result, multiple patents have
been given for the same invention or patents awarded for inventions
discovered previously. But what if we could also make it easier
to ensure that only the most worthwhile inventions got twenty years
of monopoly rights? What if we could offer a way to protect the
inventor’s investment while still safeguarding the marketplace
of ideas from bad inventions? What if we could make informed decisions
about scientifically complex problems before the fact? What if we
could harness collective intelligence to replace bureaucracy?
This modest proposal harnesses social reputation and collaborative
filtering technology to create a peer review system of scientific
experts ruling on innovation. By using social software, we can apply
the “wisdom of the crowd” – or, more accurately
the wisdom of the experts – to complex social and scientific
problems and bring more expertise to bear. This has far reaching
implications beyond the patent process. It implies a fundamental
rethinking of our assumptions about governance.
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Change
Leader
Bruno
Olshausen
Director, Redwood Center
for Theoretical Neuroscience (formerly, Redwood Neuroscience
Institute)
Neuroscience and Future Prospects for Intelligent Systems
Abstract: Despite much effort in the engineering
and mathematics community over the past 40 years, there has been
little progress emulating even the most elementary aspects of intelligence
or perceptual capabilities found in the animal kingdom. The lack
of progress here is especially striking considering the fact that
the past two decades alone have seen a 1000-fold increase in computer
power (in terms of computer speed and memory capacity), while the
actual intelligence of computers has improved only moderately by
comparison.
If we wish to make progress in building truly intelligent systems,
it will require more than technological tinkering. It will require
that we turn our efforts toward understanding how intelligence arises
from the only system known to possess it: the brain. Neuroscience
has produced vast amounts of data about the structure and function
of neurons, and we now know bits and pieces about how neurons interact
and how they represent various forms of sensory information in their
activity patterns. What is missing however is a theoretical framework
for linking these details to the overall, macroscopic function of
the system - i.e., intelligence. Theoretical neuroscience seeks
to bridge this gap by constructing mathematical and computational
models of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms involved in
perception, cognition, learning, and motor function. This talk will
discuss some current efforts in this direction.
Bio
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Change
Leader and Second
Life Tutorial
Cory Ondrejka
VP of Product Development, Linden
Lab, creators of Second
Life, acclaimed 3D online world
Talk Title: One Thing To Tell the World About Video Games
Abstract: Games will save the world. With
technology and connectivity exposing everyone to more information
and misinformation than ever before, critical thinking is the most
important skill of the 21st century. In a world where Presidents
consult astrologers, extremists transform the faithful into weapons,
schools choose creationism over evolution, and wars are justified
by faulty intelligence, games are teaching hundreds of millions
of players how to hypothesize, test, and verify. Games demand action
before mastery, forcing gamers to experiment in order to succeed.
Gamers learn that pronouncements from authority, whether from the
game manual, in-game dialog, or guild leaders, must always be skeptically
evaluated in light of direct experience and the
knowledge of their fellow players.
More importantly, they aren’t learning these lessons alone.
In online worlds like Second Life, gamers from all over
the world are building communities, forming businesses, earning
real money, and teaching each other. They are collaborating to solve
problems and building skills that the best universities struggle
to teach. Beyond the evidence linking game to improvements in IQ,
spatial awareness, visual recognition, cognitive chunking, problem
solving, and eye-hand coordination, games provide players with a
critical toolkit that makes them better students, citizens, employees,
managers, soldiers, scientists, and parents. So get ready, world
– the gamers are coming!
Tutorial Title: Building the Dream: Creating
and Profiting in Virtual Worlds
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Change
Leader
Jerry Paffendorf
Community Director, Acceleration
Studies Foundation; Founder and Host, Second
Life Future Salon; Co-Producer, Accelerating Change
Conferences
Brave New Virtual Worlds
Abstract: User-created virtual worlds like Second
Life are pioneering the media-rich 3D Web, as in Neal Stephenson's
Metaverse. Searchable, interactive virtualizations of our planet,
like Google Earth, are opening the geospatial Web as in David Gelernter's
Mirror Worlds. As an introduction to our Explorations session I'll
take a brief look at these emerging platforms, building up and tearing
down some ideas about their short- and long-term potential.
Bio
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Change Leader
Scott Rafer
President and CEO, Feedster
Smart Agents are People, not Software
Abstract: The dream of AI has been replaced by
always-on, broadband connections.
Instead of HAL, we've got WordPress. That means constant access
to millions of sector experts who can and will add structured text,
tags, photos, video, and links to the common store of knowledge
where hundreds of no-capital-needed startups are in a race for huge
financial prizes awarded to those who slice, dice, filter, and deliver
the right knowledge distilled from the ever-growing pool of user-generated
information.
In other words, RSS and similar formats are now letting people
share preferences at a such a scale, scope, level of detail, velocity,
and frequency, that AI is rendered unnecessary to generate smartness,
at least for the foreseeable future.
Bio
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Change Leader
Robin Raskin
Consultant and author on family life in a digital world,
robinraskin.com; TV Personality;
Former Editor of PC Magazine
Aren't We Forgetting Something? Social Responsibility In Cyberspace
Abstract: As the pace accelerates and technology dominates
both education and the workplace, it’s time to look at the
effect of the tools on a new generation of screen-savvy workers.
The newest hires demonstrate great dexterity on the keyboard, but
have little sense of the larger implications of living in the digital
world.
We’ll discuss the cut and paste mentality and the single
screen-at-a-time effect on creativity and decision making. We’ll
look at how students think about their personal audit trails, the
need for privacy and the veracity of a digital communications. The
industry has been all too quick to provide students with powerful
tools; they’ve neglected to plan for the responsibility that
accompanies usage.
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Change
Leader
Philip Rosedale
CEO, Linden Lab,
creators of Second Life,
acclaimed 3D online world
Tipping the Metaverse
Abstract: When we all conclude that a digitally
created online world inhabited by many - the Metaverse - has finally
arrived, what will we say about it's history? What will we
agree finally got it started? Will it have been a critical
piece of enabling technology, or some specific type of experience
or content? Online games, in their striking success, have something
to say about the metaverse, but certainly aren't yet there.
Some science fiction has suggested that the metaverse starts as
a giant analysis and storage tool for the collective data of a host
of mega-corporations. This is probably as unlikely as the
discovery that we are actually living in a simulated world created
for us by evil machines, as another piece of popular science fiction
suggests.
A critical combination of content, commerce, and community can
be argued to be the minimal set of requirements for a critical mass
metaverse to emerge. We'll discuss what exactly those are.
Bio
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Change Leader
Blake Ross
Co-Creator and Project Director, Mozilla
Firefox; Open Source Entrepreneur; Computer Science Student,
Stanford University
When Hacker Met Seller: The Next Generation of Coders
Abstract: Open source. Monopolized market. Microsoftian
competitor. There isn’t a VC in the world who would have taken
that bet. So how did Firefox find 80 million users in 8 months without
ever purchasing an advertisement?
The Internet has been removing barriers for years. Distribution,
development, quality assurance—the cost problem has virtually
been eliminated. As usual, the only outstanding issue is the result
of human error. Although developers have everything they need to
create great code, they lack the only thing they need to create
great products: end-user empathy. Companies are forced to split
along three lines—the developers, who create the thing; the
user experience teams, who prepare it for human consumption; and
the marketers, who spend lots of money. Fuse them together and you
have a team constrained only by the need to eat and sleep—and
you can bet that’ll be the first problem they tackle.
Firefox is built by a team of developers who find coding the worst
part of their job. Fueled by an intimate connection with users,
they represent a new generation of hackers who take products from
“Hello World” to hello, world! and will be at the top
of tomorrow’s tech companies.
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Change Leader
Rudy Rucker
Computer Scientist; Author of The
Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul; Spaceland;
The
Hacker and the Ants, and other
books
The Third Intellectual Revolution: Everything is a Computation
Abstract: We're presently in the midst of a third
intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets
obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic
laws. In todays third revolution, were coming to realize that even
minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded
as computations. Everything is a computation.
Does this, then, mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The
naturally occurring computations that surround us are richly complex.
A tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news,
a person's ever-changing moods --- all of these computations share
the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic,
gnarly computations are --- and this is a key point --- inherently
unpredictable. The world's mystery is preserved.
As an application of this notion, consider the current argument
over evolution vs. intelligent design. On the one hand, molecular
biology tells us that organisms arise as program-like outputs from
the inputs of the DNA and the cell chemistry, with the DNA and cell
chemistry having been tweaked by millennia of evolution. On the
other hand, some feel that organisms seem to intricately patterened
to have resulted from evolution's search of the space of all possible
genomes. The synthesis is to recognize that gnarly biochemical computations
are ubiquitous; fetus-like scroll patterns can, for instance, be
found in a wide range of cellular automata.
Bio
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Change Leader
John Smart
Founder and President, Acceleration
Studies Foundation; Co-Producer, Accelerating Change Conferences
How To Be A Tech Futurist: A Developmental Perspective on Accelerating
Change
Abstract: Perhaps the most important thing we
can do at Accelerating Change is to convene a spectrum
of thoughtful, open-minded, and passionate folks who care deeply
about guiding technology as we move into an ever-faster future.
Perhaps the second most important thing we can do is to discover
the probable within the simply imaginable future. Futures studies
is dangerous territory. Futurists are not immune to drama, and may
be guilty of twisting the truth to fit their passions more than
many others. In a world of accelerating information we need more
than ever to hone our critical capacities and our access to the
right data, setting our filters to stay clear-eyed, balanced, and
in control.
This goes for tech futurists as much as any other variety. Artificial
intelligence, one of the themes of this year's conference, was oversold
by the optimists in the 1960's, again in the early 1980's, and again
as support systems for the Internet in the late 1990's. Early innovators
learned "the market wasn't ready" for AI algorithms in
the 1970's, for virtual reality and expert systems in the 1980's,
and for web services in the 1990's. Yet even with the hype and inflated
expectations there is excellent evidence, from a wide range of disciplines
and companies (Google, Dell, eBay, HP, Amazon, Yahoo!, the list
goes on...) that major constant change in the IT space is now our
way of life. We are beginning to see that a profound transformation
is taking place, and are giving ourselves permission to discuss
this in the most open and critical way we can.
In this talk I will outline what has can be called the infopomorphic
paradigm, a way to understand ourselves and the universe in information
theoretic or computational terms. We'll discuss such apparently
"developmental" (not simply evolutionary, but also predictably
emergent) trends as the increasing space-, time-, energy-, and matter
(STEM) efficiency and density of physical-computational systems
over universal, biological, cultural, and technological timescales.
We can expect this "STEM compression" to continually surprise
us with what Carver Mead has called our "unreasonably efficient"
advances in the microcosm, such as the recent production advance
in carbon
nanoribbons. Here's what may be the most important point: the
very structure of our universe appears organized to drive accelerating
discovery and computation in the microcosm, many orders of magnitude
faster than in any other domain.
Such microcosmic acceleration in turn is enabling developments
in intelligent agents and interfaces, immune systems, transparency,
accountabilty, and an emerging computational dimension to our social
space I call the Valuecosm, which I expect will dramatically improve
the quality of human life, even as it brings new potential for misuse
and abuse in its early years. We'll discuss the importance of balancing
both accelerating innovation and sustainable development in the
history of human civilization. I'll try to make the case that we
need a lot more research into apparent developmental trends, as
they make us more accurate forecasters and change agents, and as
they are testable and falsifiable propositions about our future.
Bio
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Change Leader
David
A. Smith (with Julian Lombardi)
Principal Architect, Croquet
Project; CTO, 3Dsolve;
Co-founder, Red Storm Entertainment
(w/ Tom Clancy) and Timeline Computer Entertainment (w/ Michael
Crichton)
The Social Dimension of Croquet
Abstract: See Julian Lombardi
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Change
Leader
Cecily Sommers
Strategic Principal, Unit
1; Founder and President, The PUSH Institute, producers of the
annual PUSH Conference
Culture: The New Economy of Customer-Centric, Bottom-Up Innovation
Abstract: Just as the Experience Economy is finally
getting off the ground, there are now signs of an even newer trend
on the horizon: The Culture Economy. The Internet revolution of
the 1990s has birthed an insurrection among consumers. “The
customer is king” has been deposed, and now consumers are
acting more like anarchists as they hack and fashion their way into
to all kinds of inventive exchanges of cultural meaning and identity
through discrete social networks.
The extraordinary number of variations of MasterCard’s “Priceless”
campaign, independently made and distributed iPod commercials, and
the rise of remixing and “mashing” (from music to web
services and now to RSS feeds) are just some examples. The threat
that blogs and customized shoe design represent to traditional channels
of content creation, innovation and distribution are just some of
the early indicators of a deeper economic shift that is underway.
Heads up: where culture leads, commerce must follow.
Bio
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Emcee
Melanie Swan
President, Cygnet
Capital
Bio
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Change
Leader
Jon Udell
Lead Analyst, InfoWorld;
Software Developer
Annotating the Planet: Freedom and Control in the New Era of
Interactive Mapping
Abstract: The explosive innovation triggered by
Google Maps produced a shock of recognition. We always knew that
our meatspace coordinates would merge with our cyberspace addresses.
Now that it's really happening, familiar topics—identity and
privacy, grassroots collaboration and centralized control, ownership
and use of data—will be newly refracted through the geospatial
lens.
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Moderator
T. Sibley Verbeck
Chief Scientist, StreamSage
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Keynote
Vernor Vinge
Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Author, True
Names; The
Coming Technological Singularity
Can We Avoid A Hard Takeoff?: Speculations on Issues in AI and
IA
Abstract: Based on raw hardware trends, it's plausible
that within thirty years we will create superhuman intelligence
-- and so pass through a technological singularity. This is a different
form of change than imagined by futurisms past. In fact, to think
that we can predict beyond this singularity is a bit like expecting
a goldfish to understand AC2005.
Perhaps this transition will take decades, with the exact beginning
and end points the topic of much entertaining debate. But the
transition could take less than 100 hours.
Such a "hard takeoff" is almost certainly a Very Bad Thing.
(Illustrations of this assessment will be provided!)
Is there any way to prevent a hard takeoff? Perhaps. In this talk,
I will explore the virtues -- and dangers -- of Intelligence Amplification
as a strategy for dealing with hard takeoffs.
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Change
Leader
Terry
Winograd
Professor and Director, Human-Computer
Interaction programs, Stanford University; Principal Investigator,
Stanford Digital Libraries
Project and Interactive
Workspaces Project; Founding Faculty Member, Stanford
Institute of Design
Teaching Innovation: Inventing the d.School (Stanford
Institute of Design)
Abstract: Design is an orientation we bring to
the activity of creating technological artifacts and embedding them
in people’s lives. Although we can label fields of design
by the kind of artifact (“product design,” “software
design,” “systems design”, etc.) every successful
design is more. It is an intervention in the individual and social
lives of the people who encounter it. The field of software design
has often focused on the software artifact, identifying the design
processes, tradeoffs, and decisions that will make the software
robust, efficient, and malleable. It works in tandem (when things
are going well) with interaction design, which focuses on the fit
of the resulting software to human abilities, needs, and concerns.
Today, most of the challenging software design problems are not
bounded by a particular application or device, but require attention
to the totality of a socio-technical system. Security is one obvious
example. The overall security of a network is not just a matter
of well designed code, but requires understanding the ways people
will interact, both individually and in the large. The design process
needs to encompass knowledge that goes well beyond “computing”
or “software” in the narrow sense. Today’s software
architects and programmers are designing more than software-intensive
systems: they are also designing people-intensive systems. The research
challenge is to integrate the approach to design that has been applied
in the more computer-focused aspects of software design with the
broader orientation of interaction design and product design. There
is a great deal of informal wisdom about designing human-machine
and computer mediated-human-human interactions. Research is needed
on how to make this wisdom rigorous and reusable.
I am one of eight founding faculty from Computer Science, Mechanical
Engineering, Management Science and Engineering, and the Graduate
School of Business, led by David Kelley of the Stanford Design Division
(and founder of IDEO Design) who are working to create the d.School,
the Stanford Institute of Design. See http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/index.html
for more. This new program seeks to significantly advance interdisciplinary
research and teaching and strengthen the connection between the
university and industry. If successful, the ideas and people that
emerge from this program will set the standard for how teams innovate,
how universities integrate disciplines, and how design is taught
around the world.
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