NextGens Technologies
December 5-6, 2006
Seattle, WA

members' field trip
Microsoft
December 7
8:00 am – 12:30 pm

conference overview
What are the hottest, still-on-the-drawing-board technologies, both hard and soft, that will affect IT, how we communicate, and how we run and manage our enterprises? The development and deployment of ubiquitous access is clearly visible. Enough attention is being paid to ambient intelligence that we can see it is well within our reach. Semantic technologies, the furthest down the technological highway, will continue to emerge, combine, and create significant disruptions and opportunities.

The future’s one “big thing” is small—very small: it’s the place where nano-devices rule. Electronics are moving to the nanometer scale, paving the way to another decade or more of usefulness for Moore’s Law. Major improvements in display technologies will allow for new types of screens. Users will be able to see and comprehend more information. Social search engines give groups wisdom to improve results. Machines will be able to sense our moods and emotions.

We’ve heard talk of convergence for years, at the device, network, application, and content levels, yet this seems tantalizingly just out of our reach. New applications will spring up as the combination of self-organizing networks, mobile users, content delivery to handheld devices, and RFID occurs. Are there new gizmos or gadgets that will render our portable and mobile devices technologically out of date? Should we be concerned with technological obsolescence as new devices and applications appear faster than we can adopt them? In the future, will we run our applications solely from the web?

At this conference, we’ll scour the research frontiers and seek out the most radical, the most futuristic, the most far-fetched, the most dazzling, and the most promising technologies with the potential to make our lives and our work environment more engaging, energizing, and productive.

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speakers
Dr. John Delaney, Professor of Oceanography, University of Washington
Mr. Riley Eller, Director, Technology/Security, CoCo Communications Corp.
Mr. Jeff Greason, President, XCOR Aerospace
Dr. Saul Griffith, Co-founder, Squid Labs
Mr. Manju HeGDe, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, Ageia Technologies, Inc.
Mr. Paul Holman, President, Komposite, Inc.
Dr. Eric Horvitz, Principal Researcher and Research Area Manager, Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group, Microsoft Research
Mr. Jeff Jonas, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist, IBM Entity Analytics
Dr. AllAn Jones, Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute for Brain Science
Mr. Dan Nachbar, Principal Designer, Skyacht Aircraft, Inc.
Dr. Nuria Oliver, Researcher, Microsoft Research
Dr. David Salesin, Principal Scientist, Advanced Technology Labs, Adobe Systems
Dr. Stefano Soatto, Professor of Computer Science, UCLA
Dr. Andries van Dam, Professor of Technology and Education, Brown University
Dr. David M. Virshup, M.D., Co-director, Huntsman Cancer Institute Center for Children, University of Utah
Mr. Curtis Wong, Group Manager, Next Media Research Group, Microsoft
Dr. Eli Yablonovitch, Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA

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