Being Everywhere

NextGens Technologies
December 9–10, 2008
Phoenix, Arizona

David Reed previews the conference
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conference overview
Innovative technology is often mysterious, even magical: weird new stuff that borders on science fiction yet sometimes emerges as scientific fact. At this annual conference, we’ll present a cornucopia of powerful, remarkably interesting, diversified technologies and ideas, casting an eye on the underlying science, its application, and the innovation ecology surrounding it.

In computing and networking, are we approaching performance limits? What research agendas are now in full swing that will make our networks faster and our computers more powerful? Will new, potent processors allow speech and image processing to mediate interactions between machines, physical spaces, and each other? What is the future of holographic and other imaging technologies?

We’ll look at novel computing materials such as fabrics, plastics, and biological substrates. Because conducting and semiconducting polymers can be prototyped on a desktop inkjet-like printer, we’ll soon be able to scale down the Industrial Revolution–era costs of manufacturing and factory overhead to desktop levels. Will the slower speed but inherent parallelism of new materials force a change in computing architecture that most hardware vendors are trying to avoid?

How much more intimate can our relationship with technology be? Certainly, the most daring discoveries on the frontier will center around bio/nano/medical technologies that fundamentally improve the way we live. Stem cells, for example, could add 100 years to our lives. Neural implants will create direct links to the brain; computers could then easily become an extension of our minds. Machines with neuromemory chips may allow the blind to "see" and could perform our dangerous missions. Socially /embedded information networks and synthetic adaptive biology represent two springboards to the future of human-computer interaction. We will witness the evolving partnership of our planet’s two large-scale information-processing architectures: organic life and digital programmable condensed matter. As we begin to treat proteomes as computing and communications devices and networks, the two may, within 25 years, merge and become inseparable, leading to computing possibilities beyond our imagination.

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Partial list of speakers

Dr. Subutai Ahmad, VP, Engineering, Numenta
Dr. Richard Baraniuk, Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Rice University
Dr. Eshel Ben-Jacob, Professor of Physics, Tel Aviv University
Mr. Adrian Burholt, Chief Executive Office, The Key Revolution
Dr. Schuyler Cullen, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Keystream
Ms. Diane Dulla, Founder, Anatom-e
Ms. Judy Estrin, CEO, JLabs
Dr. William Haseltine, President, William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences
Mr. Rich Jenkins, Chief Executive Officer, Media Power
Ms. Joy Mountford, Vice President, Design Innovation, JoyMountford.com
Dr. David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley
Mr. Steve Saylor, CEO, SiOnyx
Mr. Jim Seay, President, Premier Rides
Mr. Michael Sinclair, Senior Researcher, Hardware Devices Group, Microsoft
Dr. Larry Smarr, Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Dr. Stan Williams, Director, Information and Quantum Systems Lab,
Hewlett Packard

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