CyberInsecurity

Nextgens Technologies
December 7–8, 2010
Charlotte, North Carolina

MIKE HAWLEY PREVIEWS THE CONFERENCE
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LIBRARY SELECTIONs
The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist by Frederick Brooks

conference overview
The intersection of science and technology is taking us to realms we never could have imagined. At this year’s conference, we’ll engage in a diverse discussion with an eclectic range of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and hackers, all looking at ideas that lie at the outer limits of possibility.

Emerging technologies come from multidisciplinary sources, and they often go beyond being smaller, faster, better, cheaper, and more plentiful. We’ll cover a spectrum of topics where the merging of physical worlds with digital technologies is helping to support systems at the extreme. What role can nanosensors play in electronics, medicine, and new energy devices? Electrochemical technologies can enable radical innovation in concert with sustainable development. The development of nanomaterials for self-assembly, hybrid materials, peptides, and proteins promise us materials that won’t degrade, offer better drug delivery, and more efficient water purification techniques.

Will biomechanical robots really be as good as the hype? In the realm of biomimicry, are there caveats we should be aware of? We’ll distinguish between different approaches that attempt to take advantage of the principles and analogies from nature. How will this play out in such areas as visual speed sensors, robotics, and synthetic biology?

What are the technical challenges and potential of immersive virtual environments? Is the scheduled Web the next incarnation of Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0? Can à la carte programming be the future of media on the Web? Natural language processing and analytical techniques are improving all the time; the result is that we’ll soon be able to look at large amounts of free and unstructured text and make much more sense of it. Will open source and hacker labs overcome current economics and give us something similar to software apps stores for hardware?

From a digital cornucopia of perspectives and technologies, to the “whys” and hows,” we’ll strip away some of the beguiling mysteries of future technologies that can lead to the uptake of new ideas.

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Partial list of speakers

Dr. Todd A. Blackledge, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, University of Akron
Dr. Fred Brooks, Author, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Mr. Mick Ebeling, Founder, Not Impossible Foundation
Dr. Robert Full, Director, Poly-PEDAL Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley
Dr. Marla Geha, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, Yale University
Mr. Pablos Holman, Inventor, Intellectual Ventures
Dr. Marc Levoy, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Dr. Paul Nemirovsky, Founder, Localot Research
Mr. Sanjay Reddy, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Live Matrix
Dr. Nicola Rohrseitz, Founder, ViSSee
Dr. Donald Sadoway, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT
Mr. Peter Semmelhack, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bug Labs
Dr. Victor Shenkar, Chief Executive Officer, GeoSim Systems
Ms. Chris Shipley, Co-Founder, Guidewire Group
Dr. Michael Strano, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT
Mr. Scott Summit, Co-Founder, Bespoke Innovations
Dr. Ting Xu, Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering, U.C. Berkeley

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