The Call For Participation for the 2008 edition of the Emerging Technology Conference (AKA ETech) is being extended by one week. We are going to be expanding the scope of ETech this year. We’re going to look beyond the web to manufacturing, biotech, large-scale systems, sensor networks, alternate reality games, visualizations, robotics, policy, human enhancement, and clean tech. The CFP now closes on September 24 so submit soon! The conference will be held in San Diego from March 3-6, 2008.
Some speakers have already been signed up. Bunnie Huang, well-known for hacking the XBox, will discuss his experiences manufacturing in China. Alex Steffen of WorldChanging is going to share his views on the state of green technology.
We’ll be picking speakers and topics in the following areas:
• Energy: At ETech 2007 we heard about Google’s solarification plans. When the presentation ended, the speaker was swamped by curious attendees. This year, we’ll examine how far we are from where we need to be, what we can do in our own houses, and what awesome things architects and others are doing to advance the cause of energy conservation and generation.
• Human Enhancement: One of the key talks from ETech 2007 was Quinn Norton’s Body Hacking. We’ll take that trend further this year, exploring what hackers, the military, and private industry are doing to extend the abilities of our minds and bodies. What are these parties doing about overall health? Who wants to trust their health to a doctor they see once a year? How are you taking your health into your own hands?
• Steal From The Seedy: Porn is full of early adopters. What can we learn about tomorrow’s tech from porn? From the military? From botnets? From spammers? From Al Qaeda?
• Visualizations: As we build and acquire data, new techniques for visualizations are needed from viewing the body or a map of the Internet to modeling cities and crowds–and beyond. Java-based processing is one of the favorite tools for this work, but what else can be used?
• Abundant and Ubiquitous Computing: Our lives are starting to assume access to large-scale computing systems. Google Earth serves its data from a bank of massive servers. What else will be created with abundant computing? How will it be managed? Will virtualization be the method used?
• From Virtual To Physical: Generating physical prototypes is an iterative process. We’ll further examine cheap manufacturing in China and elsewhere. How does it actually work? What is the process? What are the pitfalls?
• From Physical to Virtual: Sensor networks and RFIDs enable us to interact with the real world virtually. Shotspotter uses sensors to determine the location and type of gun fired via sensor networks. Designer Manolis Kelaidas‘ hand-bound book uses conductive ink and BlueTooth to enhance the reading experience and objects’ movements become tracked and the real world is recorded. What are other doors opening into virtual worlds?
• Learning From Games: Strong Angel is an annual, week-long event that creates virtual catastrophies in order to train and evaluate disaster-relief agencies. Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil gave people the opportunity to prepare for an energy crisis in advance of it happening. What other industries use games? Where are they most useful?
• The Emerging World: Resource constraints and cultural differences can foster innovation we can learn from. Microsoft Research India is using SMS servers to replace PCs to create mobile commodity auctions for farmers. What are other examples of doing more with less? What do hackers in China create and how does it compare to work generated in India?
• Policy: Increasingly, the business models encouraging new technologies are being hampered by bad political decisions. We’ll learn who’s fighting back and how.
• Useful Research: Materials science, synthetic biology, and psychology will let us design better software and hardware products. We’re going to investigate some research that will actually make it to products.
• Emerging Arts Fest Projects: ETech 2008 will also feature our first Emerging Arts Fest. Throughout history, technology has been pushed by art. The present day is no different. The mooninites, “newsworthy” as they were, do not compare to some of the other pieces that are now available. We’ll have a hands-on show to explore the latest interactive art.
If you have an idea, but don’t want to submit it as a talk, feel free to tag it on del.icio.us with “for:brady”. If you want to see examples of what I am most excited about you watch my ETech del.icio.us feed (this also applies to my other conferences Where 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Expo).