Where Technology and People Meet
November 6-7, 2000 in Atlanta, GA

Topics include:
• Health and medical technologies
• Bio-computing
• Education and learning
• Politics and economics
• Wearable/web-connected health-oriented consumer "computing" devices
• Technology and seniors, infants, other demographic groups
• Internet usage patterns
• Screen-to-face delivery of information
• Risk, trust and privacy
• Techno-ethics
• Faster -- revisited

conference overview
Technology is mediating human experience in all sorts of new ways. "Wearable" and environmental computing, coupled with ubiquitous networking, are extending the reach and dimension of our senses. The social interface will be as important as the individual interface. Our connections to each other will be amplified and shaped by a wide range of mediating technologies. People will meet and affiliate more quickly, and in more targeted ways. Now a person's every experience can be recorded and archived in digital form. When the interactions among people day to day become enhanced and distorted by digital mediation, we have a huge disruptive possibility.

How do we measure what is being "produced" in this new mediated architecture? How are decisions made by groups, when geographic boundaries are far less important? What will shape the "cybercultures" that assemble people into groups with common goals and needs? And how will conflict among those cultures affect both cyberspace and physical space?

Can virtual education be the seed for a new, more highly leveraged and effective means of learning? Or is this technology doomed to be a low-grade diploma machine? The impact of ubiquitous and "free" computing and communications on children is something we need to assess, as those children grow into adults and begin to shape society.

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speakers
Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for Communication Policy, UCLA
Michael Hawley, Professor, Media Technology, MIT Media Lab
Ray Kurzweil, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
Michael R. Ladisch, Director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering and Professor, Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, Purdue University
Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist, Composer, Visual Artist, Author, and Chief Scientist, Eyematic
Ray Ozzie, Creator of Lotus Notes and President of Groove Network
Neil Scott, Chief Engineer for the Archimedes Project, Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language & Information
Astro Teller, CEO & Co-founder, BodyMedia
Ethan Zuckerman, CEO & Co-founder, Geekcorps

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