Being Everywhere

NextGens Technologies
December 9–10, 2008
Phoenix, Arizona

REGISTER here
BY November 17, 2008

venue
Intercontinental Montelucia
Resort & Spa
click here
for Hotel information

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 new media, what are the implications of eyes, ears, and fingertips that reach everywhere? What happens when our environment is fully programmable? When will we see speech and image processing mediate interactions between machines, physical spaces, and each other? What is the future of holographic and other imaging technologies? What will be different when content and identity become transferable between disparate virtual worlds?

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.

back to top

back to top