Schedule
Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at ETech 2008 (schedule subject to change).
Customize Your Own Schedule
Create your own ETech schedule using the personal scheduler function. Mark the tutorials, sessions, keynotes, and events you want to attend at ETech by clicking on the star next to each listing. Then click on "personal schedule" at the top of the page and get your own customized schedule generated.
Marina Ballroom D
Synthetic Neurobiology: Towards Engineering Brain Circuits for Health and Human Augmentation Ed Boyden (MIT Media Lab & Dept. of Biological Engineering)
Room: Marina Ballroom D
Building a Bright Green Future Alex Steffen (Worldchanging)
TBC
Marina Ballroom E
Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story Jeff Jonas (IBM)
Personal Robots for Computer Science Education Tucker Balch (Georgia Tech), Stewart Tansley (Microsoft Research)
Marina Ballroom F
The Case for Africa as a Mobile Development Hothouse Joel Selanikio (DataDyne.org)
CouchDB from 10,000 ft Damien Katz (IBM - CouchDB), Jan Lehnardt (Freisatz)
Mobile Social Software from the Inside Out Nicolas Nova (Media and Design Lab)
Disruptive Supply Chain + Disruptive Technology = Disruptive Commerce Liam Casey (PCH International)
Mission Hills
8:45am
Breakout sessions
TBC
TBC
Going Global With Theft-Based Activism Tom Loosemore (Ofcom), Stefan Magdalinski (MOO Print Ltd), Danny O'Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Ensemble Learning: Better Predictions Through Diversity Todd Holloway (Ingenuity Systems)
Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away, Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon W. James Au (The Making of Second Life)
7:45am
Continental Breakfast
Room: Marina Ballroom Foyer
Room: Marina Ballroom Foyer
10:20am
AM Break
Room: Marina Ballroom Foyer
Room: Marina Ballroom Foyer
8:45am–9:30am
(45m)
General
AMEE: The World's Energy Meter
Gavin Starks
(AMEE)
If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build? The Climate Change agenda measures the energy profile of everything. AMEE is an open aggregation platform aimed to dramatically accelerate change, because we need to.
9:35am–10:20am
(45m)
General
DIY Survival: Projects for the Apocalypse
Bre Pettis
(I Make Things)
Whether it's a red button, volcano, avian bird flu, meteor, cosmic superhighway or economic collapse, this lecture will give you the information you need to make things that will help you survive.
11:00am–11:45am
(45m)
A Bomb Shelter For The Climate Crisis
Natalie Jeremijenko
(NYU)
Description coming soon.
11:50am–12:35pm
(45m)
General
Synthetic Neurobiology: Towards Engineering Brain Circuits for Health and Human Augmentation
Ed Boyden
(MIT Media Lab & Dept. of Biological Engineering)
Ed Boyden, from the MIT Media Lab, will describe some inventions that allow control of brain circuits with great precision and may help cure intractable neurological and psychiatric disorders.
2:00pm–2:30pm
(30m)
Keynote
Building a Bright Green Future
Alex Steffen
(Worldchanging)
If everyone lived like a typical prosperous American, we'd need ten planets to sustain our way of life. What might a sustainable future look like? How do we use ingenuity to design a future that's both bright and green?
2:30pm–2:40pm
(10m)
Keynote
Twine: The Social Graph Meets the Semantic Web
Lew Tucker
(Radar Networks)
We'll discuss and demo an innovative new service: Twine.com, built on a semantic web platform and designed to grow and enrich communities of interest. Semantics are used throughout as the system automatically annotates information with meta data, tags, and relationships.
2:40pm–2:50pm
(10m)
Plenary: Keynote
To be confirmed
2:50pm–3:00pm
(10m)
Keynote
Digital Democracy 2008 and Beyond
Micah Sifry
(Personal Democracy Forum)
Four years ago, at ETech 2004, O'Reilly hosted a seminal one-day
Digital Democracy Teach-In, focused on how internet technologies were
"putting power back into the hands of the people." In 2008, the internet has become a central battlefield for the presidential campaigns, but how much are they actually using the net to empower their supporters?
3:00pm–3:30pm
(30m)
Keynote
The 4-Hour Workweek
Timothy Ferriss
(The 4-hour Workweek)
More information coming soon
8:45am–9:30am
(45m)
General
XO Laptop Hacks
Brian Jepson
(O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
You won't find the Linux-powered XO Laptop on store shelves: they went out to people who donated to the limited-time Give One Get One program. By now, most of the donors have their laptops, so it's time to push it to the limit. Bring your XO Laptop to this hands-on session, and Brian Jepson will walk you through some of the cool hacks he's found.
9:35am–10:20am
(45m)
General
OpenMoko and Ubiquitous Computing
Michael Shiloh
(OpenMoko)
The promise of Ubiquitous Computing has been with us for a few years, but have the goals really been achieved? In this talk we will explore the obstacles to Ubiquitous Computing, and why I believe the OpenMoko project can help further the development of true Ubiquitous Computing
11:00am–11:45am
(45m)
General
Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story
Jeff Jonas
(IBM)
Jeff Jonas, who has architected and built numerous casino systems, takes you behind the scenes to describe the scams and "trip-wires" that make it possible to detect the unwanted—even before the opportunist arrives at the casino.
11:50am–12:35pm
(45m)
Personal Robots for Computer Science Education
Tucker Balch
(Georgia Tech) et al
Robots can be used as fun and effective tool and context for education. In this presentation we show how they can be used as part of introductory Computer Science courses.
8:45am–9:30am
(45m)
General
The Case for Africa as a Mobile Development Hothouse
Joel Selanikio
(DataDyne.org)
Dependence on mobile Internet access gives developers in Africa a unique perspective, free of the baggage of the desktop browser. Learn how we can reap dividends, new perspectives, and the potential for as-yet-unimagined applications.
9:35am–10:20am
(45m)
General
CouchDB from 10,000 ft
Damien Katz
(IBM - CouchDB) et al
CouchDB is a new kind of database that does not follow the relational paradigm
of traditional databases. This presentation is a low-tech, high-level overview
of CouchDB and the ideas behind it.
11:00am–11:45am
(45m)
General
Mobile Social Software from the Inside Out
Nicolas Nova
(Media and Design Lab)
In the last 10 years, a wide range of location-based services have been designed and expected to reach huge markets. This session will review the reasons why in 2007 this remains to be seen as well as alternatives models and scenarios for the near future.
11:50am–12:35pm
(45m)
General
Disruptive Supply Chain + Disruptive Technology = Disruptive Commerce
Liam Casey
(PCH International)
Everyone talks about Chinese manufacturing and how cheap that is. What few realize is that by converting manufacturing and shipping to JIT (Just-In-Time) a company never has to store the items it is selling. By reducing the initial cash outlays a smaller company can afford to make its own hardware and scale up rapidly.
8:45am–9:30am
(45m)
Session: Breakout sessions
To be confirmed
9:35am–10:20am
(45m)
General
Going Global With Theft-Based Activism
Tom Loosemore
(Ofcom) et al
For the past decade, through sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, civic hackers have been using the web to catalyse crowd-sourced reform of the UK's democratic institutions. Tom and Stef will discuss the application of these techniques to global challenges such as the UN and climate change.
11:00am–11:45am
(45m)
General
Ensemble Learning: Better Predictions Through Diversity
Todd Holloway
(Ingenuity Systems)
An introduction to how recommendation systems have been built. Particular consideration is given to the ensemble approaches used in the Netflix Prize competition as evidence of the value of combining multiple approaches.
11:50am–12:35pm
(45m)
Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away, Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon
W. James Au
(The Making of Second Life)
Overpraised in 2006 then dismissed in 2007 by the media and Internet gurus alike, Linden Lab's user-created virtual world keeps growing, attracting companies and organizations and millions of accounts. How is this possible, and what does it say about the Internet's future? The company's former "embedded journalist" and author of *The Making of Second Life* explains.
7:45am–8:45am
(1h)
Break: Continental Breakfast
10:20am–11:00am
(40m)
Break: AM Break
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