Schedule: General sessions

The Internet gives us access to billions of pages of information, pictures, and videos. A person could never look at all of them, but computers are faster than humans. What can a computer learn from all this information? Read more.

Your ability to connect with your audience will often define the success or failure of your project. This talk will use Alternate Reality Games to explore how this new genre of entertainment can give us insight into building, maintaining, and growing an audience. Read more.

How will advances in science and technology enable our brains' hardware and software to be reverse-engineered, reconfigured, and, eventually, upgraded? Several provocative panelists weigh in on the future of mind hacking. Read more.

What happens when content leaves the screen, and is embedded in everyday objects and materials? David Rose will present a story of creating tangible internet objects for consumer electronics, health and wellness, public transportation, and energy consumption. Read more.

This session will discuss how socially oriented experience and activity-based theories of interaction drive the design and evaluation of technology. Read more.

Crowds are significant socio-technical systems, allowing pedestrians to swarm in social and anti-social networks. This presentation focuses on our research in developing a visually and behaviorally realistic simulation platform for exploring crowds in dense urban settings. Read more.

Nintendo’s Wii and Apple’s iPhone introduced the power of using gestures to control devices and interactive systems. But how do you design for this interaction paradigm? Learn how to get started designing interactive gestures and gestural interfaces. Read more.

Green Nano is a breakthrough and Stan Williams, Senior HP Fellow, will give a state of the world from his perspective on nanotechnology with a focus on HP's four most significant streams of work in the Green Nano arena. Read more.

Why have things finally begun to shift in Iraq? The answer, in part, is that the U.S. dropped its techno-centric approach to prosecuting the war—and started focusing on Iraq's social, political, tribal, and cultural networks instead. Read more.

This session will explore current systems of surveillance entertainment and imagine them working in other contexts. including how our personal data trails yield raw material for play. Read more.

Bots, Bot Herders, Botnets. You hear these terms with increasing frequency, but what do they mean? What are bots? How do they propagate? What do they do? And most importantly—why do I care? This session provides attendees with an overview of botnet behavior, attacks and countermeasures. Read more.

The Web was invented so physicists could share research papers. The tools of Web 2.0 are showing themselves to be extremely powerful in the hands of digital activists, especially those in environments where free speech is limited. Read more.

Think gamers get emotional from boiling lava monsters? Think again. From fiero to schadenfreude emotions increase focus, memory, learning, decision making, and performance. Similar emotions drive participation from Flickr to Facebook. Read more.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are becoming the new frontier of amateur robotics. Learn how anyone can build fully autonomous flying drones with open source hardware and software. Read more.

People seek sexual expression online and encounter disaster or success, plus a steep learning curve about privacy, anonymity, 2.0 skills, and identity. Applicable outside the context of sexuality, online identity is a deliberate act. Read more.

For 2.5 years, Google operated the largest experiment with internal corporate prediction markets in existence. Find out what they learned about their markets, their business, and their organization. Read more.

Hugh Rienhoff's daughter was born with an undiagnosed syndrome. Not getting results from conventional medicine, he searched to find and sequence her genome. This talk focuses on the resources in the public domain to identify and understand genetic information. Read more.

From The 7 Habits to The 4-Hour Workweek, personal productivity comes in many packages, but finding the right techniques to make your life and work better is up to you. Here's what you need to know to overclock your workday. Read more.

Open source hardware is a term slowly working its way into many new projects and efforts, but what is it? What new hardware projects are out, successful, and what's next? Read more.

Description coming soon. Read more.

There is a new generation of connected consumers on the rise in Asia: Asian teenagers are voraciously reshaping the concept of media across the region. It's the future of entertainment—halfway between Shanghai and Seoul. Read more.

Brain imaging is entering economics, politics, and law. In this session we'll cover key concepts and directions in brain imaging, with a focus for DIYers on open source tools and open access data sets. Read more.

A more-optimistic-than-usual Electronic Frontier Foundation reveals: near-future technology that will help defend your rights, policy initiatives that could help save the Net, and techniques you can bake into your work that will help preserve freedom online. Read more.

Building on last year's Body Hacking talk, Quinn Norton looks at new subjects, new hacks, and new implications, with a little Walt Whitman thrown in for good measure. Read more.

The term "context hacking" refers to unconventional forms or intervention of communication. Johannes Grenzfurthner will present projects by monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna. Read more.

This presentation gives a whirlwind overview of the shiny vizporn and kinetic data sculptures to date and explains what it takes to make synthesis and visualization of Web 2.0 data useful on a daily basis, for individuals and groups. Read more.

What value is computing technology to a farmer earning $1 a day? Questions like this will be discussed through a sample of work from the Technology for Emerging Markets research group seeking new applications of computing for the world’s least privileged communities. Read more.

The process of innovation begins with discovery. Hackers are constantly disassembling the world around them. Pablos Holman will show all kinds of delightful and surprising things that hackers are capable of. Read more.

Android will let developers build applications that don't just go with you, but become part of your life. We'll introduce the Android platform and show a few examples of applications that fit into your life so naturally you'll wonder how you ever got along without them. Stop by to find out where Android came from, where it's going, and how you can take part. Read more.

Antigenic Cartography is a new computational method that allows a unique visualization of viral evolution. First published in 2004, the technique is now used to aid the WHO in recommending the composition of human influenza vaccines. It is also being applied to the design of pandemic influenza vaccines and to the study of a variety of other infectious diseases. Read more.

The Cuban people live in acute technological scarcity, yet illuminate strategies for living and creating in a society of excess. This talk will share inspiring adaptations and surprising interpretations of technology. Read more.

Fitt's Law applies a lot of places in UI design, but sex isn't one of them. What can we learn from sex hardware interfaces? If an interface is inviting enough that someone is willing to have the most intimate of experiences using it, can we apply these ideas to, say, installing printer drivers? Read more.

Exposing invisible networks and their effects, technologists, artists, social engineers, and scientists are unveiling the systems that surround us. Co-curators of ETech's Emerging Arts Fest will lead a panel discussion situating the work represented at ETech and the context in which that work is being created and experienced. Read more.

Teaching mobile phones to learn from people's behavior: predicting future activities, inferring relationships, quantifying organizational rhythms. Read more.

The revolution of personalized genomics is just beginning. Biotech companies have started to offer DNA tests that reveal a person's genealogy and disease risks. This talk will help the audience assess the benefits of looking at their own genomes versus the privacy issues at risk. Read more.

This talk will demonstrate computer vision and machine learning applications and get you up and running on them using the commercially free Open Source Computer Vision Library. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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 Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.