Personal schedule for Stephen Howard

Tim O'Reilly shares his views on technology's latest trends. Read more.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you pitch a project? Launch a website? We'll find out at Ignite ETech. Read more.

Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.

The American family consumes resources vastly beyond its "share"--more so than other nation's family. However, due to technology, increasing environmental awareness, and a changing economy, it is also the best poised to make a course correction. Worldchanging's Alex Steffen returns to show the results of his latest project about how to make us more sustainable. Read more.

WITNESS works at the intersection of human rights, media, and technology, and was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel. Our mission is to use video and new technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. Read more.

The key to developing low-cost computing in developing markets is power consumption. An often overlooked aspect of that is the screen. Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the OLPC, has started a new company aimed at a low-cost, low-power screen. She will share insights gained in manufacturing, developing, and deploying this new technology. Read more.

As we progress to a post-scarcity society, either you'll measure your consumption or someone else will. More data is becoming accessible than has ever existed. Whether driven by climate change, peak oil, or economic change, sustainability is now a fundamental factor of your business and your life. We'll unpack and map the dramatic changes coming to industry, markets, politics--and you. Read more.

Come learn about synthetic biology and watch a fun hands-on demo where we build a genetically engineered organism! It's like Spore, only real. No experience necessary. Read more.

Consumerism is crashing, but the logic of digital, networked products promises a path forward. The emerging sustainable economy connects a renewed "repair culture" to reputation systems for companies and customers. It leads to the platformization of everything, ultimately allowing digital products to drive an overwhelming share of economic activity. Read more.

The number of technologies for healthier and more sustainable urban living can seem overwhelming. This talk introduces four frameworks for thinking about technology design for environmental living in cities in general and urban agriculture in particular. Liz will introduce three frameworks researchers and designers have used to design technologies for sustainable living in cities and suburbs Read more.

Does paper vs. plastic even matter compared to how you got to the store? Everyone today is aware that there are looming environmental problems, and many are looking to create change. This talk derives a list of the industries and areas of our lives that most need change, in order of priority, and suggests what some of these changes should be. Read more.

True innovation in materials takes on many forms, and for 80% of the world's population means the effective use of often scarce resources. "Technology Transfer," a term used to refer to the process of converting academic research into usable products, is just as important whether between the developing and the developed world or between two disparate industries. Read more.

Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.

When we look at the world around us we see many examples of places and spaces that we both love and hate. What would you "cut and paste" from different parts of your city to create the ideal sustainable urban environment? Arup has spent a number of years discussing what the eco-city would need to look like if we are going to move towards an Ecological Age. Read more.

TCP/IP and The Web were open standards and specifications that created an explosion of innovation by lowering friction and transaction costs for interoperability. Creative Commons is creating a new layer of open standards and specifications for interoperability and to lower friction at the legal/copyright and semantics layer. Read more.

Explosives are usually linked to military uses or mining. Today there are other uses for explosives on a large scale (diamond manufacture) or on a small scale (cartridges to operate instruments or machinery) or somewhere in between. Read more.

For too long, power distribution has been a top down, subscribe-only model, but the electricity grids of tomorrow will be read/write, just like the Web. Read more.

Mike Mathieu outlines the emerging civic software movement where tech-savvy heroes leverage rapid development and improving web infrastructure to build projects and services focused on social impact. You'll come away with a new understanding of some key players in the space, as well as some specific ideas for actions you might take with your professional skills. Read more.

In 1900 about 40 percent of Americans (40 million) lived on farms, and a similar percentage worked on farms. People were makers by necessity, and as a result they acquired many useful DIY skills that they applied to their leisure activities as well. Read more.

Schneider's multidisciplinary work attempts to investigate human and technological interdependence. Schneider sees this interdependence as both emotional and physical. We are all infinitely removed from everything, everyone, and from ourselves. Our inners do not connect to our outers with any sort of transparency. Language separates us from the experience of the real. All of us is filtered. Read more.

Zoë Keating is a cellist. She plays solo, with rock bands, and writes music for film and ballet. Her musical process involves live looping and layering. Keating will demonstrate how to use a 17th century instrument and a laptop to make electronic music, and discuss the metaphysics of looping sound. Read more.

ETech Fest, the ETech emerging arts showcase, will once again provide a platform for artists to present their vision of the intersection of art and technology at ETech 2009. Read more.

Join us Wednesday for LateTech, our [somewhat] late night soirée where high tech meets comedy, magic, and more! Read more.

Historically, 3D on the Web has always been associated with difficulties. Although 3D has been around for decades, from research labs to gaming to visualization of a 3D earth, there are numerous reasons why 3D is still having majority adoption challenges. Read more.

It is clear that our lifestyles have become environmentally and economically unsustainable. The solution will need to include widespread power reduction. To this end, WattzOn provides a structured wiki-based tool to allow users to track personal power usage, understand steps they can take to lessen their impact, and improve the accuracy of the system by modifying the methodology and data. Read more.

The discovery and mastery of new materials throughout history have caused societal upheavals that dwarf our more recent digital revolution. In this lively talk, history of science junkie Chris Spurgeon shows how breakthrough materials changed the world. He'll also explore how we can all prepare ourselves for the materials revolutions to come. Read more.

The story of how robot cars, no longer science fiction thanks to DARPA contests, will change cities, manufacturing, energy, and of course travel, not just by driving us (saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars) but also by delivering, parking, and refueling themselves to save the electric car and the planet. Read more.

Governments all over the world are moving to censor various kinds of online and mobile content, and to expand their capacity to spy on people's digital communications. While the problem is worst in authoritarian countries, democracies are by no means immune. Meanwhile companies and others trying to provide web and telecoms services are caught uncomfortably in the middle. Read more.

In his 1963 science fiction book "The Game Players of Titan," Philip K. Dick envisioned a form of government based on gameplay. Everything from real estate law to municipal policy to marriage contracts were not only derived from playing the game, but the design and sociality of the game had replaced government itself. Read more.

Our 3-day massively multiplayer thought experiment is over! Find out what exactly the ETech crowd decided to do with their personal cube satellites -- and what it might mean for our future. Read more.

Current global disease control efforts focus largely on attempting to stop pandemics after they have already emerged. This fire brigade approach, which generally involves drugs, vaccines, and behavioral change, has severe limitations. Read more.