Personal schedule for Mark J. Levitt

Scratch is a new, open source programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is often described as a tool to teach kids how to program. This workshop will introduce Scratch to programmers and non-programmers alike. Read more.

Come and check out MAKE at ETech 2009. We'll have the Maker Shed on site where you can purchase electronics kits, participate in demos, hack your own creations, and customize your official ETech Conference T-shirt! Read more.

Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and has minimal access to education. The Playpower Foundation is using a radically affordable $12 computer, based on an old video game console technology (now in the public domain) as an 8-bit platform for learning games. Global poverty meets 8-bit design constraints--with only an open source community of 8-bit hackers in the middle? Read more.

In this highly interactive and energetic workshop, participants will learn from each other, joining technology experts and IEEE-SA ProductNEXT presenters in shaping the future of technology standards. We want to hear from you. How could today’s standards be improved for emerging technologies? Do standards restrict or slow new technology processes? Read more.

Want to help fix democracy? Hackers, those crazy Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes, have begun a sustained assault on government with projects like the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress, GovTrack, Watchdog.net, FedSpending, MySociety, and Public.Resource. The goal? Read more.

What coming in robots? More than just the butler bot, we can expect to see many robots in all aspects of our life - home, work, hospitals, schools.... Single task robots will permeate our lives, as will telepresence bots giving us the ability to truly bi-locate. Noone can predict the future, but we can get a sneak peak. Read more.

Three leaders in the technology and law of synthetic biology will present a crisp and accessible briefing on new cooperative efforts to make tens of thousands of open source standardized DNA parts. Discussion to follow. Read more.

The Semantic Web holds the promise of enabling search engines to understand webpages better than ever, leading to greater opportunities in how information can be presented to users. SearchMonkey is a Yahoo! Search application platform that promotes the structuring of the Web among site owners and developers. Attend to learn more about SearchMonkey and discuss our use of structured markup. 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.

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.

Research generates huge data sets. New formats in the semantic web bring great promise to convert portions of the scientific canon into machine-readable formats, at the same time that new collaborative lightweight methodologies allow us to represent scientific arguments and knowledge formation in real time. The Science Commons hopes to provide the infrastructure to make this happen. Read more.

Aaron Koblin will discuss the process of turning data into visual expression. As director of technology on Radiohead's latest music video for "House of Cards," he worked with sensor technologies as an alternative to traditional video. Koblin will also discuss his role at Google's Creative Lab in San Francisco, and discuss some of his other data-visualization software. Read more.

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes. Read more.

From communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” Mobile phones as “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of computing usage called citizen science. Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, citizens are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their environment that matter most. Read more.

A "hacker space" and a "community center" sound like different places, but spaces organized in the last year, like NYC Resistor and HacDC, have merged the two. These are cross-disciplinary, self-organized, adult-education centers, mostly focused on technology, with heavy detours into related sciences and crafts, and they are alive with learning. You could build one in your city, too! 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.

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.