Personal schedule for Suzanne Axtell

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.

Financial technology – something we all thought was complete – has been upended. Fundamental assumptions have been exposed as faulty. And now we have the opportunity to recreate our finance industry from the bottom up. We have a choice: a path of openness and information sharing, or more opacity and secrecy. Read more.

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash. http://txteagle.com Read more.

The greatest sports athletes' records live and die by their hi-tech gear. They use new swimsuits like the razor to shave seconds off their laps and sensors like the Nike+ to record their training. Michael Tchao of Nike Labs will share with us the process behind these creations and the new materials and technology that make them happen. 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.

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.

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.

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.

What are the five biggest problems the world will face in 2019 – and how can we get a head-start on solving them together? Find out in this talk, which presents the results of SUPERSTRUCT, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. 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.

Understanding how humans can better interact with and consume information is critical as we work to solve the increasingly complex challenges before us. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch will explore three aspects that will shape the next generation of computing applications. Read more.

People knit scarves and solder radios together in their homes and garages. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology. Read more.

This talk will trace the history of personal data collection from its surprising roots in the 18th century into its future as a form of self-knowledge. We will see some of the great self-tracking projects of the past and present. No products will be reviewed! This is a talk about the why of self-tracking, with illustrations from real experiments. 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.

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.

Stamen has been extending its work with interactive mapping and data visualizations past the slippy map metaphor into new territory, allowing you to reach through the pins-on-a-map approach that characterizes most work in this field. By making the entire screen an active interactive surface, we're expanding the possibility of what online urban mapping can do. Read more.

Design is a kind of authoring practice, crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material to create social objects and experiences is similar to writing fiction. This is a presentation about the relationship between design, science fiction, and the material elements that help tell visual stories about the future. 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.

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.