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July 19-21, 2013
Hilton Chicago Hotel
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Preconference Courses: July 18-19, 2013
Professional Members’ Forum: July 22, 2013

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Envisioning the Future of Technology through "Sci-Fi Scaffolding"

Michell Zappa is a global emerging technology strategist who publishes a project entitled Envisioning Technology. His focus is on explaining futurism and technological scenarios using visualizations and creativity drawn from science fiction, London, United Kingdom

A whirlwind overview of how technology is changing our lives. Mr. Zappa will explain how technology and humanity are fundamentally intertwined, the presentation establishes the imperatives and trends that will drive the near future. Using inspiration drawn from sci-fi, the presentation finally lays out a series of highly visual scenarios for the next decade, and invites the audience to reach similar visions for their own field of work.

Highlights

Participants will leave this session with an understanding of the proposed set of “scaffolds”:

  • The future of photography (what happens when cameras are always online, see what we see, identify what matters to us, and share everything in real time).
  • The augmented self (technologies that have the capacity of extending our senses, such as using a swarm of brain-controlled flying nanobots sending what they are seeing back to artificial retinas).
  • The future immune system (embedding a nanoscale 3-D printer in our bloodstream synthesizing drugs, responding to real-time biometric readings of how our body is reacting to the environment).
  • The future of manufacturing (employing depth-perceiving drones to interpret the physical geography of a given location, then using parametric design algorithms to design an optimized construction for that space and deploying massive contour crafting 3-D printers to actually build houses. You'd end up with overnight, pop-up city blocks, which can be implemented as disaster relief, for example).

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