Interesting SXSW talks on Sunday

March 11, 2012

Long Lines at SXSW 2012 (credit: Geoff Livingston/Flickr)

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. The tracks for SXSW 2012 are: Interactive: March 9–13; film: March 9–17; and Music: March 13–18.

Some interesting talks on Sunday, March 11:

The Mind & Consciousness As an Interface
Sunday, March 11, 9:30AM -10:30AM, by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova.

This session is about the role and form that brain interfaces might take on in coming years. It draws from the science, the facts, the fictions and products currently on the market.

Designing Tomorrow’s Digital/Physical Interfaces

Sunday, March 11, 11:00AM -12:00PM, by David Merrill, Fabian Hemmert, and Leah Buechley.

The biggest leaps in interface innovation have come from the speculative designers, who’ve taken tremendous risks to forge a new set of digital hand tools, building a new breed of devices that do not limit users to finger movements and visual/auditory feedback, but instead utilize our spatial and sensory abilities to escape the Glass Slab — especially in the area of play.

How Brain Science Turns Browsers into Buyers
Sunday, March 11, 11:00AM -12:00PM, by AK Pradeep.

Need to boost website conversion and sales? Want to accomplish more with fewer resources? You need to appeal to and engage your customer’s brain. The vast majority of your buyer’s decision-making is driven by emotion and unconscious processes, and if you are only selling features, benefits, and prices you aren’t maximizing your success. Learn how to apply cutting-edge neuroscience, neuromarketing, and behavior research in designing your site, crafting persuasive copy, and more. But don’t worry, this is a jargon-free presentation. The expert panelists, all from different backgrounds, will focus on techniques that produce bottom-line results.

A New Culture of Learning: Gaming, Tech, Design
Sunday, March 11, 11:00AM -12:00PM, by Heather Staker.

Gaming, mentorship, increasing connection, and design thinking converge in a world of constant change — and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic. By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, we can create a vision that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it.

Brain As Interface: Future of Bio-Computing
Sunday, March 11, 11:45AM -12:00PM, by Lee Shupp.

Computing interfaces are evolving rapidly. The mouse and keyboard are becoming passe. Voice recognition is getting much better, enabling new possibilities. Motion interfaces (think XBox Kinect) allow us to use our bodies, and motion, to drive ocmputing. But the ultimate interface is your brain- biology connected to technology, wetware connected to hardware. We’ll take a brief look at the evolution of interfaces for a historical perspective, then discuss the potential and perils of biological computing.

Computation and Its Impact on the Future
Sunday, March 11, 12:30PM – 1:30PM, by Stephen Wolfram.

Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist and inventor who is most recently known for the launch of the computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. Along with the computational software system Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha has put into action some concepts Wolfram has been developing throughout his remarkable career, most notably documented in his book A New Kind of Science (NKS).

Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science and technology, and shows how computation offers a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. He believes that computation is the most important idea that has emerged in the past century and that it will have profound implications on our future.

Data Is the New Oil: Wealth and Wars on the Web
Sunday, March 11, 3:30PM – 4:30PM, by DJ Patil.

In the 21st century, we’re experiencing the dawn of a new fuel: Data. Multibillion-dollar industries, from search engines to social networking to online advertising, have been built on the aggregation of personal data, information the World Economic Forum likens to a “new type of raw material … on par with capital and labor.”We believe a new war will soon breakout, a War on Data. And we’re ready to go to battle. Two personal data experts, Owen Tripp, co-founder and COO of Reputation.com and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock and former Chief Scientist at LinkedIn, encourage businesses and entrepreneurs to disrupt the status quo through data. Old businesses and dynasties will be toppled as new disruptors fight back with innovative use of data. Join Owen Tripp and DJ Patil to learn which top industries stand to be disrupted by data innovators.

Startup Genomics: Maximize Success and Avoid Death
Sunday, March 11, 3:30PM – 4:30PM, by Ashley Brown.

Ivy League degree? 401K? VP of what? Screw that. Entrepreneurship on a global scale is exploding, facilitated by a growing ecosystem of resources and supporting institutions to help startups succeed. However, there is a significant difference in quality amongst these varying institutions, people and content. In this panel we will help the audience discover and navigate the emerging startup support ecosystem.

The UnCollege: Learning Outside University

Sunday, March 11, 3:30PM – 4:30PM, by Dale Stephens.

Since 1980, the cost of college has risen more than 350% and the average student has more than $25,000 in debt. It used to be that each year of college correlated to an significant increase in lifetime earnings, but 44.4% of college graduates under the age of twenty-five are unemployed or working jobs that don’t require their degree. College teaches us conformity rather than innovation, rather than learning, and theory rather than application. Imagine if the millions of kids sitting in class started their own companies, their own causes, their own initiatives. Imagine if we approached learning in small groups like the French Salons, gathering to discuss, challenge, and support each other in changing the world. This may sound crazy, but I’m an unschooler. While my peers went to school, I started businesses, helped build a library, worked on political campaigns, lived in France, found mentors, and worked at a start-up. College isn’t the only path to success.

Using Big Data Takes Machines & Human
Sunday, March 11, 3:30PM – 4:30PM, by Arnab Gupta.

Using Big Data Takes Machines & Humans Man vs. machine – usually, good (man) versus evil (machine) — has long been the stuff of scary science fiction. And now as machines master more advanced processes, the prospect that thinking machines will outperform and ultimately replace thinking humans becomes more real and threatening. Example: IBM’s Watson, an advanced AI machine that’s squared off against Jeopardy’s best human contestants and won. But Arnab Gupta, CEO of Big Data analytics firm Opera Solutions, believes “humans vs. machines” is the wrong construct. Humans PLUS machines is far more powerful. Marrying machines’ ability to discern patterns in Big Data with humans’ ability to derive meaning from this output enables far better decisions. It’s the next wave in productivity.How to accomplish this, when machines and people speak different languages and “think” differently? At SXSW, Arnab will explore the power of “machine + humans” and discuss ways to create collaboration.