Futurism
The US agency behind accelerating self-driving cars, robotic prosthetics and humanoid robotics will be holding a new conference later this year to examine future technology. The Wait, What forum will feature speakers from various fields, from medicine to astronomy. |
Wait, What? is a forum on future technologies … on their potential to radically change how we live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security.
Wait, What? is for forward-thinking scientists, engineers and other innovators interested in thinking interactively about the nature and scope of future technologies, their potential application to tomorrow’s technical and societal challenges and the quandaries those applications may themselves engender.
Speakers at Wait, What? include:
Gunnar Carlsson - The Anne and Bill Swindells Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. He specializes in a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shape. Theoretical study of topology started in the 1700s but starting in the late 1990s, Carlsson pioneered the applied use of topology to solve complex real-world problems.
In the early 2000s, this work led to research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DARPA to study the application of topological data analysis (TDA) to problems of interest within the U.S. government. In 2008, based on the success of these efforts, Gunnar, along with two other Stanford mathematicians, co-founded Ayasdi, a company that is commercializing topological methods for data analysis.
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expertise includes biotechnology regulation, bioethics, public health law, food and drug law, stem cell policy, torts and legislative drafting.
Charo served on President Obama’s transition team, where she was a member of the HHS review team, focusing her attention particularly on transition issues related to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), bioethics, stem cell policy and women’s reproductive health. From 2009-2011, she served as a senior policy advisor on emerging technology issues in the Office of the Commissioner at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. A member of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) and Committee on Science, Technology and Law, she cochaired the committee that drafted the National Academies’ Guidelines for Embryonic Stem Cell Research.
Karl Deisseroth - A pioneer in optogenetics, using light to turn individual working neurons on and off at will Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His laboratory has worked on developing and applying highresolution tools for controlling (optogenetics.org) and mapping (clarityresourcecenter.org) specific well-defined elements within intact and fully-assembled biological systems.
His research laboratory continues to develop and apply these and other tools (integrated with optical, electrophysiological, computational, molecular, and behavioral approaches) for the study of neural physiology and behavior in freely moving mammals. His research group is interested both in natural behaviorally relevant neural circuit dynamics, and in pathological dynamics underlying neuropsychiatric disease symptomatology and treatment.
Jeff Gore - A physicist discovering the fundamental rules of population dynamics, collapse and tipping points through microbes Gore joined the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Assistant Professor in January 2010 after spending the previous three years in the Department as a Pappalardo Fellow working with Alexander van Oudenaarden. With the support of a Hertz Graduate Fellowship, in 2005 he received his Ph.D. from the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate research in single-molecule biophysics was done in the laboratory of Carlos Bustamante, focusing on the study of twist and torque in single molecules of DNA.
Will Marshall - A space entrepreneur launching flocks of small satellites to image all of Planet Earth, every day Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. Prior to launching Planet Labs, he was a scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). He was deputy system’s engineer on NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission and a science team member for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission. He was co-principal investigator on NASA’s PhoneSat nanosatellite mission and the technical lead on research projects in space debris remediation.
Mark Norell - Norell is Division Chair and Curator-in-Charge, Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School. Dr. Norell works in several areas of specimen-based and theoretical research. He works on the description and relationships among coelurosaurs and studies elements of the Asian Mesozoic fauna. He analyzes important new "feathered" dinosaurs from Liaoning, China, and develops theoretical methods for better understanding phylogenetic relationships and patterns in the fossil record.
Dr. Norell's theoretical work focuses on developing methodology for evaluating the effect of missing data on large data sets, sensitivity methods for character weighting, and using phylogeny to estimate patterns in the fossil record such as diversity and extinction. Much of his new research focuses on the evolution of the avian brain. He also studies the relationship between stratigraphic position and phylogenetic topology.
Ramesh Raskar - Raskar is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction.
In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide.
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli- Sangiovanni-Vincentelli holds the Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. His research covers design methodologies, and tools for wireless sensor networks, embedded systems, hybrid systems, cyber physical systems (CPS), systems of systems (SoS) and electronic design automation.
Sangiovanni-Vincentelli was a co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in electronic design automation. He is Chairperson of the Comitato Nazionale dei Garanti per la Ricerca (CNGR).
He received the Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of California and the IEEE Graduate Teaching Award for “inspirational teaching of graduate students.” He has received numerous research awards, including the Kaufman Award and the IEEE/RSE Maxwell Medal.
Zach Serber - A recent co-founder of Zymergen, Serber is a scientist and entrepreneur devoted to finding alternatives to petroleum. His goal is to expand the impact and reach of industrial microbial fermentation. He recently co-founded Zymergen to expand the impact and reach of industrial microbial fermentation. Zymergen applies radical new methods to design and improve microbes by rewriting their DNA. This capability allows the company to generate novel chemicals and advanced materials far faster, at lower costs, and with less risk than ever before.
Serber was previously the Director of Biology at Amyris where he worked on manufacturing bio-derived transportation fuels, on lowering the cost of the anti-malarial drug Artemisinin, and on developing advanced tools for engineering biology.
Lucianne Walkowicz - Walkowicz is an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Henry Norris Russell Fellow in the department of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. She studies stellar magnetic activity and its effects on planetary habitability using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission.
Jun Ye - Ye is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and a fellow of both the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JILA, a joint institute between NIST and CU. His research focuses on the frontier of light-matter interactions and includes ultrasensitive laser spectroscopy, optical frequency metrology, quantum optics using cold atoms and the science behind ultrafast lasers.
Along with a series of keynote speeches, the conference will feature the following demonstrations:
What's In My Network?
- When it comes to benefiting from information, trust is a must. Today, however, code, text, images and other forms of data can easily be manipulated. DARPA is developing technologies to ensure the integrity of the data upon which critical decisions are made. These efforts include formal methods for embedded operating systems that are unhackable for specified security properties; automated cyber defense capabilities that respond to attacks so rapidly and effectively as to make attackers consider other lines of work; and tools for comprehensive awareness and understanding of the abstract information systems environment in real time.
- At the same time, the bottleneck to wise decision making is not a lack of data but a lack of capacity to identify and understand the most important data. DARPA is developing novel approaches to derive insights from massive datasets and to map behavior patterns at scale; advanced search technologies for discovery, organization and presentation of domain-specific content; and privacy-preserving technologies that enable systems in which private data may be used for its intended purpose and no other.
Across the Spectrum
- The electromagnetic spectrum functions as the eyes, ears, and voice of modern society. As the spectrum grows more crowded and as technologies from software-defined radios to advanced cameras become commonplace, new opportunities for innovation abound. In the visible and infrared, new advances are creating representations of the world beyond human perception. In the radio frequency domain, we're learning how to thrive in chaos as multiple parties negotiate spectrum use on the fly. And in the territory between these RF and optical domains, promising new devices are starting to emerge that operate in this previously unattainable portion of the spectrum.
Robotics Fact vs Fiction
- For decades, we have dreamed of robots that can help people perform tasks beyond the factory floor. But some basic skills are still in need of significant refinement. Compared to human beings and animals, robot mobility and manipulation are still relatively infantile—especially when it comes to operating in disaster zones or other disturbed or extreme environs, where the need for human substitutes is often greatest. DARPA is spurring rapid change in this promising field, developing human-supervised robots that can execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded environments, as well as increasingly autonomous systems capable of understanding and learning from scenes and events so they can help their human operators become more effective.
Where, When?
- Knowing exactly where you are, how to get from there to where you're going, and how long it will take have become everyday expectations in modern America and are essential for every military mission. Our dependence on the Global Positioning System that makes all this possible is so great that it is becoming an economic and security vulnerability. DARPA is working to break our addiction to GPS by establishing new and better navigational and timing technologies, driving new microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), harnessing the physics of cold atoms, and establishing new fix systems.
Restoring Injured Bodies and Brains
- Recent advances in neuroscience, microelectronics, and information science are sparking new approaches to restoring lost abilities following brain injury or disease and eventually increasing human performance. Think implantable neural interfaces able to bypass broken circuits in the brain, helping patients overcome injury-induced memory deficits. Or therapeutic neural pulses to mitigate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Or prosthetic hands laced with bio-interfaced sensors so an amputee putting on a shirt can "feel" the texture of the fabric and the coolness of the buttons.
Programming the Living World
- Biology is capable of seemingly impossible feats: it can replicate, it can scale from one to billions in hours, it can self-heal, it can learn, and it can evolve. A new technology vector at the intersection of biology, information science, and engineering is launching an era in which biological systems such as microbes can be programmed through the genetic code, enabling us to harness their unparalleled capabilities. DARPA is applying tools from data science, computing, automation, and miniaturization to accelerate the ability to harness biology's synthetic and functional capabilities. The goal is to create revolutionary bio-based manufacturing platforms that can enable new production paradigms, new approaches to medicine, and new materials.
Outpacing Infectious Disease
- As the 2014 Ebola outbreak demonstrated, emerging infectious diseases can be a significant threat not just to individual health but also to the stability of fragile communities. Yet even as the number of emerging diseases has increased, the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics has not kept pace. How do we nip infectious disease in the bud? DARPA is developing genetic and immunological technologies to detect, diagnose and treat infectious diseases with unprecedented precision and rapidity, and platforms for predicting the mutational evolution of viruses so drugs and vaccines can be developed before they are needed.
Online registration for the general public is now open. Click here to register by July 31st.
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