Futurists from around the globe will meet in Chicago July 19-21 to discuss technology, education, business, and the future of the human race at WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon, the annual conference of the World Future Society.
Sometimes called a “World’s Fair of Ideas,” WorldFuture 2013 will feature more than 60 sessions, workshops, and special events over the course of two and a half days on such topics as life in the year 2100, nanotechnology, building computers that can think like humans, saving humanity from environmental collapse, the geo-security environment of the future, and the effects of rapidly accelerating technology on business, education, health, and the way we live. The event will take place at the Hilton Chicago Hotel.
Who are “futurists”? They include business and government decision makers, military strategists, educators (and students), and a wide range of individuals and organizations who are interested in knowing the trends that are shaping the world of tomorrow. Registration for this event and membership in the World Future Society is open to the public.
Speakers at this year’s conference will include:
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Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, author of the bestselling book Being Digital, is also a seminal voice in education reform. His One Laptop Per Child program has distributed more than 2.5 million computers to children around the globe.
At WorldFuture 2013, he'll discuss his most recent and bold experiment in education, ever. Here's how he described it recently:
"We have delivered fully loaded tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or instructional material whatsoever.... Within minutes of arrival, the tablets were unboxed and turned on by the kids themselves. After the first week, on average, 47 apps were used per day. After week two, the kids were playing games to race each other in saying the ABCs."
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Ramez Naam
Ramez Naam is the H.G. Wells Award–winning author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Naam spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams working on a variety or projects including artificial intelligence. His most recent nonfiction book is The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (University Press of New England, March 2013), Seattle, Washington, USA.
At WorldFuture 2013, Naam will dive into the perilous challenges that face us as a species, how we’ve overcome similar challenges in the past, and the steps we have to take now to maximize our odds of coming out of the twenty-first century richer and better off than when we entered it. Read Naam's feature article in the March-April issue of THE FUTURIST Magazine
“Humanity is at the peak of its accomplishments and well-being. But we also face the largest challenges we’ve ever seen: climate change, finite fossil fuels, disappearing fish and forests, dwindling freshwater supplies, and the pressures of meeting the needs of billions rising out of poverty,” Naam writes on the World Future Society Web site. “Against these challenges of a finite planet, our most powerful resource is our ability to innovate to produce new solutions, to replace physical resources that have been depleted, and to multiply the power and effectiveness of the physical resources that remain. To tap into our ability to innovate, however, we must make key changes.”
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Sheryl Connelly
"Most people laugh when I tell them I am a professional futurist," says Sheryl Connelly. But her job is no joke. Connelly is the Global Consumer Trends and Futuring Manager for Ford Motor Company. As Ford's corporate futurist, she identifies global trends that feed into functions across the entire company, including design, product development, and corporate strategy. She was recently named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine.
At WorldFuture 2013, she will share her unlikely journey to becoming a corporate futurist.
Opening night kicks off with Futurists: BetaLaunch, a technology petting zoo where engineers, designers and others will present their inventions to the 900 futurists expected to gather for the conference.
Futurists: BetaLaunch is one of the few design and expo showcases that focuses only on future-changing inventions. This year, the event will feature several start-ups right of out Chicago!
Surface Haptics: Northwestern University NxR Lab
The Northwestern University Neuroscience and Robotics (NxR) Laboratory wants to make your texts, apps, and the sites you visit on your smartphone or tablet PC feel more real through a unique, still experimental, interface feature called surface haptics.
According to the NxR Lab, surface haptics would let you “feel objects on the surface of your screen as they dynamically react to your motions.” The flat and shiny surface of your smartphone would be replaced by a tactile and stimulating landscape. The unlock slider would resist your push just enough to let you know it’s there, your fingertip would rise and fall over the “F” in the Facebook app icon. Says the lab: “We are not talking about buzzing; we are talking about making things feel real.”
So far, about a thousand people have experienced surface haptics, according to the Lab.
Details: http://tpadtablet.org/, http://nxr.northwestern.edu/
Portapure
Water is the new oil, we’ve all been told many times. The UN has forecast that half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas by 2030. Rapid urbanization, climate change, and other trends will sweep growing numbers of people into areas where there either isn’t enough physical freshwater for them or where there isn’t sufficient infrastructure to meet rising water demands. It’s a situation that already afflicts 2.8 billion people in the developing world. In many parts of Africa, in particular, women and children are often forced to trek miles to water pumps, wells, and lakes (sometimes controlled by rival villages) and can only bring back a few gallons of water at a time.
George Page, the founder and CEO of Portapure, has developed a solution that gets around infrastructure scarcity to meet rising water demands on an individual level. His company, Portapure, manufactures a five-gallon gravity-flow water filter, good for a family of six, that makes water from any lake, river, or stream safe to drink.
Says Page, “We’ve received a utility patent for our technology along with over $125,000 in pre-sales purchase orders from NGOs, disaster relief groups, and nonprofits operating in developing countries.”
Details: http://portapure.com/
Inkling
Online prediction markets, which allow people to bet on the probabilities of different events occurring, serve as a snapshot for what the public, individuals, or groups are thinking about the future. They’re redefining modern foresight practice, and Chicago-based Inkling has emerged as a key player in this rapidly growing market.
“In most organizations, [prediction markets are] the only forum employees have to anonymously express what they really think is happening with their project or company,” the company wrote in an e-mail.
Inkling has been in existence since 2006 and has already worked with auto manufacturers, oil companies, and major banks. At Futurists: BetaLaunch, they’ll demo their core software suite as well as “some new related stuff we’ve been cooking up.”
Details: http://inklingmarkets.com/
Kilo-App
“Despite all the technology advancements in the past 20 years, video has remained a passive medium,” say the creators of Kilo-App. “Video playback has remained relatively unchanged.” The Kilo-App allows users to manipulate video on their smartphones through the touchscreen* the way an old-medium painter manipulates the colors on her canvas with a brush. Imagine the next generation of Vine, and you have Kilo-App.
Details: http://kilo-app.com/
WindyCitySDR
We think of radio as what communication was like before the Internet: sound and music broadcast from a station over a limited area to a device that you had in your living room. In fact, as information technology spreads from desktop computers to phones to the physical environment in the form of sensors and radio-frequency identification tags, radio signaling plays a part in evermore devices and services. Yet, radio signaling technology hasn’t kept pace with innovation in information technology.
A Chicago start-up, WindyCitySDR, has received a patent for a software-defined radio device. A software radio can switch from being a cell phone to a wireless local area network to an electronic door operator (or what-not) to a closed-channel walkie-talkie.
The hope, according to WindyCitySDR, is to once again make Chicago the “World’s Largest Manufacturer of Mobile Phones.”
Details: www.windycitysdr.com/
CentUp
“There is no way to make money blogging, and all content is just becoming blogs,” goes a familiar complaint about what information technology has done to media. But the real problem is that, if the world is awash in free content, how do publications, writers, musicians, amateur movie directors, and other content creators convince people to support them financially?
CentUp encourages readers, listeners, and Web surfers to donate to their favorite artists through a CentUp button that appears on new posts, uploads, etc. And a portion of the money goes to worthwhile charities doing great work in the developing world. When you reward your favorite blogger (or magazine) for a particularly insightful post, you can help buy school supplies for children in Africa, or support other good work. As the company explains in its promotional video, “We’re trying to make the world gooder, much gooder.” Details: www.centup.org/
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CentUp Video from CentUp on Vimeo.
Blipcare
As much as 30% of the U.S. population over the age of 20 has high blood pressure, a consequence of our sedentary lifestyles and sodium-rich diets. Chronic high blood pressure can lead to compounding health problems later in life, but tracking your blood pressure via paper and pen or even via spreadsheet software is a lot of effort for relatively little reward.
The Blipcare Wi-Fi blood pressure monitor allows users to track their blood pressure (or that of an older parent or grandparent) using a home Wi-Fi network. Users can quickly see how their relationship with food, alcohol, exercise, sleep, and stress influences blood pressure without the hassle of writing down readings several times a day. The system can also send you an alert when you start to go off track.
“Due to ease of use and built-in reminders, users take more readings,” the company writes. “The data can be used to personalize medication timing to improve outcomes (chronotherapy). The changes in behavior patterns can be tracked to predict readmissions or other adverse events.”
Blipcare also produces a Wi-Fi Weight Scale that uses a home Wi-Fi network, which the company will demo at F:BL as well. It turns out that how you step on a scale reveals as much about you (such as your current level of fatigue) as does your weight when you’re on the platform. We simply didn’t have the tools to collect the data for those insights until now.
About the World Future Society
Founded in 1966 as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization in Washington, D.C., the World Future Society has members in more than 80 countries around the world. Individuals and groups from all nations are eligible to join the Society and participate in its programs and activities. The World Future Society publishes the internationally read FUTURIST magazine.
The Society holds a two-day, international conference once a year where participants discuss foresight techniques and global trends that are influencing the future. Previous conference attendees have included future U.S. President Gerald Ford (1974), Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1975), behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner (1984), age-wave expert Ken Dychtwald (2005), U.S. comptroller general David M. Walker (2006) and inventor Ray Kurzweil (2010). Others in attendance typically include business leaders, government officials, scientists, corporate planners, and forecasters from across the globe.
We hope to see some of you there!
Event: WorldFuture 2013
Time: July 19-21
Place: Hilton Chicago Hotel, Chicago Illinois, USA
Web site
http://www.wfs.org/worldfuture-2013-exploring-next-horizon
Contact:
443-756-4205
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