Alla Gringaus

SXSW 2012 Keynotes I attended

Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

#sxsw #AmberCase @caseorganic
UX Designer and tech writer. TED Speaker. Co-founder of Geoloqi.com.
Portland, OR · http://caseorganic.com/
Birthplace Salt Lake City, Utah
UX designer Amber Case will share insights from her research in cyborg anthropology and talk about what really makes us human. Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist currently working at Vertigo Software. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers. Her main focus is on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She formerly worked at global advertising agency. In 2010, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech. Podcast.

RAY KURZWEIL “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit”

Monday, March 12 at 2:00pm

Legendary visionary Ray Kurzweil will join writer Lev Grossman from TIME Magazine for a mind-expanding conversation about our future on Monday, March 12.

Ray Kurzweil (left) has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s website Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written four national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Computation and Its Impact on the Future

 Today, using wolframalpha computational engine, I found out that there is a minor planet Gringauz (which is the right spelling of my last name) that was discovered in 1989. Its current distance from Earth is 19.4 light minutes, located in constellation Sagittarius and there are other many very interesting facts.  

SXSW Interactive got Founder & CEO OF Wolfram Research and living genius, Stephen Wolfram, to do a SOLO presentation at the conference. I am absolutely honored, excited and stunned to be here.

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.

Each one of Wolfram’s accomplishments is representative of his vision of computation. Stephen’s life work is based on the idea that computation empowers the individual to discover facts and concepts that have never been explored before, with emerging platforms making computation more accessible than ever. His goal at SXSW is to inspire attendees to explore new corners of the computational universe.

Stephen Wolfram has been responsible for three revolutionary developments: the Mathematica computation system, A New Kind of Science, and the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, receiving his Ph D in theoretical physics at the age of 20. Wolfram’s work on basic science led him to a series of fundamental discoveries about the computational universe of possible programs. Summarized in his best-selling 2002 book A New Kind of Science, these discoveries have not only launched major new directions in basic research, but have also led to breakthroughs in scientific modeling in physical, biological and social domains—as well as defining a broad new basis for technology discovery.

Launched in 1988, Mathematica has revolutionized the way technical computation is done, and has been responsible for countless advances over the past two decades. Starting from a set of fundamental principles devised by Wolfram, Mathematica has continually grown, integrating more and more algorithmic domains, and spawning such technologies as the Computable Document Format (CDF).

Building on Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, Wolfram in 2009 launched Wolfram|Alpha—an ambitious, long-term project to make as much of the world’s knowledge as possible computable, and accessible to everyone. Used every day on the web and through apps by millions of people around the world, Wolfram|Alpha defines a fundamentally new kind of computing platform that is turning science-fiction computer intelligence into reality.

In addition to his scientific and technical achievements, Wolfram has been the CEO of Wolfram Research since its founding in 1987. Under Wolfram’s leadership, Wolfram Research has become one of the world’s most respected software companies, as well as a powerhouse of technical and intellectual innovation, and a major contributor to education and research around the world.

#compimpact