... and points beyond » ETech08

Great talk from Nathan Eagle of MIT

Jay Jakosky — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:32:02 +0000

It figures that I’d be upset about the lack of quality in the ETech presentations and walk right into an excellent talk by Nathan Eagle of MIT. Nathan’s research included giving phones to students and faculty at MIT that tracked location (both as a cell tower and as described by SMS), proximity to other Bluetooth-enabled phones, and the state of the phone such as talking or charging. Then the audience was floored by the ease of predicting behavior, inferring relationships, and determining personal attributes of the user.

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ETech 2008 (Day 2)

Jay Jakosky — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:11:14 +0000

Lawrence Lessig speaks tonight in a keynote that I’m certainly looking forward to. Generally, ETech includes too few presentations that are delivered by alpha geeks and concerned with emerging technology. If this really is the next wave of innovation being presented here, what’s missing is why and how it will make a difference. A solid presentation about emerging technology needs to outline what the questions are that have yet to be answered, the possible future, the impact and things like that. All these qualities were included in Stan William’s talk, Saul Griffith’s talk and today’s talk from Mike Walsh about the “Asian Media Revolution”.

ETech 2008

Jay Jakosky — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:49:41 +0000

Two talks stuck out today. One was a brief talk from Saul Griffith of Makani Power. What I took away from the talk was the impracticality of many renewable energy sources such as tidal power and wind power. A combination of all renewable options, with an emphasis on solar and a strong conservation element will be required to simply maintain our current consumption, let alone address growing desires from China and other developing countries.

Another standout talk that actually shared a bent on energy consumption, was by Stan Williams of HP Labs. His lab is researching several pieces of the exabyte and zetabyte computing puzzle. To paraphrase Stan, “We can’t use spinning disks in zetabyte computing because we’ll start torquing the earth” and that “using a zetabyte computer to model the earth’s climate will have to include the computer itself as it will be the single largest actor on the earth’s climate.” The tie-in with Saul’s talk is that a zetabyte computer made of modern components would require 3 terawatts of electricity, which I immediately remembered as the total energy that could be harnessed from tidal power before bringing the oceans to a standstill. Of course, we would also have to include that in the climate model.