26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 1-4 September 2015
Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus
26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 1-4 September 2015
Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus
Yiannis Laouris is a social and business entrepreneur, a neuroscientist and systems engineer. He is founder of the Cyprus Neuroscience and Technology Institute, chairs Future Worlds Center and is Acting Rector of N.E.T.S. Laouris is founding member and elected Secretary General of the Cyprus Society for Systemic Studies, member of the Board of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras and member of the Board of a numerous high-tech companies. His team, comprising of 34 full-time scientists and many volunteers and interns, focuses on projects at the interface of science and society. They promote the application of broadband technolgies and structured democratic dialogue as tools to bridge the digital; economic educational and inter-personal divides in our planet as well to reinvent democracy by engaging people from all walks of life in designing ideal futures. He pioneered in the application of the Structured Dialogic Design process (SDD) in the Cyprus and the Middle East peace movement and in many pan-European networks; his work in neuroscience, applied systems science and peace, and in the neuroscience of learning was published in several books and many scientific papers and was honored with numerous awards. His current focus is to develop systems to enable scaling up participatory dialogic processes to engage asynchronously thousands of participants in meaningful authentic dialogues, thus accelerating institutional and societal change.
The exponential growth of the web, in connection with all its derivatives and all scientific, social, economic and other consequences, created the widely accepted notion that the future(s) is (are) digital. This could not be more wrong and more misleading. Indeed, at least for the next couple of decades, the futures are hybrid in all aspects and in practically all domains. For example, we are still far away from an educational system that operates only in virtual worlds. Friends’ circles in social networking sites turn out to serve primarily the sustainability of existing real world friendships. While simulations and software (virtual instrument) solutions were trendy during the last few decades, we now witness a rapid development in robotics. Flying (i.e., drones), ground robots (i.e., robot dogs), and microcontrollers, fully equipped with sensors and actuators are about to massively populate every natural or man-made environment.
This talk will discuss how underlying principles of hybrid futures evade and dictate developments in every aspect of IT, ranging from education and HCI, to visualizations and digital humanities, all grounded in the intelligent linking between software algorithms and physical infrastructures.
The implications for the Anthropocene will be highlighted and discussed.
Barry Smyth (BSc, PhD, Hon. DTech, MRIA) is a scientist and entrepreneur. He holds the DIGITAL Chair of Computer Science at University College Dublin and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Barry is a Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, a €88m national research centre funded by Science Foundation Ireland and industry partners, and with more than 200 researchers at universities including UCD, DCU, UCC, and NUIG.
Barry's research interests cover a broad range of topics in the area of artificial intelligence and information discovery and he has published more than 400 scientific articles in leading journals and conferences. Barry is also an entrepreneur. He co-founded ChangingWorlds (acquired by Amdocs in 2008) and HeyStaks, and he serves on the board of the Irish Times Trust in addition to advising a range of early stage startups. Barry was awarded an honorary doctorate of technology (DTech) from Robert Gordon University in 2014.
In our increasingly digitized world almost everything we do creates a record that is stored somewhere, whether we are purchasing a book, calling a friend, ordering a meal, or renting a movie. And in the world of the sensor web this is no longer limited to our online activities: exercising in the park, shopping for groceries, falling asleep, or even taking a shower, are just some of the everyday activities that are likely to generate data. This is the world of the sensor web.We must understand how we can (and whether we should) use this information to enable better decisions. Better decisions for where we might live or where to send our kids to school. Better decisions about the food we eat and the exercise we should take.
This talk will discuss the origins of the sensor web and the attendant big data revolution.
We will explore how these ideas suggest new ways of thinking about some of society's toughest challenges and how the resulting technologies will impact on our everyday lives now and in the future.
