Janna Quitney Anderson, assistant professor in the School of Communications, spoke as a featured presenter at Accelerating Change 2005 Sept. 16-18 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
The conference called together hundreds of today’s most broad-minded, multidisciplinary, and practical change leaders to consider the twin trends of artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification from global, national, business, social and personal foresight perspectives.
Other presenters included Ray Kurzweil, winner of the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology; Vernor Vinge, mathematician and computer scientist; Esther Dyson, editor at large for CNET Networks; George Gilder, futurist and presidential adviser; Joichi Ito, founder of Technorati; Jon Udell, the lead analyst for InfoWorld; Thomas Malone, founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Sciences; Shun-Jie Ji, of the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies at Tamkang University; Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, the 3D online world; Blake Ross, co-creator of Mozilla Firefox; Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google; Patrick Lincoln, director of the SRI Computer Science Laboratory; Terry Winograd, director of Computer-Human Interactive Programs at Stanford University; and Steve Jurvetson, managing director of the leading venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Anderson’s 30-minute mainstage presentation during the Saturday-afternoon session of the conference included highlights from her research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. She built the presentation around futuristic data gathered for the Elon University and Pew Internet “Imagining the Internet” database.
Anderson was accompanied to the conference by Elon student Scott Myrick and TV Services staff member Bryan Baker. The trio set up an interviewing station at the conference where they gathered more than eight hours of video interviews of conference presenters and attendees making predictive statements about the future of networks. A School of Communications senior capstone group will take the material gathered at the conference and package it into multimedia presentations for use on the “Imagining the Internet” website (http://www.elon.edu/predictions).
The event was hosted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit corporation that seeks to improve the way we look at the future through research, education, consulting and selective advocacy of communities and technologies of accelerating change. ASF promotes a multidisciplinary and critical understanding of change, and it was created because discovering which technologies have the greatest potential benefit in each environmental context and selectively advancing those in a culturally sensitive manner while regulating and mitigating destabilizing technologies is more vital today than at any previous time. (http://www.accelerating.org)