Ignite Boston 5

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 9

The fifth Ignite Boston will be Thursday, February 12, from 5pm to 9pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'.

Since there is limited space at the Hooley House, you must RSVP here to secure a chance to attend. By RSVPing you will also have the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend.

From 5-5:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, on to the select keynotes. Then, onto the lightening talks.

We will be posting the talks as soon as we have a list of all speakers. If you would like to speak, please go here and enter a talk. We hope to see you at the Hooley House Thursday evening February 12.

Ignite Boston 4 - Tonight!

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 7

The fourth Ignite Boston is this Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston. Don't miss out on hearing a special keynote by Tim O'Reilly. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will be other giveaway items like tee-shirts and O'Reilly books that will be distributed during the event.

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New iPhoneLive Conference in November

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 8

Please welcome Raven Zachary, an iPhone maven and the chair for our new conference. He will be blogging on Radar about iPhone and mobile issues. -- Brady

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new O'Reilly Media conference focused on the emerging iPhone ecosystem - iPhoneLive. Apple's iPhone is having a profound impact on the mobile telephony and computing industries, reshaping how we think about mobility and defining an entirely new class of devices. Whether you're already building apps for the iPhone or are a developer who wants to make a move to the iPhone platform; if you're an entrepreneur or simply an enthusiast of the iPhone, this is the event for you. I am the conference co-chair, along with Bill Dudney, an iPhone developer and author.

This one-day event scheduled for November 18, 2008, in San Jose, California, will explore the business and development issues surrounding the iPhone platform. There are two main iPhone themes at this year's event - Build (core iPhone development) and Launch (launch readiness and business issues).

iPhoneLive will also feature Launch Pad, a showcase for the coolest, not-yet-public apps and startups. The iPhoneLive Launch Pad presents an opportunity for iPhone developers and entrepreneurs to unveil new applications and startups at a major event. There are a limited number of slots available for iPhoneLive Launch Pad, and there is no cost to participate. The deadline for submitting a proposal to participate is September 30th.

With only eleven weeks remaining before the event, we won't be doing a call for papers this year, but there is still time for community input into the conference program. We're finalizing our speakers and panelists now. We'd love to hear from you. Do you have any recommendations for speakers and panelists? What would make this conference a must-attend event for you? Please send an email to iphone-idea@oreilly.com with your ideas for iPhoneLive.

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Ignite Boston 3 - Next week

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 0

The third Ignite Boston will be next week - Thursday, May 29, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend.

From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynotes by Jonathan Zdziarski and John Viega to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto the lightening talks.

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Neuroscience and Epistemology at ETech

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 8

At ETech, I had a fascinating conversation with Marie Bjerede, VP and General Manager of Qualcomm's Portland Design Center. She was telling me how the threads we'd brought together at ETech had validated her own thinking and helped her bring together her private passions and her professional life. I asked her to write up our conversation, and she agreed. Here's what Marie wrote (links are mine):

For years, I’ve been secretly (almost shamefully) allowing my hobby to seep into my work. I’m a high-tech executive for a living. I get paid to be rational, logical, objective, and analytical. And I get paid to produce results. But, being blessed with a team with the relentless habit of constantly producing results, I’ve had the luxury of tinkering. Not the metrics-driven six-sigma efficiency-oriented tinkering that a hard-headed technical leader can point to with pride. No, my tinkering is based in my hobby: epistemology (the branch of philosophy that asks the question, “What is knowledge?” “How do we know?”)

Over the past decade, an increasing number of popular books have been published that address classic questions in epistemology by drawing on recent research in neuroscience and results based on brain imaging. From Daniel Goleman’s work in emotional and social intelligence leading to his writings on research with the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute, to Gerald Edelman’s mind-blowing denunciation of mind-body duality via neural darwinism, to Antonio Damasio’s explication of the physical origins and building blocks of feeling and emotion, a picture has begun to emerge. A picture of minds that are entailed by their biology: brains that can act either as massively parallel processors that identify patterns and signal the pattern-matching results with emotions or as serial processors where any given set of inputs will lead, through inductive and deductive reasoning, to logical conclusions. Intuition and gut feelings come from one kind of thought, reason from another. Together, they balance each other and fill in each other’s blind spots.

So how does the balance of intuitive and logical thinkers affect a team’s results? Does it affect the balance between creativity and efficiency? What about individual and collective emotional and social intelligence? Are there brain states that enhance or degrade effectiveness, and if so, can they be learned (or unlearned)? How do beings with 4 billion of years of evolutionary selection for multi-modal communication fare in a digital, pure-verbal environment? How do physical spaces affect team results? These are the kinds of questions that have driven my compulsive tinkering. I’ve taken to referring to it as “applied epistemology” and considering myself a lay practitioner. One whose predilections, of necessity, are not discussed in tough-minded company.

Then, this Tuesday I was blown away. First, I got to see Elizabeth Churchill’s surprising and insightful presentation on socially oriented experience. Not only did she use Damasio’s work to lay a foundation for her explanations, she began with Descartes and worked her way there! Shortly thereafter I was fortunate enough to see Nicole Lazzaro’s very thoughtful treatment of the emotions and mental states that drive satisfying gaming experiences - again, including Damasio in the foundation as well as a shout-out to Paul Ekman’s work on universal emotions. That evening, I had the opportunity to hear first hand from John McCarthy himself how philosophy was foundational to his work in Artificial Intelligence, a theme which he elaborated on in his challenging Wednesday morning keynote (liberally referencing John Searle’s speech act theory.) Finally, there was Kathy Sierra’s delightfully provocative treatise on what neuroscience has to tell us about expertise, focus, and practice. Such a diverse set of insights that, to me, all look like varied applications of modern epistemology!!

So. Much gratitude for the useful brain states this emergent pattern has evoked. Epistemology is coming out of the closet for me!

Marie's comments were music to my ears. A lot of what we try to do at ETech (as well as at other conferences and gatherings) is to bring together people who are connected in ways that are not obvious. We see an idea bubbling up, and try to build a program that helps other people to see the same trends that we do.

In the case of the connections between neuroscience, epistemology and computers, we've been noodling on this for a while. The success of Mind Hacks in 2004 showed us just how much people are fascinated with neuroscience; Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users helped us to see how it impacts product design and professional learning; we started seeing how game designers are the new rock stars of the computer industry, because they understand the role of emotion in application design.

Even further out, through our foo camp process (which could be summarized as "interesting people will lead you to interesting topics"), we found ourselves surprised by the number of people who are interested in "hacking their own brains." (See Ed Boyden and Ramez Naam for two examples.) But this idea is hitting the mainstream. Timo Hannay pointed us to a recent poll in Nature about the legitimacy of using drugs to boost brain power.

But hey, if you read Steve Levy's profile of me in Wired a few years ago, or John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, you'd realize that these connections between the science of mind and computer science are deeply rooted. As we pursue the idea of collective intelligence (which as I've often noted is the very heart of Web 2.0), we also go deeper into the question of just what intelligence is. We're all closet epistemologists at O'Reilly... :-)

(I can't resist a plug for Steve Talbott's two books, The Future Does Not Compute, which I published in 1995, and Devices of the Soul, which I published last year. Steve asks what parts of our humanity we are leaving out in our pursuit of technology -- are we creating machines like us, or are we making ourselves more like them? Unlike Steve, I believe in the possibilities of machine intelligence, and but he provides an insightful and necessary challenge to assumptions about the benefits of technology.)