Media X Conference, April 16-17, 2007
"Pretty soon your medical personnel will be crawling around inside your data sets."
For the past four years Stanford University has held a show-and-tell conference for partners and affiliates involved in new interactive applications. MediaX highlights research in biometrics, wireless network sensors, gaming, virtual economies with mechanisms for rewarding participants. They promise to include in the research conclusions "what has been awkward, difficult, or even disastrous." The presenters come from the schools of business, education, medical, and engineering.
I am approaching this as someone interested in where this may lead for our very affluent region (Silicon Valley) but also questioning how much relevance this has for people just getting their hands on commodity computers and relatively slow networks, people who hope the electricity works when they need to go online, and people without a lot of time or money to spend in front of a mobile phone, computer, or television screen. These sessions feature accomplished chefs preparing outstanding and innovative meals when some of my constituents are just waiting for the next sack of wheat, corn meal, or milk powder to be distributed in their village. Others ARE well fed already and might like to see what's on the menu for tomorrow.
Chuck House, director of Media X and highly decorated computer scientist, welcomes a crowd of 200 plus at the Stanford Alumni Center for a day and a half of presentations. There will be ten speakers on Monday and the 22 on Tuesday. Media X wants to participate in the Web 2.0 world. House says the challenge is to make technology transfer from the academic research environment to the business world with high profile models such as HP, Yahoo!, and Google in his mind. Media X is interdisciplinary and seeks to help find unpublished work in progress and to connect faculty/students with industry contacts. He asks, "How do you anticipate the unanticipated?" I'm wondering what, if any, will be the role of open source and sharing, rather than simply the academic lab to commercial product path.
Each speaker took about twenty minutes. During the whole afternoon about five questions were posed by the audience, but there were breakout rooms far from the conference hall (and break time refreshments) where you could discuss projects with some of the presenters. In spite of the one-way broadcast mode, I learned a lot and did not mind watching and listening for four hours.
*Robert Sutton gave a sort of inspirational talk on "treating your organization as an unfinished prototype." After a year long ethnographic study of IDeo, the famous design firm, he is trying to bring design thinking to business theory. He mentioned that Yahoo has dozens of experiments going on at once because they have such a large user base, and if they change a web site they have a built-in control group. In one case they moved the search box from the left to the center of the screen, and the increased click-throughs brought in about $20 million extra in revenue. Sutton offered advice from Andy Grove, former head of Intel:
-act under temporary conviction as if it were a real conviction. Correct course very quickly. If you are depressed, you can't motivate your staff. So you have to keep your spirits up even though you well understand that you don't know what you're doing.-
If only Rumsfeld and his boss had heeded the second sentence...
*Sebastian Thrun runs the Stanford Racing Team. They won the DARPA grand challenge for robotic vehicles in 2005 when their car navigated 150 miles off road in the Mojave desert. Using the prize money 
and sponsorship from Google, Intel, VW this year's Passat is equipped with devices that can scan 360 degrees and has a GPS system with 5 cm of accuracy. Because this year's race will be in traffic (not just scrub and sagebrush), the VW has a databank of 11,000 car images so it can sense when a car is in front or in back. There is a 3D laser to sense other objects that are rendered, and maps to show the progress. The image to the left shows the VW after it has calculated it can pass one car and avoid another. I immediately thought of the military applications, and indeed Thrun predicted a production military vehicle would be off the assembly line in 2015 and a car for the public in 2030. His dream is right out of Popular Science from the 1950's or GM's Futurama where the family travels in a bubble car chatting, playing cards, and watching TV. he added that you could do your email after pushing the "chauffeur" button.
B.J. Fogg of the Persuasive Technology lab thinks otherwise. "How email cheapens your life and 5 things you can do about it." He has a new book called "Mobile persuasion" about the future behavior attributed to cell phones. As for email, he believes the more you use it to manage your closest relationships, the worse those relationships become. For distant contacts it's okay but not for close friends and family.
People far away can be brought closer, but those close to us drift away. Our happiness is dependent on our closest relationships not those far away.
The solution:
1. Focus on the most important relationships.
2. Share your emotions.
3. Know details about someone else.
4. Give gifts with shared meaning.
5. Use email for just those things where you have to use it.
His own enterprise www.yackpack.net and pbwiki.com
allow you to connect with friends using voice messages and recordings. His demo found most of his close friends online (perhaps waiting for this particular demo), and I thought that was fine if you are in the same time zone and connected at home but not for many other situations. Still, it looked like it might serve some of my needs at work.
Paul Saffo, on sabbatical from the Institute for the Future does a great delivery, but his material was not very fresh. However, since he looks ahead so many years, many in the audience had not heard or read it before. He thinks the so-called information revolution is over: "when it goes deep and ubiquitous it becomes meaningless." He explained the main trends since WWII and reminded us that it takes about 20 years for a technology S curve to peak. He is attuned to what doctors called prodomes: indicators or whistles in the Zeitgeist of things that are coming. He thinks that robots are the next big thing. And he closed with the advice to pay attention to how you feel about change.
Qwaq. This is a private virtual space with editing and spatially placed voices in the virtual business offices. Real time collaboration is possible, and you can do markups in shared spaces importing documents from Open Office or proprietary formats. This young business is built on Croquet--which uses Squeak--and is part of an open source consortium. At the end of March 2007 they released the software toolkit <http://croquetconsortium.org >. Greg Nuyens, CEO, mentioned workers in Tajikistan and Nigeria making use of this, and I asked how it worked in low bandwidth situations. During the breakout XX explained that you need about 60 kbps to move the messages, but most of the work is done in the 3D software on your machine. As for what machines work he said that almost anything less than two years old would be good, and more recently laptop makers prepared for this by including fast video cards because MS Vista had some 3D requirements. My two year old Power PC Mac might not work well he said.
Scott Burns, Director of "an inconvenient truth" spoke about converting Gore's long slide show into a feature film and the process they used to shape it. I still don't understand why they focused more on Gore and what kind of guy he is now rather than the topic at hand. Bringing in his family crises might be appropriate for the campaign trail but not a movie like this.
"Unleash your inner video producer" Dave Toole and J.D. Lasica (author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation) run Ourmedia.org ("It's your Internet") to encourage people to make their own videos using original material or combinations from different sources. They now have 130,000 users but seem to feel they are in the shadow of YouTube--along with the 360 other video hosting sites around the world. Their talk encourages sharing, and they are trying to build a community based on open source. They are looking for sponsors to build up the online learning center, and I pointed them to Video Volunteers and should also mention Pixel Corps.
Roy Pea, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning spoke about 'video conversations' --not recordings of conversations but the discussions about videos which could yield more content than the video. He demoed Diver, a tool that can point to and annotate video, much like footnotes in a text document.
House introduced the 3D visualization talk by Paul Brown of the medical school: "If you have not experienced Second Life next year we won't let you in," he joked. Brown gave credit to a commercial company called Fovia as he showed the kinds of fly throughs of high resolution models of anatomy. I never knew how complex my teeth are, and now I understand why root canals are so much fun--and so expensive. Brown showed how you can explore a skull, look inside it, or just roam around the teeth. He remarked,
"Pretty soon your medical personnel will be crawling around inside your data sets." And he showed real time rendering of live patients as well as Sherit, a little girl who had been dead for thousands of year: a mummy from San Jose's Rosicrucian museum. In one minute the device took 490 images and then later it was taken apart using VR methods. Quite an amazing visual impact.
The final speaker was a fellow I knew at Apple, Eric Hoffert who was the principal architect of Apple's QuickTime. He's had several companies since then, and today he showed ShareMethods to encourage "teams that play together." First he went though public tools like wikipedia and Flickr. While ShareNow is a commercial service it is open source and serves as a sales and marketing portal. What was most impressive was the claimed adoption rate by the the employees (who may not have had any say in choosing the system introduced by the IT department). I need to find out more about it.
Today I had a visit from Steve Vosloo, a Reuters Digital Vision fellow at Stanford. His project is called Digital Hero Book Project, based in Capetown, South Africa originally. Children were aided in writing a paper book with their own stories to help them cope with crises. The next step was to digitize the books and put them online. One Zambian writer's book cover is shown at the left. At Stanford, Vosloo is working with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley which does training in sophisticated media tools to make movies of people's stories. He is working with schools in the Western Cape and in India and the US, while looking at techniques where mobile phone cameras can be used to capture story material.
We traded information about his projects and others that might be of interest to him such as Video Volunteers and OurMedia and discussed the upcoming iCommons conference in Croatia. Vosloo recently made a presentation before a foundation, a corporation, and a venture capitalist, all of whom gave him suggestions as he prepares to look for more support to continue the project at the end of his time with the Reuters program.
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