program

The Lift12 program is almost final now, and I am happy to announce three exciting speakers:

Maximilian Busser
Owner & CCO at MB&F
Maximilian is an innovator in an otherwise conservative world. He has a passion for working with the most talented independent horological professionals to create a totally different dimension.

Sean Park @anthemis
Founding investor at Anthemis
Sean has been involved as founding investor in a number of disruptive and highly successful new ventures such as Betfair, Weatherbill, Seedcamp and BankSimple and has extensive experience investing in and advising start-up and high growth companies in addition to over 16 years of experience working at a senior level in capital markets and investment banking. Building businesses has been a key theme throughout his career. He is the co-founder of Anthemis Group and the author of The Park Paradigm.

Xavier Dietlin @xdietlin
Founder at Dietlin
A former professional soccer player, Xavier is now an artist and innovator, crafting the world's most innovative displays for the luxury industry.

Xavier is doing the kind of things you see in the video below. He will demo his latest creations on stage, and bring them to the Lift experience space where Lifters will be able to play and test the displays themselves!

To see the full list of Lift12 speakers, click here.

Here is a quick overview of the themes we chose for Lift12:

Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
Technologies vs people Technology and/in crisis	The Mobile World Changes in the Luxury Industry Beyond Finance The New Face of Gaming Alp ICT Venture Night	Stories Near futures Extreme Amateurs

Sessions in more details

Below you will find the first description of each session. Please note all this is beta, and will undergo MASSIVE change in the coming weeks. Consider this the first iteration of a long, collaborative process. Take the wiki approach: if something is broken, fix it!

What do you think?

Please give us your feedback using the comments below, or on info@liftconference.com.
For each one of these themes, we are now seeking sub-themes and speakers. For example: sub themes on Mobile are "usage of mobile while shopping", "geolocalized marketing", "mobile banking", etc.

Please contribute your ideas, especially people you know personally and that we could invite on your behalf.

Marie Elisabeth Boury (MEB) is a creator of Synapses, Executive Coach & Team Facilitator, specialized in leading through complexity & transformational leadership. She is a former Top Executive in the New Techs & Professor at Sciences Po & Dauphine (Paris). She is also a philosopher and a specialist in oriental cultures & languages.

She currently works on the resonances between New Techs, New World and New Leadership. In Marseille for Lift France 11, she'll be running "The LIFT Learning Expedition I For a Digital Leadership" as an event-within-the-event. Participants of the "Learning Expedition" are a small group of Corporate Leaders coming from all over Europe. This is a continuation of the program that was launched in February in Geneva at Lift11.

Half of their time will be dedicated to deep diving in the LIFT New Digital Big Event; the other half to giving the executives input on New Worlds, New Words, New Stakes, and working with them exploring the impacts of the Digital World on Leadership.

It's a unique experience and a contributive work to design a new leadership: Digital Leadership.

Contact Marie Elisabeth (meb@thelearningexpedition.info) if you are interested in joining!

Read more on her website: http://www.thelearningexpedition.info/

Robolift's second day is starting after a great day of talks yesterday on the shape of robots, ethics, our emotionnal connection to machine, military usage of robots, and much more. Today's schedule has been slightly adapted to fit an official inauguration that will take place on the main stage at 11:30. Here is the program:

10:00 instead of 10:30 Human-robot interactions (Session starts earlier)
Robots seem to live either in the long-distant future or in the realm of research labs. This vision is wrong and these speakers will show us how nowadays people interact with them in Europe and in Japan. The session will also address how robots can be useful in developing or understanding our emotions.

11:30 Official inauguration

12:00 Lunch

14:00 Conference: Robot Market Focus

16:00 Artificial intelligence: acquired versus programmed intelligence? (Both two-speakers sessions merged into one four-speakers session)
Artificial Intelligence used a recurring objective of engineering. This session will give an overview of the recent progress in this field and the consequences for robotic technologies: How much pre-programming can you put into robotic intelligence? Can robots learn on their own?

The Future of robotics
This session will feature two talks about how robots might be in the future. From assistive care products to new forms of interactions, we will see tomorrow's technologies, their usages and applications.

18:00 End of the day

See the update program here.

A quick update about the robolift conference program I’ve been building over the previous months. The event is in two weeks and I’m looking forward to see the presentations and debates! We finalized the line-up last week and here’s the latest version:

• The Shape of robots to come: What should robots look like? Is it important that robots look like humans or animals? Are there any other possibilities? What alternatives are offered by designers? With Fumiya Iida (Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, ETH Zürich), James Auger, (Auger-Loizeau) and Dominique Sciamma (Strate College).
  
• The social implications of robotics: What does it mean for society to have personal and socially intelligent robots? What are the consequences for people? What are the ethical challenges posed by robots that we can anticipate in the near future? With Cynthia Breazeal (MIT Medialab Personal Robots group), Wendell Wallach (Yale University: Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics) and Patrizia Marti (Faculty of Humanities, University of Siena).
• Expanding robotics technologies: robot hacking, augmented humans and the military uses of robots. As usual with technologies, robots can be repurposed for other kinds of objectives: programmers « hack » them to test new opportunities, the military deploys them on the battlefield, and robotic technologies are adapted to « augment » the human body. What does this mean? What could be the consequences of such repurposing? With Noel Sharkey (Professor of AI and Robotics, University of Sheffield), Daniela Cerqui (Cultural anthropologist, University of Lausanne) and Daniel Schatzmayr (Robot hacker)
• Human-robot interactions: Robots seem to live either in the long-distant future or in the realm of research labs. This vision is wrong and these speakers will show us how nowadays people interact with them in Europe and in Japan. The session will also address how robots can be useful in developing or understanding our emotions. With Frédéric Kaplan (OZWE and Craft-EPFL), Fujiko Suda (Design ethnographer, Project KOBO) and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Evangelist, Lirec)
• Artificial intelligence: acquired versus programmed intelligence? Artificial Intelligence used a recurring objective of engineering. This session will give an overview of the recent progress in this field and the consequences for robotic technologies: How much pre-programming can you put into robotic intelligence? Can robots learn on their own? With Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (INRIA) and Jean-Claude Heudin (Institut International du Multimédia)
• The Future of robotics: This session will feature two talks about how robots might be in the future. From assistive care products to new forms of interactions, we will see tomorrow’s technologies, their usages and applications. With Tandy Trower (Hoaloha Robotics) and Jean-Baptiste Labrune (Lab director at Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent)
• Debate: Errare Humanoid est? Should robots look like humanoid? How do/will people interact with them? To conclude the conference, we will get back to the topic of the first session and discuss the importance of humanoid shapes in robotic development: Is it necessary? What are the limits and what opportunities? What could be the alternatives? With Bruno Maisonnier (Founder of Aldebaran Robotics) and Francesco Mondada (Researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics, EPFL).

Thanks to all the speakers who accepted to participate!

With just 3 days to go until Lift11 starts, you can now download and print our program and participant guide.

The program contains all information on the sessions and workshops, and the participant guide will give you a brief introduction to Geneva, and our social events.

We look forward to seeing you very soon!

The Lift11 program is almost complete, with many addition made in the recent weeks. To give you a comprehensive preview of the content of the conference, we added a page to our website listing all the presentations to be given on the big stage. Check the full listing and see what Lift11 will be about!

Among the presentations, you will find "Internet, geopolitics and national security" (Ben Hammersley), "Social currencies" (Brian Solis), "The reality of space" (Claude Nicollier), "Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list" (Hasan Elahi), "Four trends for the digital world" (David Galbraith), "Those algorithms that govern our lives" (Kevin Slavin) and many more.

We are working hard with the speakers to define their talks and give you a preview of the content they will share on stage to allow the audience to better understand what to expect. See the interviews coming out weekly, the first ones with Vlad Trifa and Lucie Green.

Quick question for you guys before the week-end: we added to the Lift11 program an inspiring session on space. Space as in "deep space". We have booked three speakers already: an architect who has worked on designing environments for spatial habitation systems, a specialist of the sun, and an artist who listens to space. We would like to also touch on space tourism, one of the biggest change happening to that field and unfolding before our eyes. Do you have ideas of good speakers on that topic?

^{Get your space ticket from Virgin Galactic now, only 200'000$!}

I have been fascinated by the story of Hasan M. Elahi since Wired reported on his full life disclosure policy in 2007. Mistakenly listed on the US terrorist watch list, the Bangladeshi-born American decided to publish his life online in an effort to convince the authorities of his innocence. How could you accuse him of wrongdoings when his total transparency would prove he was just a normal citizen that can be geolocalized at every moment. Hasan stories is a (rare?) example of a loss of privacy becoming a vital feature, and raises interesting questions: did it work (has he been taken off the list?), how did his friends and family react to being photographed and published on the web, what impact on his love life (how do you explain what is happening to a date - preferably without mentioning the list thing ;), how much work was this, are all these traces forming into something interesting?

A lot of questions that we hope we can ask Hasan in person next February.

We have identified that our community comes to the conference looking for two types of content: inspiration/new ideas and concrete/actionnable ideas. We have rebuilt the program of the conference with that in mind, spreading the sessions into different days to allow those who might want to skip sessions to do so more easily. We will also sell day tickets for even more flexibility.

And we need your help: we need to name each day (to display on the program and to put the day tickets on sale), and we would like to hear your propositions. This is the program:

Wednesday Feb. 2, 2011
09:00 Co-creation workshops
11:30 First time participants welcome
14:00 Session: Inspiring stories (1/2)
16:00 Session: Re-organization, the changing workplace
20:00 Lift Fondue

Thursday Feb. 3, 2011
09:00 Workshops
11:00 Session: Engaging users with games
14:00 Session: Building and managing communities
16:00 Session: Community mining, new forms of business intelligence
20:00 Open dinner

Friday Feb. 4, 2011
09:00 Workshops
11:00 Session: Trends and ideas from around the world
14:00 Session: New frontiers
16:00 Session: Inspiring stories (2/2)
22:00 Closing party

Day one is about discovery. Day two about actionnable content you can reuse in your daily life. Day three is about prospective, potential and speculative futures.

So how would you name those days?

Day 1: Discovery day
Day 2: Concrete day
Day 3: Prospective day

What do you suggest?