Talk: William Kamkwamba at MIT, October 21

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind:
Elegant Design Out of Junk and Spare Parts

William Kamkwamba
Read about William on CNN's World
See William on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart-October 7th!
Wednesday, October 21
7:00pm
MIT: Room 6-120 — click here for map
Introduced by Amy Smith, founder of D-Lab, MIT

William Kamkwamba, is a senior at the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African high school in Johannesburg, South Africa. A 2007 and 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow, Kamkwamba has been profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and his inventions have been displayed at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. He's often invited to tell his story at such venues as the World Economic Forum in Africa, CES, Aspen Ideas Festival, Maker Faire Africa and the African Economic Forum.

William Kamkwamba will share his story of how he achieved his dream of bringing electricity, light, and the promise of a better life to his family and his village. It started with a bicycle dynamo—simply a pedal-powered wheel that generated light. This taste of electricity (a luxury enjoyed by just two percent of Malawians) filled William with a desire to create. Before long, his scientific curiosity sent him on a quest to build a windmill. Besides dealing with financial obstacles and technical difficulties, William became a self-taught physicist, overcame local superstitions, and withstood being mocked for his “crazy” ideas.

For a full biography of William, please click here.
This program is co-sponsored with the Edgerton Center.

Talk: The Democratization of Innovation, A Conversation with Ray Kurzweil, October 14, 2009

Group Name	Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, MA
Event Name	Innovation Series October 2009
Event Description	Networking and Registration: 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. Program: 6:15 - 8:00 p.m. Post-Event Reception: 8:00-9:00 p.m.
Event Contact	Trish Fleming
Contact Phone	6172538240
Contact Email	trishf@mit.edu
Date	Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Time	6:00 PM until 9:00 PM
Address	MIT Stata Center Kirsch Auditorium, 32-123 32 Vassar Street Cambridge MA

Forum Members: $25
Non-Members: $40
MIT Staff (with valid ID): $25
Students from all universities are FREE with valid ID. Pre-registration encouraged.

REGISTER

Keynote presentation by one of the most prolific and diverse technology innovators followed by a deep conversation led by Sim Simeonov of FastIgnite

Impervious to the roller-coaster ride of the financial markets, the past decade has brought about an unprecedented acceleration in technology development and adoption combined with a rapid decline in the cost of anything touched by IT. Open-source, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, user-generated content, freemium and viral distribution models share one thing in common: they lower the cost of experimentation and make it cheaper and easier to create new things while at the same time destroying existing business models.

The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process. Rapid creation and violent destruction. Many winners and many losers, both big and small. Are there patterns of success in the chaos? Ray Kurzweil definitely thinks so. He has been on the bleeding edge of innovation for decades and his track record is something to admire. Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Following Ray’s keynote presentation, we will go deep with Ray on topics ranging from forecasting technology shifts and timing markets to practical techniques for fostering market-focused innovation to understanding the different roles of the individual entrepreneur vs. the team in venture creation. Iconic entrepreneur and angel investor Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology, Wildfire Communications, and Warner Research will join the conversation.

Keynote:

Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor, entrepreneur, author and futurist
Conversation with:
Bill Warner, serial entrepreneur and investor
Moderator:
Simeon Simeonov, serial entrepreneur and investor

Program Organizers: David E. Brook, Hamilton, Brook, Smith & Reynolds, P.C., Kristen Collins, KMC Partners, Pearl Freier, Cambridge BioPartners, Simeon Simeonov, FastIgnite, Inc

October Colloquia at MIT's Comparative Media Studies

10.08.09 | 5-7 PM | Bartos Theater

Communications Forum: Race, Politics, and American Media

Juan Williams in conversation with Phillip Thompson and David Thorburn

The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many people’s answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?
Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News will discuss these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. This forum is the first of two this term in our ongoing civic media series, a collaboration of the Communications Forum and the Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media.

10.15.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture

Elisa Kreisinger

Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We’ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change.
Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

10.22.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

Transatlantic Acousmatics

John Picker

In 1897, the year The Invisible Man was published, Marconi filed his patent and established the first station for wireless telegraphy, what would become radio. H.G. Wells's novel reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. Picker will begin to argue that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells's protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells's sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells's story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media, the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world.
John Picker is Visiting Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where he arrived this fall after several years as Associate Professor of English at Harvard. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press.

10.29.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

Cinematic Games

Richard Rouse

Many people talk about "cinematic" games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture will present film clips from a number of classic movies, analyze how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggest ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.
Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his bookGame Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven FPS Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

For more information, visit the CMS Events Page.

Lecture: Reflections on the Current H1N1 Flu, October 05

Monday, October 05, 2009 at MIT

Reflections on the Current H1N1 Flu

Speaker: John Barry, influenza historian, author of "The Great Influenza," and board member of the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals

Time: 2:00p–3:30p

Location: 34-401B

Enough data on H1N1 has accumulated that we can reach some tentative conclusions. It seems clearly to target people born after 1957, and generate high morbidity in schools, while those >65 have largely escaped. It also seems generally mild, although that depends how one defines "mild." One study, using one measure, concluded it's 100 times as virulent as seasonal flu. Nonetheless, numerous questions remain. For one thing, it lacks molecular markers to do some of the things it is doing, including for human transmissibility as well as for binding directly to cells in the lung. And the most important question that remains open is a general one: whether any influenza virus can change virulence. Although some virologists speculate that changes in virulence have not been observed, historical evidence not only from past pandemics but from seasonal influenza suggests otherwise.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Engineering Systems Division

For more information, contact:
Stefanie Koperniak
617-324-3806
skoperni@mit.edu