Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
November 4, 2009 // Upcoming events and digital media

[1] [MONDAY 11/9/09] "Internet Companions: technical and social issues" with Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/wilks)

[2] [TUESDAY 11/10/09] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "What Information Was" with David Weinberger, Berkman Center (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/weinberger)

[3] [SAVE THE DATE 11/18/09] Berkman West Celebration featuring Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for Sale" // Mountain View, CA (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/berkwest)

[MONDAY] INTERNET COMPANIONS
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11/9/09, 11:45 AM ET, Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area

Topic: Internet Companions: technical and social issues.
Guest: Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute

COMPANIONS is a concept, and the title of an EU project (http://www.companions-project.org) that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual 'Companion'. This is intended as an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes. The Companion communicates with the user primarily through conversational speech. This talk describes the functionality of a Senior Companion (SC), one of two initial prototypes built in the first two years of the project. The Senior Companion provides a multimodal interface for eliciting and retrieving personal information from the elderly user through a conversation about their photographs. The Companion will, through conversation, elicit their life memories, often prompted by discussion of their photographs; the aim being that the Companion should come to know a great deal about its user, their tastes, likes, dislikes, emotional reactions etc, through long periods of conversation.

It is a further assumption that most life information will be stored on the internet (as in the Memories for Life project : http://www.memoriesforlife.org/) and the SC is linked directly to photo inventories in Facebook, to gain initial information about people and relationships, as well as to Wikipedia to enable it to respond about places mentioned in conversations about images. The overall aim of the SC, not yet achieved, is to produce a coherent life narrative for its user from these materials, although its short term goals are also to assist, amuse, entertain and gain the trust of the user. The SC uses Information Extraction to get content from the speech input, rather than conventional parsing, and retains utterance content, extracted internet information and ontologies all in RDF formalism over which it does primitive reasoning about people and places. Even in its current state it raises issues about what kinds of entities people want to emphasize with and trust, once we go beyond humans, and how one can best synthesize personality and emotional rapport. If a Companion were to become the internet repository for someone’s whole life, to be a “cognitive prosthesis” for dealing with their own life’s records, what safeguards are essential, both technical and legal, concerning access to such a repository during the owner’s life and after?

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/wilks

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on WHAT INFORMATION WAS
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11/10/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu).
This event will be webcast live.

Topic: What Information Was
Guest: David Weinberger, Berkman Center

It's puzzling that even though we named an age after information, very few people can tell you what information is. And the ones with the clearest answers are often defining information in the technical sense, which is not the sense in which the culture took it up. In this session, we'll look back at information, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant -- paradigmatic -- way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/weinberger

[SAVE THE DATE] BERKMAN WEST CELEBRATION featuring JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
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11/18/09, 6:30 PM PT, Computer History Museum, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA
RSVP requested: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHU4Y01CVGpnbEJQcWJwY3lMaGVvM0E6MA

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University warmly invites you to attend our third annual celebration of our friends, affiliates and partners on the left coast.

When: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 6:30pm PT
Where: Computer History Museum, Mountain View
What: Talk by Prof. Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for sale", followed by reception
Who: Anyone and everyone who's interested in the work of the Berkman Center, including all our friends and family in the Bay Area
Why: Because we miss you!

About "Minds for Sale"

Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now find as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud, too. A new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace. What are some of the issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited by the thousands and millions? A fascinating (and non-scare-mongering) view is offered of a future in which nearly any mental act can be bought and sold.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/berkwest

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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[1] 11/4/09: Free... Software? Google and Open Source Software // Harvard Law School (http://www.law.harvard.edu/calendar/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D86284296)

[2] 11/5/09: MIT Communications Forum: What's New at the Center for Future Civic Media // MIT (http://civic.mit.edu/event/communications-forum-whats-new-at-the-center-for-future-civic-media)

[3] 11/5/09: Towards Insurable Network Architectures // MIT CSAIL (http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=2413)

[4] 11/6/09: Patent Pools for Neglected Diseases and Global Health // UC Berkeley (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/patentpools/about.html)

[5] 11/8/09: Grand Opening of the Lab @ Harvard (http://www.ofa.fas.harvard.edu/cal/details.php?ID=40733)

[6] 11/10/09: A National Initiative for Technology-Mediated Social Participation // MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (http://cci.mit.edu/shneiderman.html)

[7] 11/12/09: The Impact of Social Media in the Middle East (with Berkman Research Director Rob Faris)// Harvard Arab Weekend (http://www.harvardarabalumni.org/MENAweekend/event.php?evid=5)

[8] 11/12-14: The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference // New School (http://digitallabor.org/)

[9] 11/17/09: David Weinberger at the Ethos Roundtable (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=92474922615)

[10] 11/19/09: Cyber-Terrorism/Warfare - The Emergent Threat: Strategies for Survival // Boston University (https://secure-alumni.bu.edu/olc/pub/BUAR/events/event_order.cgi?tmpl=events&event=2237679)

[11] 11/21-22/09: Music Hackday Boston // MS NERD (http://boston.musichackday.org/)

[12] 12/2/09: Ignite Spatial Boston (http://isb09.eventbrite.com/)

[13] 12/5/09: The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest // UC Berkeley (http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/fotf/)

[14] 12/8/09: The library is dead. Long live the library! The rebirth of libraries in the 21st century (with Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey) // Cambridge, MA (http://neasist.eventbrite.com/)

DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Berkman Luncheon Series on WALLED GARDENS with ELIZABETH GOODMAN (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/10/goodman)

-ETHAN ZUCKERMAN at BIF-5 (http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/video/bif5-ethan-zuckerman)

-DELETE: THE VIRTUE OF FORGETTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE with VIKTOR MAYER-SCHONBERGER (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwxVA0UMwLY)

-RADIO BERKMAN 135: The Quest for a Free Culture with GABRIELLA COLEMAN & ELIZABETH STARK (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman135)

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BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.

ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.harvard.edu.