Latest news about the Lift conference

Lift09 program update

nicolasnova — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:08:35 +0100

A quick update concerning our speaker roster. The latest addition to the Lift program are:

Natalie Jeremijenko, a new media artist working as a professor at UCSD in San Diego. Her project deals with technological changes and upcoming boundaries to be crossed in the near future.
Melanie Rieback, researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, who works on security, RFIDs as well as the evolution of privacy.
Patrick Gyger, director of a science-fiction museum in Switzerland. Patrick wrote about flying cars we dreamed about in the recent past.

They will all contribute to uncover the issues related to our main question this year: "where has the future been?". We're almost done with the last discussions with speakers from the main track. Feel free to propose ideas in the workshops session or in the open stage!

Swiss Official Carrier Lift09

Sylvie Reinhard — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:34:38 +0100

We are proud to announce that Swiss International Air Lines will be the Official Carrier for Lift09!
Swiss offers special Congress Fares to all participants. These Congress Fares offer reductions and special flexibility on selected flights, depending on the fare type, route and space availability.
Click here for more information on how to take advantage of this offer!

Welcome to the team: Solveig and Eléonore!

Sylvie Reinhard — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:26:29 +0100

We are happy to announce that two new women joined our team:

Solveig Sautier, a freelance Event- and Project manager, will support us as Partner Relations manager. Before joining the Lift Team Solveig worked as coordinator for events such as the Pacte Multimedia produced by the Télévision Suisse Romande or the Festival Nord-Sud.

Eléonore de Lusignan, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, will support our Team as Event management Intern, helping us to make Lift a great experience for you!

Welcome to the Team Solveig and Eléonore :)

Welcome on board: Bruno Bonnell

Laurent Haug — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:54:06 +0100

We are proud to announce that Bruno Bonnell is joining our advisory board. Bruno is a legendary French entrepreneur who created Infogrammes and became CEO of Atari before starting a new venture around the world of robots called Robopolis. He is also one of the funniest person on this planet (ask him to tell you the story of his visit to Neverland ;) and is joining Lift to provide us with ideas and contacts to further develop the conference.
Take also the chance to see Bruno's great speech From Robota to Homo Robotus he held at Lift Asia 08

^{Photo by Robert Scoble}

Our advisory board is now Julian Bleecker (Nokia Design), Bruno Bonnell (Robopolis), Pierre Chappaz (Wikio), William Cockayne (Change Research), Xavier Comtesse (Avenir Suisse), Bruno Giussani (Writer/blogger/entrepreneur), Adam Greenfield (Nokia), François Grey (CERN), Jeffrey Huang (EPFL), Daniel Kaplan (FING), Beth Krasna (independent board member), Jaewoong Lee (Daum/Lycos), Joanne Lee (Writer and entrepreneur), Bernard Rappaz (TSR), Bruce Sterling (Writer and futurist), Jasmina Tesanovic (Publisher and Filmmaker), Guido Van Nispen (Veronica).

Participant Profile: Mitch Free

Benedikt — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:17:36 +0100

About
Mitch Free is a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of MFG.com, an online marketplace which helps in sourcing manufactured parts by matching the requirements and specifications of the buyer with the skills and savoir-faire of a supplier. Prior to that, Mitch founded 3DATUM, a provider of technology solutions for the manufacturing and engineering communities. He began his career as a machinist on the shop floor, got his hands dirty and literally learned the manufacturing industry inside and out.

He's been widely recognized as an inspiring and ground-breaking entrepreneur who follows his instincts. He also is an avid speaker at technology conferences and at universities including the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University, Harvard and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. At LIFT09 Mitch will be a participant. We're looking forward to seeing him there.

Speaker Profile: Ramesh Srinivasan

Benedikt — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:36:36 +0100

With an interdisciplinary background as engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer, Ramesh researched topics as diverse as the relation between indigenous and local knowledge systems and new media or the use of design and social-science perspectives to analyze the impacts of information technology on global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements, and infrastructure.

Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst others he has given talks at the World Bank, UNESCO, Government of India and Microsoft Research. Please find more info on his LIFT profile.

Why LIFT
Ramesh is interested in the divergent notions of futurism and utopia with respect to every layer of media and technology. His thoughts on diverse cultural domains around media and technology presents some very different notions of pastness, and future aspirations, ones that are very much locally grounded in environment, family, cosmology, and landscape.

What Ramesh expects
The 2009 edition will be Ramesh's first LIFT conference and he'll be curiously heading to Geneva in February for an animated exchange on where the future went.

Profiles publication starting

Laurent Haug — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:03:08 +0100

As you might have noticed we started to publish the speakers profiles, a tradition we started at Lift07 with the idea of allowing participants to preview the speakers they want to focus on during the conference.

This year the profiles will be published by Benedikt Foit and we added a little something new: participants profiles! We have amazing people coming to the conference, giving workshops, speaking at the open stage, or simply attending, and we decided to profile some of them. Lift veteran Tom Hume, who attended every edition since lift06, has the honor to go first, with more profiles coming at the pace of one every four to five days.

Participant Profile: Tom Hume

Benedikt — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:59:40 +0100

Tom is founder of Future Platforms, a small team of designers and developers who build delightful software products for mobile phones. He's been doing this since 2000; before that he spent 5 years working in the web industry. A mobile web expert, Tom has recently been invited to work on a project for the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Group. You can find more info about Tom on his blog.

Why LIFT
We asked Tom what LIFT is for him and why he decided to come back: "For me, LIFT is a great way to get some perspective. I meet a crowd of folks, chiefly from across Europe, who are completely outside my day-to-day experience and who invariably see things completely differently from myself. The mix of arts, academia and business is particularly helpful in this way, and the event is small enough to feel intimate and friendly, and big enough to provide some variety."

What Tom expects
Being an old-time LIFTer, Tom expects the unexpected when coming back to Geneva for LIFT09.

Speaker Profile: Vint Cerf

Benedikt — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:43:44 +0100

Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist who, together with Robert Kahn, invented the Internet. His contributions have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Japan Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Vint has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005. In this role he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPV6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model. He is also working with NASA on the implementation of an interplanetary extension of the Internet.

Why LIFT
For Vint, LIFT is an opportunity to see through many eyes the strengths and weaknesses of prediction and vision about the Future. He would like to compare with others the speculative exploration of future, unexplored landscapes and to compare those speculative explorations with the reality that emerged from the past.

What Vint expects
Vint has high expectations for the conference in February. He told us that he would like to have a much clearer sense of what the future may hold, in part to enhance imagination and also to find realistic paths towards technological progress.

Important: We are not accepting further program suggestions!

Laurent Haug — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:53:25 +0100

I would like to pass a very important information today: we are closing program suggestions. Here is why.

We created program suggestions in 2006 because of a simple fact: most of those attending the conference also deserved be speakers. Over the years we have been very happy to hear all suggestions from the community, and even created the open program to give you more access to presenting (currently open program is 36 slots of more than 50 hours while official program is 20 slots and around 10 hours).

As Lift grows, gets covered by the BBC, BusinessWeek, and hundreds of blogs, we are getting EVERY DAY a number of suggestions equivalent to the number of speakers slots FOR ONE EDITION.

This results in a very frustrating situation: we have to turn down 99% of the propositions simply because we have no room! And very good people, with very good propositions, who took one hour of their time to create a nice pitch, these people end up feeling left out (and it's not funny nor easy for us either).

Open Program stays unchanged, based only on suggestions!

To end this situation we decided to stop accepting propositions for the official program. The open program will be where the community can speak, you make your propositions (workshops, open stage, discussions coming soon), you vote, and this should be a much more effective system.

Last year 100% of workshops propositions were accepted (and we even added 4 slots this year!), these numbers going down slightly to 60% for open stage and discussions. That is a better mechanism: those who take time to propose somethings end up being rewarded for their effort more often.