One of the perks of being a student again is to get free passes to conferences which usually cost a ton of money to attend. I recently attended EmTech (http://www.technologyreview.com/emtech/09/index.aspx), a conference about the emerging technologies in fields ranging from energy to software. Since this conference was held in our own backyard at MIT, I was able to get a pass to the conference by volunteering for a few hours. Being the good student that I am , I attended all my classes before I got here.. Well okay I missed a recitation to be here :-)
One of the panels I attended was titled "Always Connected", and discussed advances in communications and information technology. Pranav Mistry from the Media Lab at MIT was one of the panelists. Remember the cool interface through which Tom Cruise sifts through information and files by moving his fingers in a orchestrating fashion. The research Pranav Mistry is working on is reminiscent of the movie and is very appropriately titled "sixth sense". Check out http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/if you are interested in learning more. Pranav Mistry talked about his research that is focused in trying to find ways that we can access information through everyday objects versus having to turn to a computer to find that information. For example a regular newspaper that would show live video instead of just delivering static news.
The other cool thing about the EmTech conference was the "Digital Bag". Each of the conference attendees had a small RFID tag in his/her conference badge. When we wanted to exchange business card information from another attendee, we just walked over to one of the touch screens stations available at the conference and waved both our badges at the same time to exchange information. Similarly if I wanted to learn more about one of the sponsors who had a booth at the conference and did not necessarily want to carry brochures around, I quickly swiped by badge at the RFID reader available at the table, and all the information was transferred to my "Digital Bag" that I could access over the internet at any time.
Attending EmTech was a great way to get a peek at what is happening elsewhere at MIT and also see how industry trends are shaping up. Looking forward to attending EmTech again next year!
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