Melissa Sterry: Building a Bionic City: Science Fiction or Future Science Fact? #STU12

This presentation was given on February 16th, 8 pm GMT, by Melissa Sterry, @MelissaSterry, a design scientist, futurist and transformational change strategist to the built environment, utilities, manufacturing, design, publishing, media and communications industries. A PhD researcher at the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research group (AVATAR) at University of Greenwich, she is developing The Bionic City™: a sustainable smart city it transfers knowledge from Earth’s ecosystems to a blueprint for a metropolis with resilience to extreme meteorological and geological events, enabling reduced structural damage and loss of life from events including flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, eruptions and earthquakes. A Visiting Fellow of Sustainable Innovation in Design & Media and Assembly member at University of Salford, Melissa is a Visiting Lecturer and Guest Critic at universities including the AA School of Architecture. A member of the scientific committee of the International Bionic Engineering Society, she is a speaker, panel chair and workshop host at international sustainability conferences and seminars including EcoBuild, European Future Energy Forum, Forum for the Built Environment, World Congress on Sustainable Technologies, International Bionic Engineering Conference, Tomorrow’s Natural Business Conference and Sustainable Business in Practice. Published in over 50 international titles, including sustain’ magazine of which she is an editorial board member, Melissa is Director and Head of Technology at 360 media group Earth 2 Hub Ltd, which aims to re-establish a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature using art, science and digital creativity. A multi-award winning social entrepreneur she was listed in the Future 100 (2008), as one of the young business leaders changing the face of everyday business and improving commerce’s impact on the wider world. The creator of catalyst for rapid innovation in sustainable design NEW FRONTIERS™, which was the first prize winner of the Great Exhibition 2012 competition, she is an inductee of the Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network Hall of Fame and was the recipient of the Mensa Education and Research Foundation International Award for Benefit to Society 2010 for exceptional commitment to enhancing intelligence which benefits society.

Steve Fuller: How to think like God #STU11

This presentation was given on Christmas Day, 25th of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Steve Fuller, @ProfSteveFuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, he is best known for his work in the field of ‘social epistemology’, which is concerned with the normative foundations of organized inquiry. It is also the name of a quarterly journal he founded in 1987 and the first of his eighteen books. His most recent books are The Sociology of Intellectual Life: The Career of the Mind in and around the Academy (Sage, 2009), Science: The Art of Living (Acumen and McGill-Queens University Press, 2010) and Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  He is currently completing a history of epistemology to be published by Acumen in 2013.

Mark Ingham: New Paradigms in Pedagogical Thinking for the Academy of the very near Future, or how the Wasp Became the Orchid #STU10

This presentation was given on Wednesday, 21st of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Dr Mark Ingham, @ScopingPhD2010. Mark is visual artist who has been making work about and researching into ideas of autobiographical memory and its relationships with photographic images. This work is made up of a number of installations that use SLR cameras and LED light sources to create photographic projectors. They use photographic slides as their image source and are attempts to create a sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and be changed. These projected photographic images are an exploration into experiences of remembering and forgetting. They are attempts to evoke a form of ‘paramnesia’, whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a sense of déjà vu. He is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich in the School of Architecture, Design and Construction. He is a Masters Programme Leader in the Design Future Despartment.

Eileen A. Joy: Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism #STU09

This presentation was given on Tuesday, 20th of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Eileen A. Joy, Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches courses in medieval literature, contemporary fiction, cultural studies, and critical theory. She is the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group (www.babelworkinggroup.org), Co-Editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/index.html
), Co-Editor of O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies (
http://ozone-journal.com
), and Co-Director of punctum books (
http://punctumbooks.com
). She has published numerous essays and articles on medieval literature, cultural studies, post/humanism, and ethics (website:
http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy
).

An Xiao Mina: Translating People: Crossing the Language Barrier in Social Media #STU08

This presentation was given on Thursday, 15th of December 2011, 11 pm GMT, by An Xiao Mina (aka “An Xiao”, her artist name), @anxiaostudio, an American design thinker and new media artist. She uses technology to build and empower communities through creative expression. She co-founded and directs the digital efforts of Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English, a translation site for Ai Weiwei’s Twitter account. Her work has been featured in venues internationally, from the Brooklyn Museum to Shanghai’s Xindanwei, and in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, Art in America and CNNGo. Learn more at www.anxiaostudio.com or on Twitter at @anxiaostudio.

Jim Walker: Steve Jobs’ Greatest Legacy: How Apps, Smartphones, and Tablets Will Revolutionize Healthcare #STU07

This presentation was given on Tuesday, 13th of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Jim Walker, Director Emerging Trends – Cadient Group. Jim is the founder of AnywhereHealth.com, and provides digital marketing strategy for a wide-range of healthcare clients. He is particularly interested in helping brand teams take advantage of social networks, mobile marketing, and online video. Jim graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English & Japanese and has an MS in Instructional Technology from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Jamais Cascio: The Foresight Immune System #STU06

This presentation was given on Monday, 12th of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Jamais Cascio (@cascio), who specializes in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future, and was selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Policy, among others, and he has been featured in a variety of future-oriented television programs. Cascio speaks about future possibilities around the world, at venues including the National Academy of Sciences and TED. Cascio is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future. In 2003, he co-founded the award-winning environmental website WorldChanging.com, and now blogs at Open the Future.

Jonas Hannestad: Nature as Technology: Strategies for Nano-Scale, DNA-Based Communication #STU05

This presentation was given on wednesday, 7th of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Jonas Hannestad, @jhannestad, PhD student at Chemical and Biological Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg. Jonas works with bio-inspired nanotechnology, with a particular focus on nano-scale photonic devices.

Natalio Krasnogor: To Boldly Go: Computer Science’s Quest to Make Living Matter Algorithms-Friendly #STU03

This presentation was given on tuesday, 22nd of November 2011, 5 pm GMT, by Natalio Krasnogor, @NKrasnogor, Professor of Applied Interdisciplinary Computing, leads the “Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Systems (ICOS)” research group at the University of Nottingham, UK. He works at the interface of Computer Science and the Natural Sciences, in particular, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. He is a current holder of a Leadership Fellowship by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (#EPSRC) and a Morris Belkin visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Robert Jackson: Computational Aesthetics: Independence and execution #STU02

This presentation was given on wednesday, 16th of November 2011, 6 pm GMT, by Robert Jackson, @parallax00, MPhil/PhD candidate at the University of Plymouth, Faculty of Arts and Media. Kurator / Arts and Social Technologies (K/AST). Artist, academic and software programmer.