November 1, 2001-Vol33n9: Digital summit set for tomorrow

Digital summit set for tomorrow

Josephine Anstey is just one of the pioneering figures in the fields of science, technology, engineering, medicine, education and the arts who will be at UB tomorrow and Saturday to share their sense of how digital technologies are affecting our lives and how they are likely to alter our future.

These internationally known figures will be guests at "Digital Frontier: The Buffalo Summit 2001," a major international meeting sponsored by UB, to be held in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

In addition to talks and such demonstrations as Anstey's "EVL: Alive on the Grid," the summit will feature discussions and lectures by such important public and idiosyncratic figures as Steve Mann of the University of Toronto, a scientist often referred to as "the human cyborg" because of his "wearable computers;" Jaron Lanier, a noted inventor of digital applications who coined the term "virtual reality" and first produced it, and astronomer and UB alumnus Clifford Stoll of the University of California-Berkeley, the author of "Silicon Snake Oil."

Other participants will include Aliza Sherman, author and founder of Cybergrrl; Julie Swain of NASA; attorney Chris Hoofnagle, who will address Internet privacy; Rep. John LaFalce, and physiologist Michael Ackerman, assistant director of high-performance computing and communications at the National Library of Medicine.

Also, author, well-known Canadian journalist and Marshall McLuhan Scholar Liss Jeffrey, director of a new media and policy incubator founded to ensure that all voices are heard in the "electronic commons;" "cyborgologist" Chris Hables Gray, a scholar of new technologies, and philosopher and author Michael Heim, who teaches the philosophy of virtual worlds design at California's Art Center College of Design.

Many other participants of note also will speak—psychologists, technologists and researchers into many fields. All will be concerned with how new and sometimes incredibly pervasive technologies are changing our lives for good or ill.

More information about the program and guest speakers—as well as the opportunity to register—is available at the summit's Web site at http://digitalsummit.buffalo.edu. The registration fee has been waived for UB faculty, staff and students.