UB to Host Summit About Effects of Digital Technologies on All of Us

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Many important, pioneering figures in the fields of science, technology, engineering, medicine, education and the arts will be at UB on Nov. 2 and 3 to share their sense of how digital technologies are affecting our lives and how they are likely to alter our future.

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

All sessions will be open to the public. The registration fee of $20 covers both days. There will be no registration fee for UB students, faculty and staff

In addition to talks and demonstrations, the summit will feature discussions and lectures by such important public and idiosyncratic figures as Steve Mann (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 Clifford Stoll (University of California, Berkeley), the author of "Silicon Snake Oil."

Many exhibitions will be on display as well, including an immersive virtual reality "experience" involving real-time 3D interactions by persons in different locations.

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.