Earlier this month, NCTA announced The Near Future, a completely unique half-day event designed to challenge convention, spark inspiration, and reconsider how we think and talk about the future of technology. We held back on details – after all, we didn’t want to spoil the surprise – but we did reveal that it would be held at Dock 5 at Union Market on April 27th, it would be invitation-only, and that it would explore four pillars of human-technology interactivity – the way we LIVE, WORK, LEARN, and PLAY. Today we’re teasing with a few new details about The Near Future as well as sharing information on some of the confirmed speakers.
Joining The Near Future’s PLAY section will be Paul Debevec from GoogleVR and Ted Schilowitz, a futurist at 20th Century Fox. They’ll be discussing how they imagine games, sports, and storytelling will be re-shaped by futuristic technologies such as virtual and augmented reality.
Contributing to the WORK section of The Near Future will be Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, an advanced cloud conferencing tool. Salesforce will be there, too to provoke thought on the workforce of the future. And in the LEARN section will be David Traum, Director of Natural Language Research at USC and Liam McKinney, Founder of Skoolbot. Both of them will offer compelling visions of how the use of machine learning and networked apps will challenge our thinking on the way humans and machine work together to drive deeper learning. IBM Watson will also be there to share their thoughts on how artificial intelligence will be used to transform nearly everything.
In the LIVE section we can confirm Wyatt W. Decker, M.D., Vice President at the Mayo Clinic and CEO of Mayo Arizona, Peter Hirshberg, CEO of the Re:Imagine Group, and Justin Fishkin, Chief Strategy Officer at Local Motors. What do an emergency surgeon, a media strategist, and an autonomous vehicle builder have in common? And what do they have to say about how technology will change the way we live? These uncommon pairings and interest-piquing questions are what The Near Future is all about!
To learn more about The Near Future, keep an eye on NCTA’s Twitter feed @NCTAitv and the event hashtag #NearFuture, and continue to watch The Near Future website. We’ll be back in the coming weeks to reveal more about the event and how NCTA is envisioning the near future.