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Vitality, a positive attribute correlated with success can now sometimes be improved using technology. This program deals with two different aspects of how technology helps us physically – it can be used to improve our health and it can be used to improve our performance. The familiar Star Trek Tricorder is an extremely useful but fictional handheld device whose sensors permitted monitoring of vital signs and other physical conditions. Presently there are seven finalist groups converging on creating a Tricorder-like device, in part motivated by the $10M Qualcomm X-prize “to bring healthcare to the palm of your hand”. This prize, scheduled to be awarded January 27, 2016, is just one example of the application of technology to health – more are exploding across diverse fields from diabetes monitoring to telemedicine.

On the performance side of technology there is an explosion of everything from simple fitness bands to prosthetics and including embedded electronics in everything from racing boats to bicycles. Daily exercise, diet,medication regimes are all part of the huge integrated set of apps and operating system extensions being designed specifically to help us improve our wellness and performance.

Join us for a roundtable discussion Tuesday October 27th from 6 to 9 at the Foothill Tennis and Swim Club for an eye opening and sometimes mind blowing look at not only what is coming, but what is already here today. Humanity is right now in the process of currently transcending biological evolutionary timescales. And much of this is happening right here in what is still the epicenter of technology, Silicon Vally. What better place to talk about augmented physicality!

Doors Open: 6 PM

Program: 7 to 9 PM

Tickets at the Door are $30

Online Preregistration is $20

Our Three Roundtable Panel Members

Dr. Elzbieta Holsztynska,    President, GeaMedica, Inc.,    elahol@gmail.com

Dr. Elzbieta Holsztynska (Ela) has over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry (Warner-Lambert, later Pfizer), Cocensys , Athena Neurosciences (later Elan), and Rigel Pharmaceuticals).  Over her career, Dr. Holsztynska has contributed to discovery, development and global regulatory submission of multiple commercially marketed drug products.  As a leader of Drug Metabolism division, Ela has studied therapies for a variety of disease groups, including oncology, immunology and nervous system disorders.   Ela is a published author of multiple scientific papers and book chapters.  She holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Michigan, and continued post-doctoral research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.  At present she is working on exploring new venues for understanding and treating age-related diseases.

Robert Sloan,  Chief Innovation Officer, Equate Health,     robert@vevity.com

As a life-long innovator, Robert has served in positions as diverse as chief innovation officer, mobile system architect, innovation architect, digital systems architect, and system designer at flagship companies and startups alike. Companies have included Equate Health,  Sun Microsystems, Compression Labs, Phillips, Luma, Scanadu and Vevity, producing products and services ranging from wireless medical devices, mobile medical monitoring and creating illuminating design. His most recent venture, Vevity, is focused on helping people live healthier longer.

He has served as a liaison between Philips Research and Philips Medical, helping launch ideas into market products. As a system architect he has designed and built the audio encoders for DirecTV, designed the audio/telephony subsystem for the SparcStation 1, and defined an audio chip which was built by Crystal Semiconductors and Analog Devices that is used in many multimedia applications.

A pragmatic thinker, Robert has in-depth knowledge of multimedia platforms and industry and maintains hands-on experience with hardware and software.

Geeta Priya Arora,   Speaker, Author, CEO & Founder,     La’Vanya Ayurveda Healing & Wellness Center

Geeta Priyadarshni Arora is an Ayurveda and Yoga practitioner, life coach, author, media personality, motivational speaker and teaches people how to discover their hidden talents to tap into their limitless potential to express their highest fullest self. Her passion lies in serving others and empowering higher thinking and education in the quest for identity and balance in our technologically driven world.

Geeta earned an MBA degree while climbing a successful corporate ladder. After her divine healing experience, she decided to leave the fiercely competitive struggle for wealth and power to focus her energy on spiritual inner awakenings to reconnect the missing pieces between mind, body, heart and the higher self. Geeta completed her master’s degree in Ayurveda and incorporates the practice of meditation and yoga daily. She offers educational programs to help individuals find their true path with intention. She writes, travels, teaches about healing and being in service.

Website: www.geetapriyaarora.com

Our September 22nd event at Foothills Tennis and Swim Club featured a spirited discussion, ranging from the role of technology in education to the combination of trepidation and fascination we have when watching kids connect online.

The conversation moved too quickly to do justice here, but there were several references made that we thought we should share with everyone.

The Kahn Lab School is new personalized education practices that center around the student and focused on mastery.

An iPad can be a game, an artist’s easel, an educational tool, or a life-changing communication device. Even beyond uses for Special Needs education and accessibility, an iPad is defined by the blank screen, the ability for it to be whatever we want.

For more reading:

Sherry Turkle
She’s an MIT professor studying the sociology of technology, and has written several books on how we engage online, and also delivered a great TEDtalk.

TEDtalk: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together
Books:
Evocative Objects
AloneTogether
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (releasing October, 2015)

danah boyd

Another Sociologist, danah is focused on identity formation and sociality of teens, especially where mediated by technology. I first met danah at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego in 2004. She’s a brilliant observer of social behavior who digs in to understand why. Her work can be found at danah.org.
It’s Complicated, The Social Lives of Networked Teens – I recommend this book widely, both for parents trying to understand what’s going on, and for anyone else who wants to better understand the emerging social connection dynamics happening online.

Andrew Solomon

He’s a brilliant journalist and writer, and in Far From The Tree, he builds a compelling story showing diversity as both advantage and a conveyance of meaning.

Madeline Levine, PhD.

Her controversial NYT Best-Seller, The Price of Privilege showed us the importance of developing in kids a strong sense of who they are, and of meaning in their lives.

The world is changing due to tech

There is no question that the democratization of technology made possible by a combination of economies of scale and Moore’s Law has put incredible power in our pockets. Today’s smart phones have more speed, storage and resolution than super computers of the 1990’s and also have fantastically more connectivity and flexibility. In our digital age, the world has changed and the change is accelerating.

What does this mean for society?

Technology is changing the nature of work, careers and families making them no longer limited by geographic proximity. Connections through shared interests, now easier to find and develop, are often bringing people together from very different cultural backgrounds.

How does this affect families?

What does it mean to be a parent in the digital age? How much time should you and your kids spend with technology? Can a parent actually control their child’s use of technology? Should they? What types of technology usage should be encouraged? How does technology usage impact social skills development? How is technology, and the world it’s making possible, changing education? Are kids learning problem solving and other important skills? What is the kids point of view? How is technology enabling those with special needs?

And for the individual – What about them?

Is your world bigger? What if you’re a kid? A grandparent? How do you learn? How do you fit in a family, a community, and a team? How many families and communities are you in? How is technology changing the way you see the world, and the way you see yourself in the world?

… Join us in a provocative discussion!

Tuesday, September 22nd
7pm – 9pm
Doors open at 6pm for appetizers and no-host beer and wine

Tickets: $20 in advance • $30 at the door

Mark L. Miller, Ph.D.,Mark L. Miller, Ph.D. founded Learningtech.org [The Miller Institute for Learning with Technology], incorporating it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in March 2000. He continues to serve as both its lead technical contributor and its President and Executive Director. The mission of the organization is to help “children of all ages” use technology more effectively for learning. The firm has helped schools throughout California, as well as in several other states.Learningtech.org has three Program areas: Planning and Funding Services (E-Rate applications and technology plan preparation); Technical Services (network design and configuration, device imaging, software R&D, and troubleshooting); and Education Services (in-class and out-of-school STEM enrichment, including high technology summer camps, and professional development).

Learningtech.org’s early work included contribution to the efforts of Smart Valley (Net Day and PC Day), Challenge 2000, Wired for Good, and the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits. The Institute works mainly with K-12 schools, libraries and other nonprofits. Recent work has included helping prepare a US Department of Education approved tech plan for all public schools in Puerto Rico, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in E-Rate funding for schools in California, Arizona, Hawaii, Tennessee, and Puerto Rico, and completing a STEM summer camp that demonstrated how to successfully include foster youth, a highly underserved group. A recent Peninsula TV show featuring our after school STEM offerings for middle school students is available here: http://vimeo.com/39080224. Great Nonprofits rated Learningtech.org as a “Top Rated Education Nonprofit” in 2014 and earlier years. Reviews are available online: http://greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/the-miller-institute-for-learning-with-technology.

Before founding Learningtech.org, Dr. Miller had served as Lab Director for Learning and Tools at Apple Computer, reporting to the Vice President of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group [ATG], where he spent almost a decade heading up educational technology investigations. Apple programs under his direction at various times included: Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow [ACOT]; Apple Global Education [AGE]; Visualization and Simulation; Business Learning and Performance Support; and Multimedia Authoring Tools. Responsibilities at various times included oversight of over three dozen employees, including Apple Distinguished Scientists and numerous engineers with advanced degrees, with budget responsibility in excess of $6M.

Dr. Miller’s other corporate experience included early work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and several years at Texas Instruments, Inc., Central Research Labs, where he established its widely recognized Machine Intelligence research program, emphasizing educational applications, expert systems, natural language processing.

Miller also co-founded Computer*Thought Corporation (Dallas, TX), a high-tech startup backed by venture capital financing – over $5M equity financing raised during the first three years of operation – where Miller led the technical design of the Ada*Tutor product, an advanced instructional system used to retrain software engineers to use the Ada programming language, as mandated by the U.S. Department of Defense for projects such as Space Station.

Dr. Miller’s teaching experience includes Adjunct Faculty at the University of Texas and Southern Methodist University (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Survey of Knowledge Engineering; Design and Implementation of Programming Languages; Compilers, Assemblers, and Operating Systems; Software Engineering Using Ada; Discrete Structures). Miller has supervised successful M.S. and Ph.D. candidates. While earning his Ph.D. at MIT, he served as both Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Artificial Intelligence and LOGO Laboratories. Miller has also taught high school mathematics as a guest instructor, and Filemaker Pro and other topics from time to time at Community Colleges and County Offices of Education. He currently co-teaches middle school Computer Science and instructs after-school STEM enrichment daily for grades 4-8. He has also co-developed a high school computer science elective, which was UC A?G approved; he co-taught the course at multiple high schools for several years. Since 2012, he has been a Contributing Member of the STEM Committee for the California After School Network http://www.afterschoolnetwork.org/stem, where he is currently focused on integrating Computer Science, Coding, and Computational Thinking with the Next Generation Science Standards.

 

 

Jason Marsh is currently working with Virtual Reality applied to consumer, non-game experiences. Consumers are spending millions of hours ‘in their information’ – experiencing their social feeds and topics they are interested in. This experience doesn’t occur in a geographical location as much as in cyberspace, the mental representation of information, rich with connections and emotion. But all of that is mediated by screens, often small ones, with rectangular frames that limit the ability to maintain context, go back to prior explorations, or share complex ideas with others. I see Virtual Reality as the solution, and that’s what I’m working on for my own pre-funded company FLOW.

Besides being a software designer and engineer, I’ve been doing what I call call Information Architecture (http://www.marshworks.com/what-is-an-information-architect/) for enterprise companies, most recently at my prior startup Acesis, working with healthcare software.  I’m capturing and presenting complex information to busy thought-leaders in healthcare and business. I diagram everything, using software tools to zoom from the macro view (the ‘why’?) to the micro view (the ‘concrete’?). The audience can be grounded in both the big picture and the specifics very quickly. Now, in VR, the prototypes keep flying off the screen and I’m seeing where the ecosystem sees value as I converge on minimal viable product ideas.

I was also the Founder and Executive Director of the Sierra Montessori Academy in Grass Valley, CA. This was a significant expansion of my efforts in educational reform bringing technology into the classroom with Challenge 2000, SRI, and the Institute for Research on Learning. I wrote the charter and obtained approval for a new K-8 public charter school based on the educational principals of Maria Montessori and Project-Based Learning. Now more than ten years old, the school opened with 120 students on a 35 acre site.

—

Jason Marsh

(530) 878-4414

Mandeep Dhillon
Entrepreneur & Children’s Technology Advocate

Mandeep is passionate about influencing how kids will use the technology they were born with to improve the quality of their lives and the world they live in.

Co- founder and CEO of 1StudentBody Inc. (1sb), where we are connecting the world’s students. Our primary application, Sidechat, is revolutionizing the world of teen communication with a media and group-centric mobile messaging app.

Former VP Strategy/Togetherville at Disney Interactive; CEO/Co-Founder of Togetherville (Disney); former consultant (McKinsey), lawyer (Latham & Watkins), non-profit leader (Lohgarh), JD/MBA (UVA) and die-hard college basketball fan (Duke). Duke University Alumni Board member & Sikh community activist.

Born in England. Raised in the Bronx, Smithfield, NC and Raleigh, NC. Lived in DC, Charlottesville, VA, Redwood City, CA and now San Jose, CA. Married to my best friend and the proud father of three digital natives.

Next in our Series
Oct 27: Health & Fitness Technology

After thirty-five years in tech and business, I find myself spending most of my time in New England, exposed to an intriguing question not asked very much in Silicon Valley. “What is the role of liberal arts in a digital age?”  With a personal background applying technology to the arts as an electro-acoustician, musician and educator, much of my professional life is and has been spent answering “What is the role of technology and business in the arts?”  My answer to the question was to create multiple technologies and tech businesses almost all designed to lower the overhead associated with creative expression.

Developing capabilities to subordinate technology to serve creative people is time consuming. It took ten years of university to acquire sufficient background to serve on the front lines as a  contributor to the Digital Age. Our digital age can be considered to be an artifact of the democratization of technology.  This age is an economic manifestation of Moore’s Law paraphrased to, “for the last fifty years the cost of semiconductor technology has halved every year”.  Even math people accustomed to exponentials are still surprised at how enormous this growth rate is. Two raised to the fiftieth power is over a thousand trillions or to powerfully illustrate this in terms of money, 1 cent would become 10 Trillion Dollars. This is how calculators become more than super computers.

Computers are a thousand trillion times more accessible today than  they were in 1965 when Gordan Moore stated his law. Billions of people now have a supercomputer or two in their pocket which are far far more powerful than the most powerful devices in the world of a few decades ago. This digital age is not going to end any time soon unless we accidentally wipe humanity out, because people like having this power. Liberal arts communities have overnight become the dominant market segment of the technological age because they now vastly outnumber technical consumers.

This clearly defines at least one very important role of the liberal artist in a digital age, to be the voice of the customer. As liberal artists, are in general much better at communicating with people than engineers are, one extremely important role could be to define what humanity needs and wants, as part of many dialogs with engineering communities who tend to contribute facts pertaining to what is possible, how much will it cost and how long will it take but have less experience in what do nontechnical people need.

Voicing humanities needs is certainly an important enough role for liberal artists to spend some time understanding the frames of mind, of both the technologist and businessperson. There is no reason that poets as masters of succinct communication, can not learn how to write a specification. After all the digital age has turned many musicians into recording engineers and programmers, and many photographers in 3D digital signal processors, and the maker movement is converting the do-it-yourself community into 3d prototyping experts rapidly moving toward small run manufacturing.

It is for this reason I propose that there be courses available to liberal arts communities called  Introduction to Engineering and Entrepreneurial Thought.  Artists, technologists and entrepreneurs all be creative innovators, who differ enough in tool requirements and priorities for sub-optimal new devices to come into being. Systems thinking, project management and complex program collaboration are regularly taught to technical and business majors. The boundary between liberal arts and technology is an artificial one that can easily be traversed through some cross education. Notice I do not say cross training, as training is for animals and robots, not thinking expressive people. Teachable moments regularly occur throughout the entire maker movement gathering steam all over the world. The price of 3D printers is now dropping from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. Imagine what will happen when the cost of manufacturing is radically reduced even more than the effects of the low cost of a global labor market. Even more dramatically, imagine the impact of concept to market cycle changing from years to days. Hardware development is entering the rapid iteration the software world has been enjoying for a couple of decades. Once again the economic driving force of democratization will further blur the distinctions between liberal arts, performances arts, and technological arts.

The age of the specialist is less than 200 years old. Before this age, everyone grew their food, shoed their horses, built their houses, and did almost everything needed.  Humanity is on the order of 200,000 years old or a thousand times older than this. There is the tendency to assume the world belongs to the specialists, but I would like to remind all of us that almost all specialists work for generalists.  For better or worse generalists are the decision makers and purse string holders in society. Even those who begin as specialists, as they grow in influence, power and leverage become generalists. Liberal artist education is about how to think about a wide range of topics in order to be better prepared to be in the world. This is as true today in the 21st century as it has ever been and perhaps more so. The more gifted or curious the student, the more important  it is that they are exposed to the ways of thinking of the specialists who are literally defining the world they live in every day, the engineers and entrepreneurs. Engineers create tomorrow and entrepreneurs deliver it to society. Engineers and business people all need to learn to read, write, draw and get along with teams in addition to doing math. In the 21st century the liberal artist needs to know something about the mindset that has created the world they live in.  Just as business and tech people need to know about culture, beauty and the humanities to be fully human.

It is only through collaboration that we will co-create a sustainable and meaningful world. Each of us has to learn to put ourselves in other persons places. It radically improves the ability to communicate and get things done. It will also greatly increases each persons value to the world and to themselves.