About the Talk
Crowdsourcing saved lives after the Haiti earthquake. Part of the reason I’ve been so behind in planning BIL is I’ve been in Miami collaborating with members of the open-source / open culture community (Sahana, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMaps) and the US Government (USSOUTHCOM, US Coast Guard) to respond to the crisis in Haiti. I’ll give an inside look on how these two cultures worked together in ways that have never been seen before.

About the Speaker
Hello my name is Todd Huffman, and these are the things that I do… toddhuffman.pbwiki.com

About the Talk
Scientific collaboration, that hallmark of collaborative scientific endeavor varies greatly among different disciplines. What is in common on all scientific publications is the author list. In SciColab a framework for forming scientific collaborations using Web 2.0 technology is presented. Comments can be made on published papers, interested readers can communicate between each other, and new collaborative groups can be formed to do new research work. This streamlines the discovery process beyond what is capable on pre-print servers and electronic mail and is “open access” publishing at its best.

About the Speaker
Russell Hanson was born in Palo Alto, CA on May 2, 1981 and grew up in California and Bloomington, IN. From 1999–2003 he studied in Portland, Oregon at Reed College, completing a bachelor’s degree in Physics. In 2005 he received an M.S. in Biology from Georgia Tech and his PhD studies were in Chemistry at Boston University. His research interests are varied and span machine learning and statistical learning, chemical engineering, biophysical and medicinal chemistry, quantitative finance, algorithmic trading and technology, synthetic biology and computational biology, quantum computation and information, natural language processing, and mathematical logic and recursion theory. Past academic appointments include Harvard, MIT, and the Technical University of Berlin. An entrepreneur and businessman, in 2008 he founded SciColab.com a collaborative website for scientists and researchers, co-founded LobeLink.com a web annotation and recommendation engine company, founded Reducible Systems, Inc a quantitative consulting company, and in 2009 co-founded TagHalo.com a word tag cloud-based information browsing/search system.

About the Talk
The North Paw is a compass anklet: it vibrates on your ankle to tell you which way is north. Because the stimulus is persistent, your brain adapts to the device, and you acquire an intuitive sense of north.

Sensebridge is a company I have started (with some friends) that aims to explore the space of wearable electronic senses. We bridge the world you can’t feel into the senses you already have: sensebridge. The North Paw bridges a magnetic sense, we also have projects to bridge ultrasonic sound (and thereby echolocation), heart beat, and “eyes in the back of your back”: feeling when things are coming up behind you.

Our approach is not visual: although vision is the most powerful of our senses, it’s also the most over-burdened already, and is actively used. We feel that the sense of touch offers the most possibilities for augmentation of new sensory stimulus.

If you’re interested in wearable electronics or sensory augmentation (aka augmented reality), come to my talk. I’ll give a short talk on wearable electronic senses, and then I’ll moderate a group discussion / Q & A session. I’ll also have a variety of devices on hand that you can try on! Check out our website

About the Speaker
Eric is an engineer and hacker, transhumanist and environmentalist. Lately he’s been building wearable electronic devices which augment his senses. Please join the noisebridge cyborg group: 1pm Sundays at Noisebridge (a San Francisco hackerspace), till the hacking stops.

About the Talk
A buoyancy based device, dubbed the LavaAmp, is able to perform PCR faster than regular thermocyclers, for extremely low cost, and is easily of manufactured and operated. The LavaAmp will also be portable and battery or USB powered, programmable, and able to communicate with smartphones and computers. The LavaAmp hardware will be as open as possible, completely customizable and hackable, so it can be adapted to new purposes and suit the needs of its users. Currently, the detection of the amplified DNA has to be done by conventional agarose gels, however, a variety of methods could be used for in situ detection for the next versions of the LavaAmp. The coupling of DNA detection in a handheld device means quick, effective and even automatic detection of plant and cattle pathogens, food-borne bacteria and diagnostic of antibiotic resistant infections with no need of cumbersome culture tests, not always available. Such a device would allow better surveillance of emerging pandemics in risky areas.

This would improve our collective reaction time against pandemics and extend the reach of the PCR for solving needs currently unmet because of cost and portability. Portable Personal PCR can be attractive for diagnosing neglected diseases in a clinical setting or used by hobbyists and schools: Is this sandfly infected with leishmaniasis? Do you want to teach your kids the real science behind CSI? Do you want to perform your own paternity tests? The LavaAmp can solve these problems and answer these questions, it is an extraordinary tool harnessing the power of PCR and taking it outside the lab, allowing anyone to become a citizen scientist.

About the Speaker
I am a computational biologist from Venezuela, interested in developing inexpensive methods for detecting neglected diseases.

About the Talk
Multimedia, Global voice conferencing, The KDE/GNOME love’s race, Mozilla, OpenOffice, DJ SW, Music making, Games, Internet, Netbooks, Android cell phones – GNU(Linux) is everywhere you want to be. And never stops improving. Freedom (& $Free$$) Software is owned by You! Learn & share about The World’s, & Your, Software.

Discuss your Freedom Software projects & interests. What would you like to see get created in 2010? What are you working on?

Bring your laptop & we’ll help you install GNU(Linux on your computer), or demo stuff for each other, in the “doing” on a special meeting on Saturday or Sunday.

About the Speaker
Giovanni Re is the founder of the global group for All Freedom Software, Hardware & Culture, with 4x/month global voice meetings – BerkeleyTIP. Join from home whenever convenient via voice connection from your computer VOIP, or even a regular land line or cell phone. Make new friends, work on projects, learn new things. TIP = Talks, Installfest, & Project & Programming Party. Educational, Productive, Social.

http://sites.google.com/site/berkeleytip