People hear all buzz from start-ups doing Web 3.0, NFTs (non fungible tokens), and the Metaverse, and think “here goes the hype cycle again”, but this obscures the reason this technology is important for social stability and security,, and that both big corporations and trading nations are aggressively deploying Web 3.0 platforms as part of a very serious geopolitical struggle for power and control

About the Speaker

Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland directs MIT Connection Science, an MIT-wide initiative, and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and Forbes declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States.  He is on the Board of the UN Foundations’ Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was one of the UN Secretary General’s  “Data Revolutionaries” helping to forge the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.  He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy.   Recent invited keynotes include annual meetings of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary-General, the UN Foundation, Consumers Union, and OECD, and formerly the American Bar Association, Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a council member within the World Economic Forum.

* Interesting experiences include dining with the British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space.

His books:

2021 – Building the New Economy: Data as Capital
2017 – Swarms and Network Intelligence in Search
2014 – Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread ̶ The Lessons from a New Science
2008 – Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Photo credit: nextcanada.com

Are we alone in the universe?  The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial life is now into its sixth decade, and we still haven’t discovered any cosmic company.  Could all this mean that finding clever beings beyond Earth, even if it exists, is a project for the ages – one that might take centuries or longer?

About the Speaker

Dr. Shostak  has a degree in radio astronomy and obtained his Ph.D.  in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology  Currently he is  Senior Astronomer at  SETI Institute. Seth is he host of the SETI Institute’s weekly science radio show, “Big Picture Science.”   He is enthusiastic in outreach activities: interesting the public – and especially young people – in science in general, and astrobiology in particular.

His numerous publications include:

• More than 60 research papers in refereed, professional journals
• Approximately three hundred popular articles published in magazines, newspapers, and the Web, on a wide range of topics.
• He was editor of two scientific book and contributor to five popular astronomy books.
• Several commissioned scripts for public relations videos produced for commercial clients and wo scripts for planetarium shows.
• He’s co-authored a college textbook on astrobiology,
• Authored three trade books on SETI.

His major awards include:

• Carl Sagan Award for the Popularization of Science
• Klumpke Roberts Award for Astronomy Popularization
• Jaap S. Nieuwenhuis Award, from Netherlands Association for Scientific Film and Television
• Wubbo Ockels Award, for applied science (image processing in the service of computer animation), The Netherlands
• Best Bay Area Talk Show, BACE cable TV awards