Colorado State University to Host Symposium on Future of Information and Communication Technology April 2

FutureVisions, a biennial symposium on the future of global information and communication technology, will be held at Colorado State University on Friday, April 2. FutureVisions speakers will look ahead at the next 10 years and describe the future in which college graduates in information and communication technologies will be working.

The conference will be from 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. at Colorado State’s Lory Student Center. Admission is free and open to the public, and advance registration is not required. This is the third biennial symposium and three key themes include the future of cloud computing, human-computer interaction futures, and the future of games.

Keynote speaker Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist from NASA’s Langley research facility, will speak about information technology and climate change. Computer-based technologies are massive consumers of power worldwide. Bushnell will discuss how these technologies might be used to mitigate the effects of climate change in coming decades.

Closing session speaker Thomas Frey, noted futurist from the DaVinci Institute, will describe his vision of the World Wide Web in 2020. The Web has evolved rapidly and dramatically since its inception in 1990 and Frey will explore what Web version “10.0” may look like.

“Frey says that ‘Images of the future create the present,” said Peter Seel, professor of journalism and technical communication at Colorado State. “By listening to forward-looking faculty and industry professionals describing future technologies and trends, students can create images of the future that will shape their professional goals and research agendas. With the outstanding line-up of speakers on April 2nd, we expect this to be one of the most interesting and exciting FutureVisions Symposiums to date.”

The Symposium will offer three unique tracks of thought-provoking seminars featuring experts describing their visions of the future in key information and communication technology fields.

The tracks:
• The Future of Cloud Computing (The Future of Cloud Computing in Higher Education, Consumer Cloud Computing, and Corporate Cloud Computing)
• Human-Computer Interaction Futures (Ubiquitous Computing, Accessible/Assistive Technologies, and Immersive /Augmented Environments)
• The Future of Games (Games and Social Networks, Future of Game Design, and Teaching Programming with Games)

Speakers include representatives from Accenture, EDUCAUSE, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Logisens, Microsoft, Double Fine Games, and faculty from Colorado State, The University of Denver, the University of Colorado, and the Poudre School District.

The FutureVisions Symposium is sponsored by the Information Science and Technology Center (ISTeC) at Colorado State with industry support from Google, HP, Rogue Wave Software, and Telvent.

For a complete symposium schedule and speaker biographies, visit http://futurevisions.colostate.edu/.

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