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The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel g. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b

More than 50 severely disabled people in Second Life have been trying out a sophisticated new brain-computer interface (BCI) that lets users freely explore Second Life's virtual world and control their real-world environment. The system was developed by medical engineering company g.Tec of Schiedlberg, Austria as part of a pan-European project called Smart Homes for All. It's the first time the latest BCI technology has been combined with smart-home technology and online gaming. To activate a command, the user focuses their attention on the corresponding icon on a screen. Electroencephalograph (EEg) caps pick up brain signals, which are translated into commands to navigate and communicate within Second Life and Twitter. It can also be used to open and close doors, answer the phone, and control the TV, lights, thermostat, and intercom. g.Tec's system has been tested at the Santa Lucia Foundation Hospital in Rome, Italy.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

Jane McGoniGal: The Game that can Give you 10 extra years of life

Matt Mills: Image recognition that triggers augmented reality

on faculty at University of Virginia