2010 Speakers:
More As they become known!
Lynn Baroff
Human-rating Automated and Robotic Systems
How Can HAL Work safely and effectively with People? A Panel
Long duration human space missions will not be possible without unprecedented levels of automation to support the human endeavors. The automated and robotic systems must carry the load of routine "housekeeping" for the new generation of explorers, as well as assist their exploration science and engineering work with new precision. Fortunately, the state of automated and robotic systems is sophisticated and sturdy enough to do this work - but the systems themselves have never been human-rated as all other NASA physical systems used in human space flight have. Our panelists will introduce a variety of perspectives on requirements and architecture for the interfaces and interactions between human beings and the astonishing array of automated systems; and to identify approaches to create human-rated systems and implement them in the human space program. Members of this session include: Lynn Barroff, Andrew Mishkin, Darrel Jan, Bill Clancey, Carol Stoker and Mark Lupisella.
Lynn Baroff is Executive Director of the California Space Education and Workforce Institute (CSEWI), a non-profit agency. The institute's purpose is to integrate the efforts of that state's educational establishment and its huge space enterprise, in maintaining and growing the workforce needed for the world's largest space economy. He comes to the Institute after 16 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he most recently worked as Human-Systems Integration lead with NASA's Constellation Program, America's next generation program for human space flight. He continues his association with NASA as a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, leading an agency-wide team in developing a standard for automated and robotic systems that support long duration human space missions. His work is helping to develop the social and work process patterns that will support new and long duration space missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond.
Bill Clancey
Consciousness, Schemas, and SETI: The Search for Human Intelligence
Psychologists and social scientists have suggested that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence reflects the nature of human consciousness, which enables us to be social beings, and our cultural practices of inquiry and exploration. In particular, cognitive science is revealing how fundamental organizing concepts (schemas) broadly affect both scientific work and how we deal with human dilemmas, such as our mortality. This presentation considers the conceptual schemas that underlie scientific and cultural assumptions about our place in the universe and how SETI reflects our ways of thinking and values.
William J. Clancey is the Chief Scientist for Human-Centered Computing in the Inteligent Systems Division at NASA Ames. He leads a partnership project with Johnson Space Center for automating file management between ground support teams in the Mission Control Center and the crew of the International Space Station. Clancey's scientific interests include understanding the cognitive and social nature of human exploration and team work; the neuropsychological architecture of conceptualization; the cultural evolution of cognition; and the varieties of animal consciousness. Clancey holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. In addition to his many books and publications, he has recently written a NASA Special Publication on how working with the Mars Exploration Rover has changed the nature of field science.
Yvonne Clearwater
Participatory Exploration
Yvonne Clearwater is a NASA Project Manager and Principal Investigator at the Ames Research Center. Starting at the inception of the International Space Station (ISS) Program, she established the NASA Habitability Research Program and served as Senior PI in for multi-disciplinary, distributed team investigations leading to design guidelines for the ISS and beyond. She has served as NASA project manager in a wide array of endeavors including strategic communications, education, and most recently for concept development of the first of its kind American Student Moon Orbiter. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, with specialization in design research and communications.
Bruce Damer
The EvoGrid: An Artificial Origin of Life Experiment & CONTACT Challenge
The EvoGrid, or Evolution Grid, is a global project that grew out of a presentation given at CONTACT XII in 1995 and the subsequent Digital Biota events of the Contact Consortium. The EvoGrid seeks to create a large enough computing space (containing trillions of particles representing virtual atoms and molecules) that chemical origin of life experiments can be undertaken. Of specific interest to the CONTACT audience are the following questions arising from the EvoGrid effort:
- How would you know Artificial Life when you see it?
- What are the consequences for humanity of a techno-auto-genesis event occurring in some of our lifetimes?
- What would CONTACT recommend as a protocol for contacting an EvoGrid-generated alien, however simple it might be?
Bruce Damer is a frequent CONTACT presenter and inventor and director of research and technology at a number of organizations, including CONTACT's offspring organization, the Contact Consortium, where in the mid 1990s teams pioneered many aspects of virtual worlds and avatars on the Internet; at DigitalSpace which has been engaged with NASA for over a decade simulating and designing existing and new space missions; at Elixir Technologies, where in the 1980s he led efforts with Xerox to develop some of the first graphical user interfaces on personal computers; and leading the Evolution Grid, or EvoGrid, which seeks to use massive grid computing through the Internet to simulate the origin of life of Earth. In his spare time, Bruce curates one of the world's largest collections of vintage personal computer hardware and software, called the DigiBarn Computer Museum, as well as designing cyber-clothing, and raising pigs, and many fruits and vegetables with his wife Galen Brandt on their "real" farm in Northern California. More on Bruce and his pursuits and life at: http://www.damer.com
Chris Ford
Computer Generated Synthetic Human Beings
Why we have not seen completely digital actors (close up) yet, the challenges of simulating photo-realism (motion as well as visuals) as applied to human faces and bodies, and how close up hyper-realistic synthetic humans, avatars, etc, are looking increasingly possible. I am interested in the possibility that in remote visual interaction we could return to being 21 years old, assume another identity, turn into the opposite sex, or even become non-human...
Chris Ford is currently RenderMan Business Director at Pixar Animation Studios with over 20 years experience in computer graphics (CG) software development, media production technology, product management and business development. Previously at Autodesk, Alias, Silicon Graphics, and Wavefront Technologies, Chris has managed most of the professional CG modeling, animation, and rendering software tools used in contemporary feature film special effects and scientific visualization including Wavefront, Maya, 3ds max, and RenderMan. Chris is also a keen astro-photographer focused on the application of 3D visualization techniques to astronomical imaging.
Gus Frederick
Space and Time Warps - Time-Lapse & Exposures
Gus Frederick is a multi-media artist, animator and technical illustrator who lives in Silverton, Oregon with his cat, lots of books and tons of 78rpm phonograph records. He currently works as a Multimedia Specialist for the Oregon Office of Private Health Partnerships. A long-time space enthusiast, evironmentalist and peacenik. He is actively involved in his local community by way of several diverse organizations from the Silverton Grange to the Marion County chapter of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. He is also working with a new global group known as Explore Mars to promote and study the implications of how best to make use of a new world.
Jim Funaro
Small Town Monkeys in the Big City: Problems of Scale
Our cultural institutions - social organization, politics, economics - evolved as adaptations to serve our prehuman social needs. As in other animal societies, they were designed by evolution to operate effectively within their original biosocial context, which for primates means small-scale -- groups of less than 100. After 4-5 million years as food collectors, about 10K years ago humans became food producers, which meant our populations were no longer limited by the natural food supply. Within the last few thousand years our population has increased a thousand fold. These institutions we see today were not built to operate in such a large-scale context and thus have historically become outdated, ineffective and corrupted versions of their eufunctional originals, leading to most of our world problems - warfare, poverty, corporate and nationalistic greed, ecological degradation, globalization, etc. What could we do about this?
Jim Funaro is the founder of CONTACT and professor emeritus in anthropology at Cabrillo College, which has honored him with its highest award for teaching excellence. Publications demonstrating his research interests are "Anthropologists as Culture Designers for Offworld Colonies" and "On the Cultural Impact of Extraterrestrial Contact." His personal and professional approach to life combines the sciences and the arts. Besides his graduate degrees in Anthropology, has a BA cum laude in Literature and is a published poet; he won the American Anthropological Association's 1997 prize for poetry with "The Dancing Stones of Callanish."
Randall Hayes
Cognitive Dissonance as a Cognitive Universal
Many science fiction stories share a key tragic element -- the refusal by a character or a society to accept as true facts that are upsetting. This situation is usually treated as a moral failure, which leads to disaster. On the other hand, several decades of psychological research have shown fooling oneself to be a normal human trait, and even healthy under some circumstances. More fundamentally, the way brains process information by repeated filtering means that denial may be a river in any culture we find.
Randall Hayes has degrees in biology and neuroscience, which he uses to inform his son's drawings of aliens, monsters, and robots. He teaches interdisciplinary courses in Analytical Reasoning and Evolutionary Theory as it applies to everyday life at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in Greensboro, NC. He read Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" in Weekly Reader in the 7th grade, and is now putting together an evolution-themed SF anthology for classroom use.
Howard Heard
Panel - Avatar: The Good, The Bad And The Beautiful
Howard Heard is a native of southern California and studied motion picture production at UCLA. He has an avid interest in the sciences as an amateur observer, as well. Still a resident of Los Angeles, he has done film editing work on forty-five features, more than fifty hours of prime time episodic television, pilots, miniseries, four documentaries, and other short films and commercials. He also serves on the faculty of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena with students who hope to become the film directors of tomorrow. Jeroen Lapré has been with Industrial Light & Magic since 1996. As a Technical Director at ILM he is responsible for the assembly and rendering of visual effects in feature films including CG lighting of the 3D elements and integrating them with the actors, sets, props and locations. His film credits with ILM include Star Wars episodes 1 and 2, Artificial Intelligence, Hulk, T3, The Time Machine and many others. In addition to his work at ILM, Jeroen is working with Sir Arthur C. Clarke on a film version of Clarke's story, Maelstrom II.
Jeroen Lapré & Matthew Blackwell
Epsilon Aurigae Dome Show
The California Academy of Sciences Visualization Studio Senior Technical Director, Jeroen Lapre, and Technical Director, Matthew Blackwell, will present their work on a 5 minute planetarium dome show that explores the eclipsing binary system Epsilon Aurigae. Epsilon Aurigae is located in the constellation Auriga, approximately 2000 ly from earth. The binary system is believed to consist of an F0 super giant, and a solar system-sized dust disk, orbiting a common center of gravity. The Epsilon Aurigae system drops in brightness every 27 years. The eclipsing of the dust disk and the F0 is proposed to be the cause of this dimming. Jeroen will explain how science data about the epsilon Aurigae System was imported into Uniview, and modelled in Maya.
Uniview is a real time 3D "Universe in a Box" software package by SCISS, a company specializing in astronomy visualization software for digital planetaria. Maya is a 3D modeling and rendering package, by Autodesk, which is popular in the visual effects industry. Matt will describe the process of visualizing a solar system-sized rotating dust disk, starting with scientific simulations supplied by collaborators, and examining the issues encountered in representing such information using software commonly employed in the visual effects industry. The Epsilon Aurigae vizualization is based on research by Professor Robert Stencel, and produced in association with the Citizen Sky Project, AAVSO, Adler Planetarium, with assistance from the National Science Foundation.
Jeroen Lapré's background includes 11 years in the feature film visual effects industry at Industrial Light & Magic. Jeroen has had a life-long passion for science and space exploration. He enjoys combining digital visualization skills gained from the visual effects industry, with compelling science topics at the California Academy of Sciences Visualization Studio.
Matthew Blackwell's background includes a doctorate in chemistry from UC Berkeley and over 10 years in the visual effects industry at Industrial Light & Magic.
Todd Klaus
An Overview of the Kepler Mission, a Search for Earth-Size Exoplanets in the Habitable Zone
The Kepler mission is designed to continuously monitor over 100,000 stars at a 30 minute cadence for 3.5 years searching for Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. The field of view was chosen to maximize the number of suitable target stars while satisfying constraints on ecliptic and galactic coordinates. The field must be at least 55 degrees from the ecliptic in order to be continuously observable throughout the year as Kepler orbits the Sun while remaining within 20 degrees of the galactic plane in order to maximize the number of target stars. These constraints are further refined to minimize the number of false positives due to background eclipsing binaries, which is a function of galactic latitude. The Kepler photometer contains a 95-megapixel CCD camera, but due to storage and bandwidth restrictions, only about 5% of these pixels are sent back to Earth. This requires that the target stars within the selected field be preselected. The target stars were chosen based on metrics designed to optimize the scientific yield of the mission with regards to the detection of Earth-size planets by the Kepler photometer. Target tables specifying which pixels to store and download are generated at the Science Operations Center (SOC) at NASA Ames Research Center and uploaded to the spacecraft every 90 days. The data collected on board the spacecraft are downloaded monthly via NASA's Deep Space Network and processed at the SOC using custom built distributed pipeline software running on a cluster of 128 processors.
Todd Klaus is the Lead Software Engineer for the Kepler Science Operations Center (SOC) at NASA Ames Research Center. Todd has been with the Kepler project since 2005, and helped design and implement the software and hardware used to process the Kepler data in search of planetary transit signatures, as well as the operational tools and processes used by the SOC. Todd has been a software engineer and architect for 19 years, and is also an avid amateur astronomer with a backyard observatory.
Ken Koenig
Panel - Avatar: The Good, The Bad And The Beautiful
Ken Koenig, M.D. is a recently retired psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who was in private practice for over 32 years. He was also responsible for co-organizing the Northern California branch of the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis where he taught for many years. Nearing retirement Ken took up documentary filmmaking, a long held passion that brought together his interest in photography, computers, interviewing and filmmaking (which began when he grew up using a 16 mm camera his parents owned). A lifelong jazz fan and musician, he made his first film about the famous jazz club in Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles (The Lighthouse) where modern jazz on the west coast had its roots in the 50s and 60s. This project has proven very successful and the film has been shown in venues nationally and internationally. His next project was a film about the history of jazz in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA. His most recent film is a live concert documentary about singers and the Great American songbook. He is currently beginning work on his next documentary film. Ken lives in Santa Cruz with his wife. He has a son, who is an animator and script writer and works in Los Angeles most recently on the Simpsons as well as his own animated projects. He has a daughter who lives in Northern California and is an archeologist.
Larry Lemke
Flying on Titan
On January 14, 2005 the Huygens probe successfully entered the atmosphere of Titan and descended on a parachute to the surface, where it remained operational for a few hours, transmitting data to the Cassini orbiter for subsequent relay to Earth. This orbiter-probe spacecraft combination produced a wealth of observations consistent with previously held theories, while also revealing unexpected discoveries. For example, the presence of predicted convective atmospheric processes, evaporation and condensation of liquid methane, geological resurfacing, and energy sources to drive all of these processes was confirmed. After the mission was proven successful, the discussion within the Outer Solar System exploration community quickly turned to the topic of bringing mobility to Titan. In principle, the characteristics of Titan allow the possibility of mobility on the solid surface, on the lakes, or in the air. Of these possibilities, aerial mobility offers the highest productivity of scientific data return in the immediate future because the atmosphere is in contact with every point on the surface (allowing global access) and because the speed of air travel makes it possible to cover a very large ground track during the course of a given mission. In addition, the view of Titan's surface from orbit is obscured by a haze layer at high altitude, thus making low level atmospheric flight the only practical alternative for high resolution imaging. Of particular importance to the problem of flight is the combination of Titan's very low gravity and high atmospheric density, making Titan the easiest place in the Solar System to fly. This talk deals with flying fixed wing aircraft on Titan for purposes of scientific exploration using the new generation of Radioisotope Power Source being developed by NASA.
Larry Lemke earned a BA in Psychology from University of California Santa Cruz, a BS in Physics from Portland State University, and MS and Engineer Degrees from Stanford University. In 1978 Mr. Lemke joined the professional staff of NASA-Ames Research Center, performing applied and theoretical aerodynamic research in advanced rotorcraft technology. From 1988 through 1996, he was a member of the faculty of the International Space University, where he was responsible for Design Projects and the Space Engineering departments. Beginning in 1996, he served for 5 years as the Chief of the Advanced Projects Office at NASA-Ames. He served as Principal Investigator for a Mars Airplane technology development project (MATADOR), and a Mars Hypervelocity penetrator (MVE) project, and Co-Investigator on the Mars Analog Rio Tinto Experiment (MARTE, Riotinto, Spain). Since 2004, he has served on assignment to NASA Headquarters' Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) office, where he participated in the Surface Nuclear Power special study group and the Near Earth Object special study group. He has published more than 20 articles in technical journals and conference proceedings. He currently serves as a senior aerospace engineer within the NASA-Ames Small Spacecraft Office/Mission Design Center. Specific interests are in the design of extraterrestrial airplanes and planetary surface and subsurface access systems.
Mark Lupisella
Panel: Human-rating Automated and Robotic Systems
Andrew Mishkin
Panel: Human-rating Automated and Robotic Systems
Jim Moore
What's the Difference Between a Chimpanzee and a Bonobo?
Chimpanzees have a reputation (today) as aggressive, male-dominated, warlike and "demonic." Bonobos (aka pygmy chimpanzees) are "apes from Venus" who make love, not war. Understanding the reality behind those images and the ecological explanation may help in designing and perhaps understanding aliens.
Jim Moore has collected degrees (BA, MA, MS, PhD; no BS) and is a biological anthropologist at UC San Diego and founder of the Ugalla Primate Project. His research focuses on chimpanzees and how they can inform us about human evolution. Chimpanzees and early hominids have something in common with vampires and aliens: they are clearly not members of Homo sapiens, but whether they are persons is unclear and their "humanity" cannot be categorically rejected. In that spirit, he's looking forward to returning to CONTACT after a hiatus of ... way too long.
Reed Riner
What Anthropology Brings to the Study of Futures
The training and education of professional futures thinkers has been feudalized, so that tyros study in a Master's enclave, where there is restricted, and not peer-reviewed nor sharing of methods and findings, as both are necessarily proprietary. Anthropology, as a public discipline, and the most holistic, all-embracing, among the social sciences, brings an established structure of inductively developed and inter-connected theories (explanatory strategies), methods, and professional practices - which can, potentially, elevate the exploration of alternative futures from proprietary Feudalism into a 21st , post-modernist holistic, inter-disciplinary social science. Specifically, anthropology's strategy 'yang' strategy of 'timelining' of thermodynamic, cultural materialist description, while the Ethnographic Futures Research illustrates the complimentary, 'yin', ideographic strategy, eliciting and clarifying 'meanings'. Geeks will understand these relations in the hardware / software dichotomy.
Reed Riner is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, where he regularly teaches courses about the future, and is a founding board member of CONTACT.
Don Scott
The Ecologist, the Mythologist, and the Poet
Sometimes intellectual change is obvious and highly visible - like the Apollo moon landings. But more often, it happens quietly, in a backwater, outside of formal institutions and overlooked by the media. People of like mind run into each other, talk, share ideas, and the paradigm shifts -- so quietly that society at large does not know the shift has happened until decades pass. This talk will explore one example of quiet paradigm shift - which began when two brilliant misfits met in a dentists' office, and reached its fulfillment when another brilliant misfit shared a unique and potent cocktail with one of them.
Donald M. Scott is a retired NASA Educator. In the best tradition of medieval wandering scholars, Scott currently travels the western United States in his classic 1977 Toyota Chinook, working as a volunteer Ranger-Naturalist while he completes his biography of historian, odologist, toponymist, and pioneering ecological novelist George R. Stewart. Scott is interested in the role that independent scholars play in the creation of the future; that will be the topic of his talk at CONTACT 26.
Seth Shostak
Where Should SETI Aim?
Where should SETI aim its telescopes to find a signal that would prove that we 'e not the smartest things in the galaxy? The traditional answer: stellar systems somewhat like our own. Consequently, every SETI experiment since Project Ozma, a half-century ago, has relentlessly examined the neighborhoods of nearby stars, hoping to pick up ET's faint signal. But the bulk of technically competent societies (if such things exist) will be far beyond our own level. It's possible that these cultures won't be constrained to solar systems. In this talk, we consider some novel galactic locations where highly sophisticated intelligence may be sited, and suggest why SETI observations in these direction might lead to a signal detection sooner than the continuing surveillance of individual star systems.
Seth Shostak is senior astronomer and official spokesman for the SETI Institute. A distinguished astronomer with many publications to his credit, Seth is also a photographer, filmmaker and widely known media personality. Seth's book, Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life has received much public and scholarly acclaim.
Michael Sims
Aggregate Organisms
The new human aggregate organisms: Web 2.0, books, spoken word and 10k's years of history have taken us to be a unified (if ill-directed) incredibly powerful force of nature.
Michael Sims is Research Scientist with the Center for Mars Exploration and the Computational Sciences Division of NASA Ames. Michael received a BS in Physics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rutgers University and has been at NASA Ames Research Center since 1987. His research includes robotics, machine learning, visualization, and tools for enhancing and easing scientific modeling. He was one of the founding members of the artificial intelligence and the intelligent mechanisms groups at Ames. Previously he served as agent for artificial intelligence, robotics and human performance for NASA's Office of Exploration. Michael is actively involved in plans for future planetary missions including robotic activities and human settlements on the Mars and the Moon. He was a participating scientist on the Pathfinder mission and is co-investigator on the Mars 2003 rover missions.
Carol Stoker
The Habitability of the Phoenix Landing Site
The key objective of the Phoenix mission was to search for a habitable zone. The paper evaluates the habitability of the landing site based on mission results. We define the habitability probability (HI) as the product of probabilities for the presence of liquid water (Plw), energy (Pe), nutrients (Pch), and benign and nontoxic environment (Pb). Observational evidence for the presence of liquid water (past or present) includes clean ice at a polygon boundary, chemical etching of soil grains, and carbonate minerals in the soil. The presence of ice at the surface and near subsurface, along with thermodynamic conditions that support melting suggest that liquid water is theoretically possible. Presently, unfrozen water can form only in adsorbed films or saline brines but more clement conditions recur periodically due to variations in orbital parameters. Energy to drive metabolism is available from sunlight, where semi-transparent soil grains provide shielding, and chemical energy from the redox couple of perchlorate and reduced iron. Nutrient sources including C, H, N, O, P and S compounds are supplied by known atmospheric sources or global dust. Environmental conditions are within growth tolerance for terrestrial microbes. Surface soil temperatures currently reach 260K and are periodically much higher, the pH is 7.8 and is well buffered, and the water activity is high enough to allow growth when sufficient water is available. Computation of HI for the sites visited by landers yields Phoenix=0.47, Meridiani=0.23, Gusev=0.22, Pathfinder=0.05, Viking 1=0.01, Viking 2=0.07. HI for the Phoenix site is the largest of any site explored but dissimilar measurements limit the comparisons' confidence.
Carol Stoker is a staff scientist in the Space Sciences Division at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. She is a lead scientist on the Phoenix mission whose four principal science teams include Biological Potential, Geology, Chemistry and Minerology, and Atmospheric Science. Dr. Stoker leads the Biological Potential working group responsible for evaluating the biological potential, or biohabitability, of the polar landing site. Her Mars-analog drilling experience and research into life in extreme environments on Earth, together with her development of the virtual reality technology that enhances the control of mobile rovers, make her uniquely qualified to participate in the exploration of the Polar region of Mars accomplished by the Phoenix mission.
Melanie Swan
Revolutionizing Biology with Personal Genomes
Biology evolved to be just good enough to survive. Genomics provides the critical toolkit for its greater exploitation. The ability to sequence and synthesize DNA is already having an impact in the health and energy sectors. The global challenge and opportunity for humanity is to move safely and expediently into a new era of biological manipulation.
Melanie Swan - Principal, MS Futures Group, is a hedge fund manager and futurist focused on research in emerging high-impact technologies. Recent publications include "Multigenic Condition Risk Assessment in Direct-to-Consumer Genomic Services," "Engineering Life into Technology," and "Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models." Melanie has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Georgetown University. She is an advisor and instructor at Singularity University.
Israel Zuckerman
COTI Classic: Back to Cultures of the Imagination
We're celebrating the inauguration of our second quarter century of CONTACT with a resurrection of our original focus on COTI. This should please many longtimers, who have been clamoring for a return for years, and delight some newcomers, who have not had the opportunity to participate in the event that precipitated the initial success of our conferences. So, for CONTACT 2010, we return to the thrilling days of yesteryear with COTI Classic. Human and alien teams will be recruited from our presenters and audience. Contact between the teams will climax the conference on Sunday.
Israel Zuckerman is the director of the COTI: CULTURES OF THE IMAGINATION workshop. He has a BA in Anthropology, and currently is a computer technician and educator at a bilingual elementary school in Watsonville, CA.