TransVision 2010, October 22-24, 2010 The Day After from Giulio Prisco

We had about 30 remote participants in the in the TVirtual online extension of TransVision 2010, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform. Remote participants have been able to watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. In the picture above, Max More's talk is shown to remote participants in Teleplace, and the virtual Teleplace conference hall is shown to the participants in Milan. We used two Teleplace workstations, one to stream the video and voice of the speaker and to interact with remote participants, and one to stream the speaker's slides. Lesson learned: if the text on the slides is small it is better to upload also the original .ppt or .pdf to Teleplace. We did this in realtime during the conference, but we should have done it in advance. For those speakers without presentations in .ppt or .pdf, we used the second Teleplace workstation to show the audience in Milan to the audience in Teleplace.

In the afternoon of the second day we have reversed the procedure outlined above and shown remote talks from speakers in Teleplace to the audience in Milan. After great talks by Eugen Leitl and Robert Geraci, Natasha Vita-More started her talk (picture above)... but 20 minutes into Natasha's talk all the Internet connections in the conference hall in Milan died, perhaps due to overload caused by too many WiFi connections in parallel (about 10 participants were using the hotel's WiFi connection). The Internet service provider's technicians could not fix the problem. The remote participants in Teleplace continued without us, and we have video recordings of the talks by remote speakers. However, all remote speakers have been invited to repeat their talks to the teleXLR8 community.

In the morning of the third day, not only the Internet connections in the conference hall were still dead, but also the screen projection system was dead! I had a (very) heavy-handed "exchange of views" with the hotel's personnel (wife says I can be quite unpleasant on occasions), and the technical problems were fixed.

This was a very interesting event, with great talks by great speakers. I am happy to have seen again many old friends and made many new ones. In the picture above, some speakers and participants at a dinner after the end of the conference. I was not really able to pay attention to any of the talks including my own, and I look forward to watching the video coverage. We recorded everything on video, both in HD with the cameras on site, and from Teleplace. The videos will be available online and on the conference's DVD proceedings. The videos recorded in Teleplace will be available online in a few days, and those recorded on site in a few weeks.

I have started two blog posts as containers and index pages for material to be posted later. Both posts have the same title as this one. The post on the TransVision 2010 blog will have links to the HD videos recorded in Milan, and the post on the teleXLR8 blog will have links to the videos recorded in Teleplace. The Twitter feed created by participants at #TV2010 has the twitting history of the conference.

Ben Goertzel The Cosmic Manifest to TELEPLACE

Ben Goertzel will give a talk in Teleplace on his recent book “A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age” on September 12, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET).

A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age, by Ben Goertzel, has been published by Humanity+ Press. See also “Book Review – A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age, by Ben Goertzel“ @ IEET and the revised and expanded version “A Cosmist Manifesto, an Advocacy“ on H+ Magazine. See also the online version of the Cosmist Manifesto.
The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel’s “Cosmist Manifesto” gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.

Ben Goertzel is founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, and of the non-profit Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute. He serves as Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for AI.
Teleplace is one of the best 3D applications for telework, online meetings, group collaboration, and e-learning in a virtual 3D environment (v-learning). Those who already have Teleplace accounts for teleXLR8 can just ahow up at the talk. There are a limited number of seats available for others, please contact Giulio Prisco if you wish to attend.
 
THE COSMIC MANIFEST

TRANSVISION 2010