LASER Talks at Stanford: Digital Privacy; The New Inequality; A History of the Pixel, Chaired by Piero Scaruffi

Program

Cindy Cohn (Executive Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation) on "Imagining A Future with Real Digital Privacy"
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy) on "Inconspicuous Consumption and Cultural Capital: the New Inequality"
Alvy Ray Smith (Co-founder of Pixar, live from Montreal) on "A Biography of the Pixel", A Leonardo Book
 

When: 29th September 2021, 6pm PDT (UTC-7) Find your timezone HERE

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Speakers Bios:

Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF's Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. In 1993, EFF she served lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Among other honors, Ms. Cohn was named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, and in 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. In 2013, The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America, noting: "If Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn."

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of public policy at the University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy. She teaches courses in economic development, the arts, and urban policy and urban planning. Her research focuses on the arts and culture, the American consumer economy and the role of cultural capital in geographic and class divides. She is the author of "The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City" (Princeton University Press 2007); "Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity" (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and "The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class" (Princeton University Press, 2017), which was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. She is a member of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network and Industry Strategy Officers and has been a member of the WEF Global Future Councils. Currid-Halkett's work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. She has contributed to a variety of academic and mainstream publications including the Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the New York Times, and the Harvard Business Review. Author Website: www.elizabethcurridhalkett.com

Alvy Ray Smith is a cofounder of Pixar and a pioneer of computer graphics. He was present at Xerox PARC for the invention of the personal computer, then at the New York Institute of Technology where the vision of the first digital movie was conceived, then Lucasfilm, where he was its first director of computer graphics. His second startup company Altamira was sold to Microsoft, where he was the first Graphics Fellow. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contribution to digital movie-making technology. He created and directed the Genesis Demo in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", the first use of full computer graphics in a successful major motion picture. He hired Pixar's star animator, John Lasseter, and directed him at Lucasfilm in "The Adventures of Andre & Wally B". He initiated the Academy-Award-winning CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) project between Pixar and Disney, the hardware and software system that Disney used for years for full production of all its 2D animated feature films. He initiated and negotiated the Academy-Award-winning CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) project between Pixar and Disney, the hardware and software system that Disney used for years for full production of all its "traditional" 2D animated feature films. He has published dozens of articles on cellular automata, computer graphics, scholarly genealogy, and computer history, and created numerous artworks. He has a PhD from Stanford in computer science. His book "A Biography of the Pixel" is part of the Leonardo Book Series published by MIT Press in 2021.

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks