Tech is booming even in the midst of a global pandemic. Many tech companies are achieving better-than-ever revenue and profits, sending tech stocks soaring. Salaries for tech executives and engineers are rising as well which creates a competitive marketplace for top talent. But this prosperity is not shared by all. In tech, women and people […]
Electronic gaming is a huge industry, larger even than music and film, and encompasses options and platforms for everyone: From casual games on smartphones, to visually realistic games on consoles and PCs, to massive online games and platforms leveraging data centers and clouds. It has inspired tremendous amounts of content on social media and streaming […]
SXSW 2022 is finally coming back in-person (and online), after two years of absence (2020) and online-only (2021) programming — and oh, how the work, culture, entertainment, society, and conferences have changed! Join us for a programming preview of SXSW and plenty of online discussion with the head honcho of SXSW himself. Learn how SXSW […]
We will kick off the Austin Forum Sci-Fi book club with Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a novel that inspired many of the ideas and terms we use in technology today! While “Snow Crash” isn’t a new novel — it was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994 — the ideas and lessons about […]
In this talk, Steve will give an introduction to AI for non-practitioners and then highlight current use cases in computer vision, natural language processing, time series forecasting, anomaly detection, reinforcement learning, and recommender systems where AI-based systems are already performing well or offer significant promise to do so in the near future. Some key examples […]
Why combine AI — the powerful, transformative technology that is changing almost every aspect of how we live, work, learn, and play — with whiskey? Well, for starters, there's a lot to be said about how both need to be used safely and responsibly, but both are also beloved by the events’ moderators, Austin Forum […]
AI is changing the world in which we live, work, learn and play, permeating our lives and jobs and our devices and places, and enabling innovations and discoveries in research and industry. However, this huge adoption of AI — both for support of human decisions and for completely autonomous decisions — in all aspects of […]
Digital technology is ubiquitous and pervasive in our lives and society, with largely positive impacts on how we live, work, learn, and play. But there are some dangers, risks and concerns. As with any tool, we can use combinations of responsible design, education, personal behavior, and policies to mitigate these while maximizing benefit. We'll unpack […]
The metaverse concept has been articulated and predicted in books starting with Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," and as CGI has advanced is has been compellingly visualized in movies, such as "Ready Player One," based on the book of the same name by Austin author Ernest Cline. As part of "Metaverse May," we will show the […]
Renewable carbon-neutral generation is now the least expensive means to produce electricity in the world. In West Texas alone, we can produce terawatt-hours of power through wind turbines and solar panels. The question is no longer how do we generate sustainable energy, but how do we leverage its power efficiently and economically. This question is […]
