Andrew Walkingshaw - *sketching* data by creating simple query interfaces based on structured data repositories. Had similarities to the Bricks framework. Generated quite a discussion around how and who should be marking up the content. I liked one of Tim O'Reilly's comments *you need to create the context for a set of interactions* and then gave an example of not just asking parents to contribute to a wiki about baseball games, rather provide them with a system that has all the structure of the little league games, info on who is playing when etc, and then *allow* the parents to upload information such as commentary, photos, organisational data etc *what ever they choose*. Just sitting and listening to all the real examples being cited had my head racing with ideas that i would love to implement on the internal Arup investment and technical news websites.

Josh Koarer and Jon Durant - Incorporating science into social networks. An interesting conversation around citizen science and Josh's idea of subscribing to feeds made by / on behalf of animals at your local zoo (I would definately campaign for that - how cool would it be to get rss or twitters from your favourite bear / penguin / lion...) would probably encourage me to return to the zoo more aswell. Really liked Jon's theme around making the context of science accessible in the built environment. He gave the example of the physical / virtual signposts along the gene-mile in Cambridge. I mentioned the BBC's coast work and urban tapestries project.

Henry Gee - what is sci fi for? Last and really interesting session. Henry works at Nature and amongst other things is responsible for the future article on the back page - he has been soliciting one page sci fi stories from the scientific community and has been getting them at the rate of one a day - wow. It is not about visions of the future, rather a reflection on our current pre-occupations. His biggest plea was for people to write stories not scenarios...

Other notables / things to look up:
Josh Knauer of MAYA: making sensor nodes for home energy monitoring and on sale at home depot
Sara Winge at O'Reilly (conceived with Tim the FOO camps) loved the DoC cards - copies are in the post!
Ditto with Frank Rijsberman at google.org - amongst other things he was very interested in our 2007 cardsets around water, climate change and the 2008 poverty set.
Simon Quellen Field *light tube man* has a cool science toys website
scifoo prototypes on JoVE
Arnab Chatterjee (Shell Amsterdam) interesting work on innovation and gamechanger
Convergence discussion with Denise Caruso and Kim Stanley Robinson. In biotech (DC) how do you assess the risks and how do you *project* 21st century regulation. Risk analysis not cost analysis - see Denise book *intervention* for stories on transgenic food and what the FEA did. Also (KSR) the morph from capitalism to socialism may be occuring due to an increased convergence around economic, social and environmental analysis (see Joseph Schumpeters creative destruction).
Nature scifoo
flickr scifoo
technorati posts and photos
http://www.connotea.org/tag/scifoo
google blog search
and a scifoo facebook group

All in all a fantastic event - many thanks to Tim O'Reilly and the team for the invite.

154 sessions to choose from - hmmm, how do i do that...

Visual Garage - We'll Fix Your Graphs and Visuals with Felice Frankel. Interesting session. Managed to present and get feedback on the Bop visualisations and had some great (if severe) comments. But that is what was great - an open honest critique of what i presented since the room genuinely wanted to help people do stuff better. Wish there was something like her Image and Meaning workshops in the London area. Had a few conversations post session with Tamara Munzner, an infovis expert at Uni British Columbia in Vancouver. She also recommended looking at prefuse

Listening to the World: Voices from the Blue Deep - Chris Clark - great presentation on the convergence of comp sci, maths and nature. He is using the sensors measuring energy in the mid pacific between Hawaii and USA. The military uses this for obvious tracking purposes. Chris has been given access to the data to track *biological objects* which has led to an understanding that type n whales communicate over hundreds of miles. The males *sing* to attract mates. The vis of the data was pretty cool it showed different energy bands (Hz) on the y axis and time on the x. At the top was lots of shipping data and during a few months in the latter half of the year was a very distinct band of *singing*. The speeded up (25x) audio sounded pretty cool. Group also discussed data logging bird activity over space and time and issues around the NSF funded NEON air quality monitoring project in 11 locations across the US (to granular to generate accurate results...?)

Computable Data/Mathematics - next was a demo by Mathmatica guru Theodore Gray, some really nice demos showing very simple and visual programming, worth a browse through

100 dollar laptop demo - Ted Kaehler - pretty nifty little machine and looks great. Had some excellent software written in smalltalk to encourage a very visual, object oriented approach to programming - again website worth a browse.

Freebase Demo - Danny Hillis - convergence of data: we do not necessarily know how our data will be used. Freebase is a framework and application for hosting and sharing data, and a tool for presenting data across mulitple datasets from one source.

Micro-UAVs - Chris Anderson - making sub 1000 USD autonomous aircraft using model planes and phone / camera / gps units. amazingly cool and done with his 9 year old son... see his posting at the long tail blog (yes he did write the book)

Finally was a silent observer during the howtoons sessions - not sure if this was the jet lag setting in or because my brain could not fire as quick as everyone else in the room - amazing, buy the book when it is out in November and i just hope the howtoons party bags make it onto the internet.

Couldn't resist this. Played with the iPhone in Apple Store, SF. The touch interface including typing is pretty cool and the web page navigation was pretty useful - e.g. tap to resize to column width. You end up just trying gestures and they work. The resizing of images etc was very nice. So, when can we get one....

[more photos]

The best bit about conferences is actually the time you get to spend with people over lunch, in the breaks and in the bar in the evening. The sci foo events are designed to so that all the time is spent doing those three things...

Arrive at Building 43, Google, Mountain View, looking forward to this invite only unconference. I did not quite understand how the completely open format would work but the answer was very well. Friday started with an introduction to the scifoo concept from Tim from O'Reilly and Timo from Nature, all 200 people introducing themselves using 3 tags that described them and then everyone adding session proposals to the big board. Even though i had not planned to propose a session i found myself volunteering to lead one. It was peculiarly participatory...

The evening ended with 4 great presentations (the only pre-planned parts of the agenda). The first by Drew Endy on the time being right for some real convergence between biology and technology - *creating biological building blocks that others can use, just like we do with lego* and showed the work of school kids who had made eau d'E. coli. as part of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. Second up was Felice Frankel who showed some fantastic examples of communicating science through photography / imagery. Next up was Saul Griffiths introducing Howtoons (fantastic, am going to Amazon now to pre-order...) with an example from their next phase of work which is looking at communicating energy and climate change. Last up was Charles Simonyi recounting his experience of his *tourist* journey to the international space station earlier this year - also amazing - i liked the fact that when he came back down to earth he found it difficult to move his head under the new forces of gravity so all the first interviews show him being very *stiff headed*. Since Martha Stewart was also present she was asked about the food she had been asked to prepare for the space flight - curious.

I had not met a single person before the event but it was an amazing bunch of people, too many to mention so a list is added in this file, but i liked the fact there was 6 nobel laureates, some great sci fi authors (Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear), Tim O'Reilly, Linda Stone, Sergey Brin......

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