Telluride Tech Festival

TechFest 2011

2011-05-04T15:38:42Z

This years TechFest will be held in Boulder, CO. Please sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know when TechFest@Boulder is scheduled.

We hope to see you in Boulder this fall!

2010 Interview with W3W3

2010-09-24T18:04:03Z

Tech Fest organizers talk with Larry Nelson on W3W3 about this years 2010 upcoming event. Listen to the 8 minute interview here.

Murray Gell-Mann

2010-08-02T18:58:58Z

Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He discovered the V-A theory of chiral neutrinos in collaboration with Richard Feynman. He created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models when the fundamental theory was still murky, which led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment.

Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Levy, discovered the sigma model of pions, which describes low energy pion interactions. Modifying the integer-charged quark model of Han and Nambu, Fritzsch and Gell-Mann were the first to write down the modern accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics although they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom.

Larry Smarr

2010-08-02T18:53:12Z

Larry Smarr became founding director in 2000 of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California San Diego/UC Irvine partnership. He holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Jacobs School’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. For the previous 15 years as founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Smarr helped drive major developments in the planetary information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence. For the last six years Smarr has been PI on the NSF OptIPuter project.

Smarr was a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee for President Clinton and served until 2005 on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing systems achievements. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fortune, and Business Week.

Richard Stallman

2010-08-02T18:42:47Z

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project’s leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Stallman gives speeches frequently about free software and related topics. Common speech titles include “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software movement”, “The Dangers of Software Patents”, and “Copyright and Community in the Age of the Computer Networks”. A fourth common topic consists of explaining the changes in version 3 of the GNU General Public License, which was released in June 2007.

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.

After personal meetings, Stallman has obtained positive statements about free software from the then-President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, from French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, and from the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa. In Venezuela, Stallman has promoted the adoption of free software in the state’s oil company (PDVSA), in municipal government, and in the nation’s military.

Eric Allman

2010-08-02T18:44:42Z

Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, breaking into his high school’s mainframe and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the Unix operating system began to become popular in academic circles. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC Berkeley in 1977 and 1980 respectively.

As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the AT&T code. One such extension was delivermail, which in 1981 turned into sendmail. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver e-mail over the still relatively small (as compared to today’s Internet) ARPANET, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers.

Sendmail soon became an important part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and continues to be the most widely used MTA on Unix based systems today, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman founded Sendmail, Inc., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.

Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style.

He was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in August, 2006 in Telluride, Colorado, and in 2009 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Kirstie Bellman

2010-08-02T18:24:05Z

Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman is a Principal Scientist in the Computer Systems Division and head of the Aerospace Integration Sciences Center (AISC), which she started upon returning to the Aerospace Corporation after four years at DARPA. AISC’s focus is on the development of advanced system and model integration methods, new analytic techniques, and evaluation tools for assessing the impacts of new technologies. While at DARPA, she extended the then new concept of Virtual Worlds to education, business and research environments. With a number of academic partners, she is also developing new mathematical approaches to the analysis of Virtual Worlds containing collaborating humans, artificial agents, and heterogeneous representations, models and processing tools. Lastly she has been working on reflective architectures that use models to manage their own resources and to reason about appropriate behavior. Recently with both national and international partners, she has been applying the above experience and methods to theoretical work and experiments on emotional agents, cyber-medicine applications, bio-computation, and “biologically-inspired” architectures and operating systems.

Evi Nemeth

2010-08-04T15:02:47Z

Evi Nemeth is well-known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration and technology infrastructure measurement. She has been named as one of the “Top 25 Women on the Web,” and has been published over 20 times. Throughout her life, Evi has carried the torch as one who separates myth from reality in the technology arena. Evi is best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie-Hellman trap,” the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.

As a professor, Evi taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the State University of New York, and Dartmouth College, and was a visiting lecturer at UC San Diego. In her recent work at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), Evi led the Internet Engineering Curriculum (IEC) Repository, an NSF-funded project to assist educators and others interested in Internet technology in keeping up with developments in the field. The IEC Repository is a collection of teaching materials from university courses, vendor training materials, and tutorials that have been contributed by their individual authors.

Evi holds a B.A. in mathematics from Penn State University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She is also co-author of the best-selling “UNIX System Administration Handbook” (Prentice Hall, 2000) and “Linux Administration Handbook” (Prentice Hall, 2002).

Arthur C Clarke

2010-08-02T18:11:28Z

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the “Big Three” of science fiction.

Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and technician from 1941–1946. He proposed a satellite communication system in 1945 which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1947–1950 and again in 1953 Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving, and lived there until his death. He was knighted by the British monarchy in 1998, and was awarded Sri Lanka’s highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

Freeman Dyson

2010-08-02T18:05:49Z

Dyson is best-known for his contribution to quantum electrodynamics. The observation in 1946 by Willis Lamb of a small difference between the lowest energy levels of the hydrogen atom was an experimental result against which such theories could be tested. In the period 1946–48 independent formulations of quantum electrodynamics were put forward by Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Richard Feynman. Dyson showed that the three methods were all consistent and brought them together into a single general theory.

Dyson later became known to a wider public through his work on the nuclear test ban treaty and for his quite serious considerations of space travel and the ‘greening of the galaxy’. He also reached a wider audience with the publication of his autobiography Disturbing the Universe (1980) and his 1985 Gifford Lectures, Infinite in All Directions (1988).

Dyson has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future. In 1996 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.

In 2000, Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion and in 2003, he was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.