This year's theme: WHAT IF?

Our world is incredibly complex thanks to the processing of information done by the atoms, organisms, ecosystems and societies that preceded us. It is our duty to preserve and enrich that complexity. We’re at a unique moment in time, where the encoding of information into bits is allowing us to abstract our reality into software, making its transformation easier than ever before and placing our information society at the center of this process.

At InfoCamp 2019, by asking “What if?”, we’ll engage in a creative dialogue with technologists, academics, students and policy-makers to explore the opportunities and challenges that our information society faces.

Schedule

9:45 AM - 11:00 AM / Panel: Understanding Users

What if we could have better frameworks to understand people’s interaction with technology? What if we could rescue the value of the individual in the definition of the user? What if we could more fluidly integrate these insights into the process of technology design? By talking with researchers, designers and product owners we’ll explore current approaches and emerging trends on how to better understand end users.

11:00 AM - 11:15 AM / Break

11:15 AM - 12:00 PM / Unconference

Unconference is a loosely structured conference session emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured panel/talk. Interested in hosting a 10-minute session during the unconference? Fill out this form.

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM / Panel: Raising and Resolving Conflict in Online Communities

Online groups and communities are increasingly important in the ways we work, play, learn, conduct commerce, organize politically, and receive social support. These communities depend on effective social engineering – understanding how people tend to act, how we want those tendencies to manifest online, and how to design rules and affordances to 'tilt' human behavior in the directions somebody wants. What should conflict look like in online communities? In this panel we'll explore different perspectives on the escalation and de-escalation of conflict, such as centralized vs. decentralized processes, from communities such as Wikipedia and Blockchain.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM / Lunch

2:00 PM - 5:00 PM / Future Scenarios Challenge Activity

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM / Talk: Tangible Interfaces

What if our interfaces transcended our screens? What if we could leverage the full potential of our senses to interact with technology? We’ll explore how new perspectives in interface design are redefining our relationship with information through embodied cognition, ubiquitous computing, and the art of research by design.

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Talk: The Current Bounds of Data-Driven Decisions

What if learning is not all about data? What if we find hard limits on the problems machines can learn by simply looking at examples? What if there are none such limits? What if our current limitations in computing power can be overcome by better algorithms or models? What if we find ways to capture more data without compromising privacy? We’ll venture into these questions with practitioners that are stretching, to its limits, the current capabilities of our data-driven machine learning paradigm; explore their approaches and evaluate opportunities.

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM / Talk: Ethical Considerations for Scaling Companies

What does it mean for an information organization to scale ethically? What if the companies, governments and other organizations that transform information in our society reach a consensus around fairness, privacy and transparency? What if products are introduced into different societies, taking into account their cultural context? We’ll explore how the ethics of technological product development are being defined by the large organizations that shape our everyday lives.

5:00 PM - 6:30 PM / Concluding Remarks + Mixer

WHAT IS INFOCAMP?

InfoCamp, in its 10th year, is the premier student-run conference for the information community. Held on the UC Berkeley campus at the School of Information, InfoCamp is a day-long event that aims to educate, inform, and inspire new ways of thinking about information through panels, talks, and innovation challenges. The event is targeted to anyone interested in information, and typically draws professionals, students, and entrepreneurs who work in roles in data science, UX design, product management, software engineering, and policy.