Ninth Annual Winter School on Emerging Technologies

Do you fit the requirements for the Ninth Annual Winter School on Emerging Technologies: Accelerating Impactful Scholarship supported by The National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure January 3-10, 2022?

The National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure Coordinating Office is now supporting the winter school, run by the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, covering fees and accomodation costs..

The Winter School will give junior scholars and scientists an introduction to and practical experience with methods and theory for better understanding the social dimensions of emerging technologies, focused on the broad notion of impact with an aim to explore ways for participants to increase and diversify the impact of their work.

This year’s program will begin with a series of interactive sessions with faculty members to explore a variety of ways in which research can have a positive impact beyond the specific studies involved. The program will conclude with a multi-day immersive “sandpit” experience, where participants will form teams and pitch projects aimed at increasing the impact of scholarship. Successful teams will be awarded funding to help them implement their ideas over the year following the program.

Ample work time and breaks are built into the Winter School schedule to encourage participants to guide their own learning experience throughout the week. Mentorship sessions with attending faculty will also be offered.

The Winter School is an immersive experience for scholars to share their own unique research and learn from peers and experts. The faculty at the Winter School will offer theoretical framings, analytical tools and hands-on lessons in how social science, natural science, and engineering research on emerging technologies can have a greater impact on the world.

Participating in the Winter School will enrich your networks and provide ample opportunities to share ideas, collaborate with peers, and develop proposals to enhance the impact of your work.

Applicants should be advanced graduate students or recent PhDs (post-doc or untenured faculty within three years of completing a PhD at time of application) with an expressed interest in studying emerging technologies such a nanotechnology, robotics, synthetic biology, geoengineering, artificial intelligence, etc.

Applicants may come from any discipline and must be demonstrably proficient in English.

The program will spend its ninth consecutive year at Saguaro Lake Ranch in Mesa, AZ with access to Sonoran Desert hiking, kayaking on Saguaro Lake, horseback riding and relaxing by the Salt River.

The program fees for accepted students will be covered by the NNCI including seven nights at Saguaro Lake Ranch, meals and local transportation from Tempe, Arizona. Participants will be responsible for their own travel to Phoenix, Arizona and should arrive before 1pm on January 3rd.

To access an application and learn more about the 2022 Winter School program visit the dedicated website. Participants are requested to be fully vaccinated before they arrive at the ranch.

 DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS MONDAY NOVEMBER 8, 2021. Spread the word!

Art in Responsible Innovation, Maurizio Montalti in Conversation

Long ago, back in February of 2015, I wrote this post about Maurizio Montalti and his work with fungus.

Montalti produces various materials in what he calls a collaboration between living organisms, compostable materials that can be used to replace plastics and chemical based products.

Since I first met him he has begun to produce a host of materials on an industrial scale with the foundation of his company MOGU, and earlier this summer I was fortunate enough to catch up with him again and record the video interview you find below, part of my Art in Responsible Innovation series for the Bassetti Foundation.

Maurizio is a designer, scientist and artist whose works is extremely innovative, research and experiment based and perched on the border between art, design and biology.  He has been active in promoting responsibility within innovation throughout his career, with lots of ideas around sustainability and science communication and the role of science in society.

Learn more about this intriguing character and his work through the video and podcast below.

Green, Environmentally Friendly Economic Growth

Green Growth Through Technology

I have been following the European Biotechnology Seminar series 2021, an online University run series of 20 minute presentations that take in lots of different aspects of technology.

It’s the second series (here for a review of the first) and really interesting.

Yesterday we got into a discussion about the problems of what we might like to think of as intelligent sustainable growth, the use of technology to reduce emissions and help to improve the health of the planet while also producing economic growth.

The talk was about evaluating sustainability. This is not an easy thing to do in reality, as there are lots of factors that we might like to include, an endless number of factors are really possible, depending on your point of view.

CO2 output, water use, pollution of the land, use of space, just to think about environmental issues. But sustainability also involves social sustainability, and economic. If we close all the factories down then half of the problem will be resolved. But is that socially or economically sustainable?

So we find ourselves having to make decisions about what we are going to address, weight the various aspects of interest and then try to compare one approach with another.

This brought in a discussion about framing the future. Any presentation that we see about addressing climate change today makes proposals, the world will be intelligent, connected and electric. If we frame the future as this, we should understand that we are not only making a proposal, but also excluding other paths. Once electric transport is promoted as the future for transport, others fall by the wayside and what we get is a future of electric transport.

The green growth model (technological solutions) also brings other things into play that are not so broadly discussed: the manufacturing of all of this technology requires raw materials, and a large percentage of those that we use today lie in developing nations.

Lithium Mining

Namibia and Zimbabwe are two of the world’s largest lithium producers today. Chile, China and Australia are the biggest by far in terms of production, the USA for deposits, while the largest mining companies are multinationals, with extraction processes spread across the world. And thanks to its use in batteries this is a growth industry, with current production expected to double by 2024!

The largest project in Zimbabwe appears to be Chinese owned and run (Sinomine), While the largest in Namibia is Canadian.

All of which brings back thoughts of my sociology studies and the start of the mining exploitation by the Belgians and French in Africa. They called in colonialism in those days, taking raw materials from a third country to feed the ruling nation’s economy. The reality also includes polluting other people’s back yards, cheap life and labour.

Any Suggestions?

I am not suggesting that the battery/electric transport future should not go ahead, far from it. Regular readers will have seen lots of my posts about environmentally friendly, energy saving and producing technology, but there are more complications to the model that we like to think about.

Sitting in Europe it is easy to take the technological path without fully working through the consequences for other peoples and global politics. Fed the narrative of doing the right thing for the Earth, always trying to do what is best, but without a full picture of the implications, we (I too) fall into line within the narrative, we drive it and make both the positive and the negative sides real.