Our 1st Keynote Speaker at Berlin Buzzwords 2013

Today, we are happy to announce our 1st Keynote Speaker for this years Buzzwords: Ariel Waldman

We are looking forward to her keynote: The Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

Don't panic: the next big science revolution isn't just for asteroid miners or CERN scientists. Just as science fiction has often shown the way to future inventions, the act of hacking is now generating prototypes that act as footholds for future explorations, discoveries and epiphanies in science. This presentation takes you on a tour of our universe (from black holes and dark matter to exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and shows you how you can actively explore the final frontier through getting excited and making things. 

Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global instigator of Science Hack Day, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also an interaction designer, a research affiliate at Institute For The Future, and an advisor for the SETI Institute‘s radio show, Big Picture Science. Previously, she worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate. Ariel has also been a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget and a digital anthropologist at VML. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley.

Recently, Ariel was appointed as a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee member of a congressionally-requested study on the future of human spaceflight. The Committee on Human Spaceflight has been tasked with a study to review the long-term goals, core capabilities, and direction of the U.S. human spaceflight program and make recommendations to enable a sustainable U.S. human spaceflight program. In 2012, she authored a white paper on Democratized Science Instrumentation that was presented to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Ariel has been awarded two grants for her work on Science Hack Day from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Keynote “Hacking Space Exploration” at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention