This Year at Penguicon

THIS YEAR AT PENGUICON

pcon2013 bb9q47502015 EVENTS

Check out this year’s programming list, which shows all of the events and descriptions we currently have planned for 2015.

These are subject to change all the way up to and including the convention, as we sometimes have last-minute cancellations of panelists.

2015 Programming List

Schedule

PENGUICON 2015 SCHEDULE BY ROOM 

This is the official schedule for Penguicon 2015! If you should see an error or need to cancel your event, please email [email protected]. If you need to cancel during the event, visit Ops during Penguicon.

Due to possible presenter modifications, the schedule is subject to change up to and during the convention.

PENGUICON 2015 SCHEDULE BY ROOM

GUESTS OF HONOR

e-Nabling the Future (Hack of Honor)

enable

The e-NABLE Community is a global network of passionate volunteers, using 3D printing to create free 3D Printed prosthetic hands and arms for those in need.

The community currently has over 4000 members and has created over 800 free prosthetic hands for children and adults around the world who were born missing fingers or who have lost them due to injury, disease, natural disaster and war.

Ivan Owen, the co-creator of the original 3D printed hand design and his wife Jen Owen, the “Voice of e-NABLE” will be at Penguicon 2015 to share about the power of ideas, collaboration and how open source technologies are changing the world for the better.

“Never underestimate the power of your ideas. They just might change the world.”

e-Nable’s 2014 Year in Review
Creating “Super hero hands” with 6 families

e-Nabling the Future hosted their first conference at John Hopkins Hospital on September 28, 2014. There, they unveiled the e-Nable 2.0 hand, the worlds first crowd-sourced, crowd developed prosthetic.

Albert Manero

Our Guest of Honor, Albert Manero, signed up to be a volunteer with e-Nabling the Future and was quickly matched up with a six-year old boy in his local area.

He gathered a team of friends and printed a myoelectric arm that runs off of servos and batteries that are actuated by muscle energy – the child flexes his bicep to squeeze the arm.

Albert and his team are excited to show the Penguicon community examples of the prosthetics they are working on that react to muscle movement for control.

Albert is currently a Fulbright Scholar at University of Central Florida where he is pursuing his Doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering.

UPDATE: Albert and Alex, the boy pictured above, recently met Robert Downey Jr., who showed off his own bionic arm!

Charlie Jane Anders

Our Guest of Honor, io9 Editor-in-Chief Charlie Jane Anders, is hard at work on a fantasy novel with Tor.com, who have picked her up for two novels.

Her novelette Six Months, Three Days won the 2012 Hugo, and her novel Choir Boy won a Lambda Literary Award, both receiving other big nominations.

She organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco (which sounds like a convention without all that pesky conventioning).

She co-edited the anthology She’s Such a Geek with Annalee Newitz and published an indy magazine called other. She’s also contributed to Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Strange Horizons, and many other publications.

You can find more of her work in the McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, Best Science Fiction Of The Year 2009, Sex for America, and other anthologies. She’s also contributed to Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA,Pindeldyboz, and Strange Horizons.

Annalee Newitz

Annalee was recently announced as the new Editor in Chief for Gizmodo, the Gawker Media technology blog. She seeks to integrate all of Gawker’s science, gadget, and technology blogs under the Gizmodo umbrella, combining “speculative wonder with skepticism and hard truths.”

She’s also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, nominated for a 2013 LA Times book prize.

Her articles have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She co-edited the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press) with Charlie Jane Anders, and is the author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Annalee is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT and has a Ph.D in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and is fond of kaiju movies and spicy noodles.


aral-432Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan is the founder and lead designer of Ind.ie, and our Guest of Honor this year. Aral thinks we are paying too much for our free software, saying, “Free is a lie because it is a concealed barter,” and “The cost of free is our human rights.”

Along with creating a manifesto for experience-based, privacy respecting open source design, the company is working on a free open source social network client called Heartbeat, with the idea that it will be the core of a peer-to-peer consumer platform that lets you share what you want without becoming a monetized statistic of the “free” business model.

Aral says, “Traditional free and open source organizations are unequipped to provide the solutions we need in the post-Snowden world.”  We expect to hear more about this during his keynote speech at Penguicon.

RETURNING EMERITUS GUESTS OF HONOR

featured-guests-rondolaFEATURED GUESTS

MAKER MARKET VENDORS

SECURE ROOM

 HALLWAY