Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Summer @ the Complex

Before Nick and I jump on the plane to the UK and Italy, here is a brief summary of the latest news from Santa Fe. I was there from June 18 to July 5. I got to stay at the casita again thanks to the buon cuore of Dede and Owen... And I got to use a deskspace provided by Steve in the Santa Fe Complex, thanks to his good heart.
Here is a quick list of things that happend while I was there:
  1. I just missed Frankencircuit but got to see the show in a private viewing before it got dismantled. It looked great!
  2. Steve and I gave a keynote lecture at the UCGIS Summer Assembly, which will be the topic of a separate blog entry. Had a chance to reconnect to Carl Steinitz on the occasion. Long story, but he did change my life, unwittingly...
  3. Ilan and Ben worked together symbiotically to produce major progress on the Venice table interactivity. Pair programming is the way to go!
  4. Fred Bianchi came to visit from WPI and stirred up our Postmortem projects once again
  5. I made major progress on a proposal to the City of Santa Fe to create and Ambient Platform for Urban Planning, Water Conservation and Energy Management
  6. I drafted a proposal to WPI's provost for the official establishment of te Santa Fe Project Center, to be phased in over the next two years.
  7. I purchased a G1 phone and tasked Simon with the skunking of the Android potential for PixelPost applications, related to our NASA grant. I also got an iPhone for similar reasons (and because there was a deal if I renewed my AT&T subscription).
  8. Kyle and I submitted two grants to NSF and one to NASA, all involving Santa Fe: Informal Science Education, Urban Long Term Research Areas-Exploration and Global Climate Change Education, Total requested is 2 million so far. More to come.
  9. Skyler and August made progress on the visualization side of the Venice Table and began to coordinate with Ben and Ilan on the communication between the SimTable Operating System and the Venice Traffic Application.
  10. Meeting with Luciano (Intel) and Roger (John Deere) it became clear that the Complex could play a formal role as the actual vector for the application of SFI theories to real world problems in the SFI Biz-net community...
  11. Got to tailgate in a suit and tie when I went to see the premiere of La Traviata at the opening night of the Santa Fe Opera...
  12. Experienced the phenomenal visual experience of Projected Light at the Complex. Fantastic!
  13. Overlapped with Andrea Vaccari (recently with MIT Senseable Lab) with whom we are exploring Reality Mining with Nathan Eagle through a massive Rwanda dataset of 1.5 million subscribers' cell calls for the past five years... Something good will come of this, I am sure.
Overall, it was a good Summer @ the Complex!

I will be in close touch with the Santa Fe colleagues as we complete the Venice Table in time for delivery when Steve joins Nick and me in Venice on the 25th of July... More to come.

No comments: