April 25

10.30-11.30: Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives

Jeremy Bailenson Jeremy Bailenson, Founding Director, Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab

In this talk Jeremy Bailenson will discuss how virtual reality, and the technology that drives it, is changing the social and psychological experience of being human. He will discuss ongoing research in his lab that illustrates the consequences - both good and bad - of spending time in virtual spaces. Moreover, he will provide a roadmap for the next ten years of research in this area - focusing on both scientific and technological challenges.

Jeremy Bailenson is an expert on human interaction in virtual environments. He is the founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, marketing, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. 

Bailenson is also the coauthor of the book Infinite Reality, on the psychology of virtual reality, which has had a major impact in many contexts, for example corporate strategy, supreme court deliberation, and national security.

• Read interview (in Norwegian): Den virtuelle virkeligheten er her

16:30-17:30 Understanding the brain through data-driven modeling and simuation: The Human Brain Project

Jan G. Bjaalie Jan G. Bjaalie, Professor, Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience and Head of Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo

Jan Bjaalie is a Professor in medicine, but also devoted to the field of neuroinformatics and how it can contribute to better health. Neuroinformatics combine neuroscience with tools from mathematics, statistics and physics.

Bjaalie will talk about how it plays an important role in simulating the actual work of the brain, which is the goal of the Human Brain Project where Bjaalie’s research group participates. Brain simulation will provide new insights into the basic causes of neurological diseases such as autism, depression, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. At the same time it will give us new ways of testing drugs and understanding the way they work. Bjaalie will also discuss how the Human Brain Project can become a source of new Information Technologies.

Jan G. Bjaalie is a professor in medicine at the University of Oslo and group leader at the Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience. He led the construction of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) and is now the leader of the Norwegian node of this organization. His research group is also a part of the Human Brain Project, which is a FET flagship project launched by the European Commission.

• Read interview (in Norwegian): Gjenskaper hjernen i superdatamaskiner

April 26

08:30-09:30: Research Challenges in Networked Systems

Torsten Braun Professor Torsten Braun, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Torsten Braun has been involved in reviewing and evaluating ICT research projects in the EU and was member of the international committee that evaluated basic Norwegian ICT-research in 2011 on commission from the Research Council of Norway. (Read about the committee’s recommendations).

Braun will mainly talk about current and future research topics in the field of networked systems, covering the full range of devices from small ones such as sensors to large ones such as high-performance computers. There is an increasing trend to exchange information among those devices in a secure, efficient, and reliable way.

Energy and ICT will be more and more be related to each other. On one side, ICT must become more energy-efficient, but ICT can also help to better control generation and consumption of energy. Appropriate communication and actor/sensor systems are needed for that.

Torsten Braun was director of the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Bern from 2007 to 2011. He has been head of the “Communication and Distributed Systems” Research group since 15 years. He has also been vice president of the SWITCH foundation since 2011. The mission of SWITCH is to strengthen the Swiss universities by developing pioneering Internet services, which give students, lecturers and researchers a technological lead. 

• Read interview (in Norwegian): Nettskyer og sensordata blir viktigere
  

14.00-15.00: Research in ICT: What we should do, and why it matters

Olav Lysne Olav Lysne, Head of the NetSys Department at Simula Research Laboratory and Professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo

Lysne will talk about what he thinks should be done in Norwegian ICT-research in the years to come. He will mainly talk about the importance of doing research on infrastructure and how ICT already is important for several critical functions in society and how it will be essential for solving several challenges in society in the future.

He will focus on several aspects of ICT such as security, availability, man/society/machine/infrastructure dependency, green IT and cross disciplinary within the ICT field, all of which remain important research topics.

• Read interview (in Norwegian): Må avdekke nettets hemmeligheter