If you happen to be in New-York begin October 2009, and you can spend the week-end there, something different would be to attend the Saturday-Sunday 3-4 Oct 2009 Singularity Summit.

Very interesting line-up of speakers and not that expensive: 399$ for the 2 days if your are an early bird.

The conference is devoted to the better understanding of increasing intelligence and accelerating change.

Participants will hear talks from cutting-edge researchers and network with strategic business leaders.

The world’s most eminent experts on forecasting, venture capital, emerging technologies, consciousness and life extension will present their unique perspectives on the future and how to get there.

Select Speakers this year:

* Ray Kurzweil really does not need an introduction, but anyway: he is the author of The Singularity is Near (2005) and co-founder of Singularity University, which is backed by Google and NASA. At the Singularity Summit, he will present his theories on accelerating technological change and the future of humanity.

* Dr. David Chalmers, director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University and one of the world’s foremost philosophers, will discuss mind uploading, the possibility of transferring human consciousness onto a computer network.

* Dr. Ed Boyden is a joint professor of Biological Engineering and of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Discover Magazine named him one of the 20 best brains under 40.

* Peter Thiel is the president of Clarium, seed investor in Facebook, managing partner of Founders Fund, and co-founder of PayPal.

* Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biogerontologist and Director of Research at the SENS Foundation, which seeks to extend the human lifespan. He will present on the ethics of this proposition.

* Dr. Philip Tetlock is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It?

* Dr. Jurgen Schmidhuber is co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano, Switzerland. He will discuss the mathematical essence of beauty and creativity.

* Dr. Gary Marcus is director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and professor of psychology at New York University and author of the book Kludge.

You can subscribe to the event via the banner below.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, i strongly recommend to subscribe to the weekly KurzweilAI.net newsletter, where this week, i found the following interesting article on the first Touchable Hologram becoming reality.

3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands have been developed by researchers from the University of Tokyo. Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the hologram projector uses an ultrasound phenomenon called acoustic radiation pressure to create a pressure sensation on a user’s hands, which are tracked with two Nintendo Wiimotes….

Watch the white mouse at the very end. I can think of a couple of applications that are touch-based 😉