At the beginning of October I was in Kyoto (yes, I can hear the tiny violins) attending the STS Forum on behalf of my employers.
What is the STS Forum? Well this was the 12th meeting of a group focused on linking universities, technology companies, and governments to address global problems. The full name is Science and Technology in Society.
And it’s a really high level kind of thing. The opening was addressed by three prime ministers. There are more university vice-chancellors/provosts/rectors than you could imagine. If you aren’t a professor then you’d better be a minister. No Nobel prize? Just a matter of time.
So it’s senior. But is is about technology? Or at least the technology that I’m familiar with?
The usual players?
Well the first challenge is the sponsors. A bunch of big companies. Huawei, Lockheed Martin, Saudi Aramco, Toyota, Hitachi, NTT, BAT, EDF.
All big, all important (I leave it up to you to decide if they’re good). But are these really who you’d expect? Where are IBM? Oracle? SAP? Even Siemens? Never mind Microsoft, Apple, or (dare I say it) LinkedIn, Facebook etc…
I daren’t even mention the world of big data: MongoDB, Cloudera or others.
Panels and topics
Then there are the panelists. 90% male. (In fact the median number of women on a panel is zero). They are largely old. None of them seem to be ‘real world’ experts – most are in Government and academia.
The topics are potentially interesting, but I’m nervous about the big data one. It’s not clear that there are any actual practitioners here (I will feed back later!)
Attendees and Ts
I have never been to a technology conference that is so suited. Even Gartner has a less uptight feel. Over 1000 people and not a single slogan. Wow. I feel quite daring wearing a pink shirt. And no tie.
What could they do?
I’m not saying it’s a bad conference. But I’m not sure it’s a technology conference, and I’m 100% certain it’s not a tech conference.
If they want it to be a tech conference then they need to take some serious action on diversity (especially gender and age)*. They also need to think about inviting people who feel more comfortable in a T-shirt. The ones with slogans. And who know who xkcd is.
And this seems to be the biggest problem: the conference seems to highlight the gulf between the three components that they talk about (the triple helix) – universities, government, big business – and the markets where the theory hits the road. The innovators, the open source community, the disruptors.
On to the Big Data session
Well that was like a flashback to 2013. Lots of Vs, much confusion. Very doge.
It wasn’t clear what we were talking about big data for. Plenty of emphasis on HPC but not a single mention of Hadoop.
Some parts of the room seemed concerned about the possible impact of big data on society. Others wanted to explore if big data was relevant to science, and if so, how. So, a lot of confusion, and not a lot of insight…
duncan3ross 