GT People & Technology Forum, held November 12-13, 2012, drew over 242 attendees during its two day program. The majority of visitors were current and potential IPaT industry partners including representatives from AT&T, Qualcomm, Panasonic, Steelcase, GM, Nielsen, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Cox Communications, Engauge, ESPN, Equifax, Hitachi, Humana, IBM, Invesco, Motorola Mobility, NCR, SunTrust, Turner, and UPS. Non-profit partners who attended the Forum included the City of Atlanta, Midtown Alliance, Emory University, Georgia State University, High Museum of Art, and The Ron Clark Academy.
Day One featured Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, whose tremendous opening keynote explored a range of near and long-term commercial possibilities, many of which align with Georgia Tech's research programs.
Beth Mynatt opened Day Two with a presentation about the convergence of people, technology, and enterprises. The majority of the day was devoted to three panel discussions providing thought-provoking discussions with insightful business leaders, brilliant researchers, and entrepreneurs to examine how emerging technologies will shape the future of our society. ‘Mobile Devices and Beyond’ explored the breakthroughs that will lead us into the next generation of connected life, moving beyond faster/better/smaller devices. ‘Big Data Meets Social Media’ looked at the new opportunities or challenges likely to emerge by marrying traditional data sources with social media in a broad set of areas, including customer service, advertising, marketing, brand affinity, or even homeland security. ‘Civic Computing’ highlighted how technology is changing the way we interact with people in our communities—from more engagement in our neighborhoods, facilitated interactions with government agencies, to stronger support for self-reliance in times of emergencies.
Attendees were also able to experience over a hundred research demonstrations hosted at the Technology Square Research Building and GVU Center.
The Forum concluded by recognizing student innovators in the Convergence Innovation Competition. This semester's competition focused on the GT Journey program, encouraging students to build apps and services to enrich Georgia Tech life. The spring 2013 competition will focus on industry-sponsored topics, namely Connected Home, Connected Life, Connected Transportation and Future Networks, sponsored by Cisco, AT&T, Panasonic, Hitachi and GM respectively.
The People & Technology Forum 2012 was sponsored by AT&T, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Steelcase, and the Office of Information Technology at Georgia Tech. In addition to the Forum, IPaT hosted a VIP Reception and Research Showcase Monday night, as the grand opening of its headquarters at 75 5th Street. The event was sponsored by Qualcomm.
453 people watched the Forum presentations online. Twitter showed 60 different users tweeting about the Forum and about 500 tweets tagged with #IPaTGT.
Photos from the Forum can be seen on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/
