Upcoming Events / Digital Media December 4th, 2013

Remember to load images if you have trouble seeing parts of this email. Or click here to view the web version of this newsletter. The Berkman Center is currently accepting applications for our fellowship program for the 2014-2015 academic year. The deadline is this coming Monday, 12/8! Apply now! berkman luncheon series Re-Thinking IPR Models for the Poor Tuesday, December 10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live. We are depending on new technologies to meet the challenges ahead for our planet. Facing a growing population, resource constraints, climate change and a global food system under stress, we are pinning our hopes on new technology. But we don’t do a good job of leveraging our innovation systems to impact the poor. 780 million still lack access to clean water. 1/5 of humanity lives without electricity. 80% of sub-Saharan Africa is farmed with a hand-hoe. IPR is the fundamental driver of innovation, but donors, practitioners and policymakers are more divided than ever in their views on how IPR can be used to impact the poor. Sara Boettiger will discuss the need to re-think existing models (e.g. patent pools, clearinghouses, humanitarian use licensing), re-invent our research agenda and work to shift the international debate. Sara Boettiger is Senior Advisor at Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Assistant Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. She is co-founder of four non-profits centered on the application of technology to meet the challenges of global poverty, including: PIPRA, Global Access in Action, GATD and AgPartnerXChange. RSVP Required. more information on our website> video/audio Kate Darling on Near-term Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues in Robotics Prominent robot ethics questions focus on liability and privacy concerns in the face of increasingly autonomous technology. A lesser-discussed issue is the emergence and effect of robots that are designed to interact with humans on a social level. Studies have begun to establish a tendency to perceive social robots differently than we do other objects. As more and more robotic companions enter into our lives and homes, our inclination to project life-like qualities onto robots could have some societal implications. Kate Darling -- IP Research Specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in Intellectual Property and Law & Economics at the ETH Zurich -- discusses some of the more interesting developments in the world of robot/human interaction, and where we might find ourselves in the coming decades. audio on our website>

Other Events of Note Local, national, international, and online events that may be of interest to the Berkman community: 12/5: Long-Form Journalism: Behind the Scenes at The Atlantic (MIT Communications Forum) 12/6: Compassion and Technology Conference (Stanford) 12/6: D. Fox Harrell reads from and discusses Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (Harvard University) 12/13: Library Test Kitchen Open House (Harvard GSD) 12/18: Bruce Schneier at the CRCS Lunch Seminar (Harvard CRCS)

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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.