Upcoming Events / Digital Media December 4th, 2013
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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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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions,
lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the
public, unless otherwise noted.
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.