Shad Valley
[LFW]

You can check out the official Shad Valley site or some other unofficial sites at UNB, McMaster, Sherbrooke, Carleton, Waterloo. Lots more at the unofficial alumni site.

There are also some personal reports out there by Allen Miu 94C, Xinyang Qiu 92C, James MacAulay 94A. Tons more at the unofficial alumni site.

I was a participant at Shad Valley Waterloo in 1992. I got to give one talk at Waterloo 1995, and helped organize the installation of Alias 3-D software at various campuses that year. My experience at Waterloo inspired me to write a little thing about the magic of Shad.

I was lucky enough to be a Program Assistant at Shad Valley Acadia in 1999. Here's my report (also available in PDF). For 99As, here are some memories from the Millenium Party at Angela's, and here are some pictures from Bobby and Ananda's wedding.


The Future According to Shad

I gave a keynote speech about future technology at the Shad Valley Summit. A digital recording of the talk is now available here! You will need a connection that can sustain 3 kb/s to play it in streaming mode, or you can download the entire file (6.5 Mb). While you're listening to the talk, you'll be asked to refer to a hand-out (this happens just before the 25-minute mark).

The hand-out presented during the talk shows a chart of computing power per unit cost that shows we are likely to have affordable computers with similar computing capacity to the human brain by about 2035. (The data for this chart is mostly taken from Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines, but as the chart in the book is rather hard to read i decided to design a new one.) The other side of the hand-out is a list of references to suggested reading about the singularity, which i strongly recommend you check out.

When you get to the 30-minute mark, i mention a "brain augmentation tool" that helps make me smarter. After you get to 30:30, find out what i'm waving in front of the audience.

At Shad Valley Acadia 1999, i ran a group activity that tried to generate predictions for future events in technology and society. My report contains instructions for running the event if you'd like to run one at your program.

Here are the results from our session displayed on a timeline (PDF, 11kb). How are we doing?

Watch this space for more updates as time passes, and our future becomes our present!

maintained by Ka-Ping Yee <ping@lfw.org> updated Sat 5 May 2001