For the third time, Baskin Engineering professor Lindsey Kuper co-hosted the !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) tech conference at UC Santa Cruz, bringing together 200+ attendees to celebrate the joys and surprises of computing.
!!Con is an independent, nonprofit conference featuring 10-minute “lightning talks” on the wild, weird, and fun aspects of computing. Designed to bring a lively energy to the tech industry, the conference attracts industry professionals, programmers, scientists, students, and other creatives to exchange ideas and learn from each other.
The conference was co-founded in 2014 by Lindsey Kuper, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. From its conception, the conference has remained a pay-what-you-want model — reflecting a commitment to making the tech space more accessible.
“One thing that makes !!Con special is that we try to cultivate an environment in which it is safe to be excited about things, to be impressed by things. At !!Con you don’t have to worry that anybody’s going to say, “You didn’t already know about that?” or make you feel as though you’re naive for being impressed,” Kuper said.
After building an audience on the East Coast, Kuper and the !!Con team brought the conference to UCSC as !!Con West in 2019 and 2020. Now after three years online, this year’s attendees gathered in the Baskin Engineering courtyard from August 24-25 for a weekend filled with lightning talks and speaker presentations.
Day one opened with a keynote speech from Dawn Walker, a researcher and designer dedicated to the development of accountable technology — solutions that emphasize transparency and ethical impact. Walker’s talk highlighted the need to make future technology more localized and discussed ways that people in the field of computing can work collaboratively to develop better tech solutions.
Following the keynote, the first round of lightning talks explored a range of topics, such as: running a tiny chess neural network by hand, recreating ancient analog computers using modern digital methods, designing custom microchips, and reverse engineering a bluetooth protocol to make better smoothies.
The second day of talks featured Baskin Engineering alum Max Kreminski (M.S., Computational Media, ‘20; Ph.D., Computational Media, ‘22), a researcher in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Kreminski’s talk examined how integrating “good nonsense” into computational text generation can enhance creative processes in storytelling and poetry.
Attendees also enjoyed talks on making algorithmically-generated flower beds, exploring the electromagnetic spectrum, recreating the first graphical user interface program and demonstrating how simple AI robots can exhibit human-like behavior — among others.
The conference concluded with a keynote speech by Bruce Waggoner, a Mission Assurance Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). Waggoner has almost 40 years of experience at JPL supporting dozens of Earth-orbiting and deep space missions. In late 2023, Waggoner’s team lost contact with the Voyager 1 — a 47 year old spacecraft currently in interstellar space. Waggoner’s talk detailed how the team diagnosed the problem and patched the computer software remotely, from 15 million miles away.
The weekend concluded with closing remarks from Kuper and the organizing team. After a decade of !!Con, Kuper is encouraging the next generation of computing enthusiasts to step in and carry on the next iteration of !!Con.
“There is no other event quite like !!Con, and it’s hard to put the !!Con experience into words,” Kuper said. “Working on !!Con for ten years has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career.”
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