Select category

Academics

Formularz wyszukiwania na belce: Studia

location:
level of study:
discipline:
study mode:
class format:

If you haven’t found what you are looking for, enter the desired phrase in the field below and we will help you find it

Research projects

Formularz wyszukiwania na belce: Badania i projekty

location:
research center:
discipline:

If you haven’t found what you are looking for, enter the desired phrase in the field below and we will help you find it

Academic Staff

Formularz wyszukiwania na belce: Nasi naukowcy

location:
discipline:

If you haven’t found what you are looking for, enter the desired phrase in the field below and we will help you find it

Events

Formularz wyszukiwania na belce: Wydarzenia

type:
location:

Contact

location:
category:

If you haven’t found what you are looking for, enter the desired phrase in the field below and we will help you find it

SWPS University - Main page

HumanTech Meetings II: Metaverse. Escape to virtuality

HumanTech Meetings II: Metaverse. Escape to virtuality

Will the virtual world replace reality? Or maybe the right question should be: when will it happen? Will metaverse become a milestone in the development of the web? To find the answers to these questions, join us for the next meeting in the 2nd edition of the HumanTech Meetings series.

April 11, 2022
17:15-20:00 CEST (UTC+2)
online

Metaverse - life in goggles

Work, entertainment, culture, and shopping — all are at our fingertips, and we do not even have to leave our homes. For example, during the pandemic, we have become accustomed to satisfying most of our needs online. While the idea that virtual lives will become as important as our real lives has been under discussion for a while, the progress in fulfilling this vision has recently accelerated significantly.

In November 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta and unveiled a virtual reality-based project. Metaverse is a combination of physical and digital worlds inhabited by our avatars. Will living in a virtual universe become a way to escape from the world of epidemics, wars, and threats of climate change?

During the second meeting of the 2nd edition of HumanTech Meetings, we will talk about the potential and the risks of this new alternative world. Undeniably, more and more people are moving there; but they are not alone. Business, politics, and science have come along with them.

We will welcome Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting at Nokia, and Ada Florentyna Pawlak, a technology anthropologist. Konrad Maj, Head of the Center for Social and Technological Innovation HumanTech at SWPS University, will open the meeting. The lectures will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Michał Boni.

Lectures will be held in Polish and English and will be translated simultaneously.

The event is held under the auspices of Strefa Technologii (Technology Zone) of SWPS University.

HumanTech Meetings

We live in an era of innovation, technological progress and digitalization. This current innovation drive may lead to unpredictable psychological and social outcomes. Therefore, it is crucial to establish collaborations between engineers, programmers, IT specialists and social scientists during initial phases of any new projects related to development of new technologies or services. Such collaborations may help to avoid mistakes and can support better development of new ideas.

The project is planned as a series of meetings, gathering academics and professionals from the technology sector from Poland and other countries. Each meeting will include two lectures, one delivered by a speaker from Poland and one presented by a guest from another country. The lectures will be followed by panel discussions, where panelists will represent different approaches to innovation and technology.

HumanTech Meetings is a project of SWPS University's Center for Social and Technological Innovation.

  1. Lecture 1: Pathways to metaverse

    Cryptoeconomics, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the need to create a new digital hierarchy are the foundations of the new anthroposphere. Innovation implies the need to combine a system of values and an economy that enables us to function in a meta universe. Among the factors that bring us closer to this world are the multidimensional changes in image-based communication, the growing influence that the Z and Alpha generations have on business, the interest in non-fungible tokens (NFT), and the epidemic of loneliness and narcissism that stems from, among other things, the architecture of social media.

    Ada Florentyna Pawlak
     
    Ada Florentyna Pawlak

    Is a digital anthropologist, lawyer, and art historian. She is an academic lecturer at various universities, popularizer of science, and a speaker at the Digital University in the field of social contexts of new technologies and related ideas. Ada specializes in discourses of affective capitalism, digital culture, transhumanism and artificial intelligence, techno-intimacy, human-machine collaboration, and art@science projects. She cooperates with the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, The Spokesmen of Science, and the Fotofestival in Łódź. Moving across many areas of human activity, she loves to build bridges between different fields of knowledge, worldviews, lifestyles, and mindsets.

  2. Lecture 2: Making Sense of the metaverse

    While there is a lot of talk about the metaverse going on right now from a world-building and NFT perspective, there is more to the metaverse concept than Bored Apes (a collection of NFT tokens) and Decentraland (a 3D virtual world browser-based platform). Leslie Shannon will examine what a wide range of tech companies are actually doing to make the metaverse happen. Looking at developments in hardware, connectivity, and apps not only tells us what path the metaverse is on but also how soon we can expect it to arrive. And most important: why will we want to spend time there?

    Leslie Shannon
     
    Leslie Shannon

    Is the Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting for Nokia. A Silicon Valley-based futurist, she focuses on identifying tech disruptions and opportunities for Nokia and its customers, including 5G-powered developments in robotics, drones, visual analytics, cloud gaming, and specifically augmented and virtual reality, the foundations of the metaverse. Leslie graduated from the University of Virginia and Yale. She does all her daily fitness work in Virtual Reality.

Panel Discussion and Panelists

Cezary Biele
 
Cezary Biele

Is a psychologist and psychophysiologist. He is an Assistant Professor and the Head of the Laboratory of Interactive Technologies in the National Information Processing Institute – National Research Institute in Warsaw. His research interests are in the area of human interaction with new technology, such as virtual reality and intelligent voice assistants, with a focus on the role of movement and emotions in human-computer interaction. Cezary Biele has extensive experience in both psychological and psychophysiological research (EMG, GSR, eye-tracking) and commercial marketing research. He is the author of the book “Human Movements in Human-Computer Interaction” and a co-author of numerous academic papers.

Andrzej Horoch
 
Andrzej Horoch

Is an entrepreneur and a board member of ConnectedRealities.eu. He is also an enthusiast of virtual and augmented reality. For over a decade, he has been successfully creating and implementing innovations in various large companies: Miele, Skanska, PZU, Kler, Amica, Werner Kenkel, Bausch Health, Orange, among others. Andrzej Horoch is a laureate of Polish and international competitions related to future technologies. He was a speaker at Polish and European events, including VR/AR European Congress, World Summit on the Information Society FORUM 2021, SEEDIG 2020, and 5G Summit 2021. He willingly (and humorously) shares his knowledge in his YouTube program about technological innovations in business - Innowatorzy LIVE.

The panel will be hosted by

Michal Boni
Ph.D.
Michał Boni
Holds a doctoral degree in humanities. He is a former politician (1989-2019), Minister of Administration and Digitization (2011-2013), and a former member of the European Parliament (2014-2019). He is also a public policy negotiator specializing in public affairs. Dr. Boni is the author of “Poland 2030 Report” and several reports on youth. His professional interests include protection of personal data and development of the 5G network.

Registration form

Organizer:

Center for Social and Technological Innovation HumanTech

Partners

  • PFR Fundacja logo
  • polskie towarzystwo informatyczne logo
  • osrodek przetwarzania informacji logo
  • Zrobotyzowany logo

Date and location

April 11, 2022 (Monday), 17:15–20:00 CEST (UTC+2)
online

Contact

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Coordinator: Ewa Łuczak

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

the colors and the national emblem of the Republic of Poland

In 2021, the HumanTech Meetings project was granted an additional PLN 250,000 (EUR 52 828,75) by the Ministry of Education and Science (MEiN), as part of the funding scheme “Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki – Popularyzacja nauki i promocja sportu” (Social responsibility of science – Popularization of science and sport), (project no. SONP/SN/514650/2021), project duration: 2022-2023, total value: PLN 305,472 (EUR 65 251,67).

News

HumanTech Summit 2024

HumanTech Summit 2024

December 07 2024