Purdue 2050: Conference of the Future

How to Create a Digital, Healthy and Sustainable Local Community as a Living Laboratory?

Purdue 2050: Conference on the Future will address this challenge and conferees will experience the technology of tomorrow as a part of the university's Ideas Festival, the centerpiece of its Giant Leaps Sesquicentennial Campaign. The campaign is a series of events that connect world-renowned speakers and Purdue expertise in a conversation on the most critical problems facing the world. Ideas Festival’s themes include artificial intelligence, health and longevity and a sustainable economy and planet.

Purdue University’s Discovery Park is organizing an ‘uncommon conference’ where participants will have an immersive experience in futuristic technology that should appear in 2030-2050. The primary objective is to organize a conference, as it would happen in the future. In this conference, each speaker will deliver a talk they would expect to give in 2050.

Conference venue includes latest interactive learning and data analytics technologies. Each participant will be equipped with the latest wearable device and will be able to record a variety of activities (e.g. sweat) during the conference. We will highlight some unique technologies developed at Purdue or our partners such as wearable sweat sensors, soil nutrients for smart agriculture, and semi-transparent flexible speakers. In the conference room of the future at Honors Hall, designed in collaboration with Purdue’s Department of Art and Design. Together with the visualization of the overall sound in the room, this will provide real-time feedback to the speakers and audience, helping evaluate how new ideas are received. Monitors will show the distribution of people who are laughing, sleeping, confused, neutral, or excited. Exhibitions and field trips may include AI-generated art exhibition, nanotechnology center, and immersive sound deep in nature.

Lunches, dinner, coffee and refreshments are created by chef Bruce Haumesser especially for the Purdue 2050 event. The menus will include: Space Foods; Plant-Forward; Local Foods etc.