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

The exponential growth of digital technologies is changing everyday life in many ways. Data analytics and services will bring disruptive changes in businesses and governments, since they could become the basis of a circular economy creating sustainable healthy communities. Simultaneously, there is a need to consider critical issues such as privacy, civility, and community development.

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 the net zero housing, AI-generated art exhibition, nanotechnology center, and immersive sound deep in nature.

https://www.purdue.edu/dp/2050.