Mindtrek 2018

Mindtrek 2018

I attended Mindtrek 2018, which was held on the 10th and 11th of October in Tampere. Mindtrek is an international technology conference focusing on emerging technologies and the future. This year's themes were Open World, Smart Cities, eHealth and Immersive and Educational Technologies. There is also an academic side event, Academic Mindtrek, in which researchers present different papers related to the technology field. The event is mostly about networking and sharing ideas between experts with different technological expertise and the business of the tech field.

In this post I'm going to go through the panels I attended and share my experience and thoughts.

The Future of Fashion

The opening keynote was called "Augmented and Virtual Reality Changing the Fashion Industry". The speaker was Amanda Cosco, the founder of Electric Runway, a company specializing in the application of technology in the fashion industry. A lot of the things presented were not super fancy in my opinion. Using body/face tracking to overlay clothes/makeup on people, virtual reality for runway shows and things of that nature. Some of the technology might be useful and I can see them becoming commonplace eventually.

Some of the things discussed were not so innocent in my opinion. Discussion of using smart filters to drastically alter your appearance in photos taken of you. Employing digital "avatars" to represent yourself online. Utilizing whatever there is that technology can do to cover up your flaws. Working on improving yourself is a healthy result of self-reflection. Striving for an impossible image of perfection is not. I have nothing against fashion per say, it's just the classic question of how far will it go? Will we get to the point where your actual physical body has nothing to do with how you present yourself to the world? We are not quite there yet so we'll see what happens.

Games Research

I attended most of the academic presentations related to games. There was talk about gamification, or using elements of games in other mediums or purposes. Seemed pretty interesting. I can see how reward, progression and feedback tricks used in games can be utilized to incentivize desired behavior. Some things of note were that apparently (and in my opinion, not surprisingly) tangible rewards were more desirable that intangible rewards. Another point of note was related to how public comparison of say scores lead to others being motivated to improve their own. Social pressure at work it seems.

Other gaming research was related to toxic behavior in online games like Dota 2. Toxic playerbases are a common problem in many online gaming communities, with many citing a toxic community as a reason to avoid playing certain games. A competitive environment and heavy reliance on teamwork execution lead to heightened tension and increases the likelihood of conflicts in gameplay and communication. This is pretty simple to understand, I think. What I gathered from the researched paper itself was that older players are apparently more inclined to be inappropriate in their behaviour, whereas younger players are more likely to be punished by the games own bad-behavior-punishment mechanics. There are many conclusions that could be reached from this data. Maybe older players tolerate more toxic behavior than younger players do. Whatever the conclusions, it is clear that this is a serious problem in many gaming communities.

Your Data, Online

The use of personal data in an online environment has been the topic of heavy discussion lately. One of the panels on Thursday was by an American researcher discussing the use of your personal data online. There are clear benefits to allowing certain people access to your data, while there are clear problems with giving access to others. The presenter identified certain specific issues, like data ownership, lack of understanding on the technical side of data usage and privacy and human rights concerns.

The dystopian image of a mass surveillance state is hopefully no ones ideal, but certain data access can be beneficial. For example, a company knowing your approximate location can better offer local services and information. The important point for me is that people should be empowered and educated to control the use of their data online. Data usage today is still shrouded in secrecy and incoherent mile-long legal jargon, because people value their privacy and wouldn't be willing to agree to what most of the companies would want to do with your data.

Liberland, the Startup of Tax-Havens

The president of the Free Republic of Liberland was scheduled to host a keynote, but couldn't attend due to "official Liberland business." The keynote was held by a Finnish representative of Liberland instead. Liberland claims to be a micronation on a disputed piece of land in the Croatia-Serbia border. Liberland is only recognized as a nation by Somaliland, an another self-proclaimed micronation. The Liberland project is apparently largely funded by Bitcoin millionaires, and there are plans to widely utilize blockchain technology to run the planned autonomous government. The people planning Liberland have big plans of a free and fair society, where peoples contributions will be rewarded with "merit" and used as both a currency and measure of political influence. I feel that behind these startup-like broad promises lies just another tax-haven for the rich. I hope I'm wrong.

Shortcomings

I already discussed the cancellation by the President of Liberland. There was also a second cancellation in a panel that was on how our computers operating system is increasingly being replaced by web-based interfaces such as Google Drive and Office Online. A lot of the students I attended with were not pleased with the event overall. They felt it wasn't that relevant to our studies. A lack of attendance (which was surprisingly low for my expectations), cancellations, short panels (only 30 minutes) and a very limited presentation area with not much to see were some of the other shortcomings I noticed. The event felt quite a bit below my expectations to be honest.

Open Source is Awesome

The highlight of the event for me was the panels on the topic of Open Source. There was a panel on Wednesday by Simon Phipps, who serves as the President of the Open Source Initiative. He discussed the history of open source, such as how the term was coined to attract the business audience, as the original term "Free Software" didn't play well with them. Over the years open source went from being called "cancer" by Microsoft to being a massive part of modern technology, with all of the world's super computers and most of the internet running on Linux. The Open Source Initiative itself mainly watches over the various open source licenses that different programs are distributed under.

Another panel on open source Thursday discussed the importance of open standards. If you think about a scenario where you store data in a proprietary file format and the company supplying the software goes under, your data might be stuck in unusable files, effectively lost forever. It is also important to establish proper standards, while avoiding cluttering the technology field with useless duplicates. Longevity of data storage becomes increasingly important in an age where the information used by the public sector is stored digitally. Studies have also shown that open standards and open source are beneficial to business, when used properly.

Conclusion

Overall my Mindtrek 2018 experience wasn't a very exiting one. The cancellations and the lack of interesting content was a bit of a letdown for me. Open source related stuff was awesome, but that's about the extent of the highlights of the event. Considering the tickets for regular attendees go for upwards of several hundred euros, I'd be pretty upset at the organizers. Perhaps most of my ire toward the event stem from me not being quite in the target audience. I didn't feel I learned much I didn't already know, but for people who don't follow things like open source much, I could see someone being very exited to learn about it. That's enough text for now though.

Thanks for reading!