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!!Con 2024

August 24-25, 2024 in Santa Cruz

The joy, excitement, and surprise of computing

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Conference program

Jump directly to the Saturday or Sunday program!


Saturday, August 24

Time Event
9:00am Space opens (please don’t arrive before nine!)
9:00-10:25am Registration; refreshments; mingling
10:25-11:20am • Opening remarks
Keynote talk: Let’s make local and accountable tech! (Dawn Walker)
11:20-11:30am Break!
11:30am-12:05pm Session the First:
Programming with only exceptions! (Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya)
Let’s run a tiny chess neural network by hand! (Amédée d’Aboville)
The Astrolabe! Using modern digital computing to recreate ancient analog computers (Jes Wolfe)
12:05-1:55pm Break for lunch
1:55-2:30pm Session the Second:
A brief history of keyboards! (Jesse Chen)
Recreating Sketchpad, the first GUI! (Adam Solove)
Images from a 1970s Typewriter!! (Phil Warren)
2:30-2:40pm Break!
2:40-3:25pm Session the Third:
bang! bang! he murdered math! {the musical!} (Taylor Troesh)
Huggable Data! Making the Ephemeral Last Longer with Textile Dataviz! (Aldís Elfarsdóttir)
Keyboarding Ain’t Easy?? What Not To Do When Building a Keyboard!! (Liz Frost)
The Perfect Blend!! Reverse engineering a bluetooth protocol for better smoothies! (Ryan Mast)
3:25-4:25pm Unconferencing!
4:25-5:00pm Session the Fourth:
How to design your own microchip!!! (Omar Rizwan)
Let’s find random things on the street, with full-text search! (Yufeng Zhao)
It wasn’t me, it was the cosmic rays! Blaming physics for our evil actions! (Matías Lang)
5:00pm Wrap for the day

Sunday, August 25

Time Event
9:00am Space opens (please don’t arrive before nine!)
9:00-10:25am Registration (for anyone who didn’t register Saturday); refreshments; mingling
10:25-11:10am Session the Fifth:
It’s alive…. IT’S ALIVE!!! Braitenberg Vehicles! (Have you ever seen an AI like this??!!) (Devon Tao)
Lord Zeus, defender of travelers and of those far from home, please create a function called printBeerInsideLoop with parameter n! (Daniel Temkin)
88 Files a Second - Running Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder! (Nolen Royalty)
This is the poem that doesn’t end!! or, the poetics of RNG! (Alicia Guo)
11:10-11:20am Break!
11:20am-12:05pm Session the Sixth:
Algorithmically Generated Flower Beds!! (inspired by Ancient & Modern Polychrome Textiles) (Rebecca Ravenoak)
Exploring the Invisible: Adventures in the Electromagnetic Spectrum! (blinry)
Backtraces in the Mirror: Stealing the Secrets of Elves and Dwarves to Perform Mad Science!! (Julian Squires)
Making Chinese Typefaces! with Components!!??!! (Ivan Zhao)
12:05-1:55pm Break for lunch
1:55-2:40pm Session the Seventh:
Calculating the Ideal “Sex and the City” Polycule! (Juan Pablo Sarmiento)
SATisfying Answers to Difficult Questions! (Vaibhav Sagar)
How to stop worrying and collect early web Banner Ads! (And make art along the way!) (Richard Lewei Huang and Yufeng Zhao (as Switcheristic Telecommunications))
Riveting Insights! Bridge.watch and the State of America’s Infrastructure (Maryanne Wachter)
2:40-2:50pm Break!
2:50-3:25pm Session the Eighth:
Domain names! Where do they come from??? (Wesley Aptekar-Cassels)
Mutating Text Toward Better Nonsense?! (Max Kreminski)
It’s skeuomorphin’ time!! The enduring physicality of braille! (Santiago Gepigon III)
3:25-3:45pm Break!
3:45-4:30pm Keynote talk: Saving Voyager 1! (Bruce Waggoner)
4:30-5:00pm Thanks and closing remarks
5:00pm The End!