Don't panic: the next big science revolution isn't just for Elon Musk. There’s an emerging movement towards "massively multiplayer science" - empowering people from a variety of different backgrounds to be explorers and contributors to new scientific discoveries and methods. Just as science fiction has often shown the way to future inventions, the act of hacking is now generating prototypes that act as footholds for future explorations, discoveries and epiphanies in science. Leagues of multidisciplinary science hackers are mashing up ideas, mediums, industries and people to create crude yet cunning devices that change how we experience science. From the collisions of subatomic particles to the explosions of supernovas, this presentation takes you on an unusual trip through the weird, whimsical and surprisingly useful ways to explore the galaxy.
About Ariel Waldman:
Ariel Waldman sits on the council for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, a program that nurtures radical, science-fiction-inspired ideas that could transform future space missions. She is the co-author of a congressionally-requested National Academy of Sciences report on the future of human spaceflight and the author of the book “What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There. Ariel is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways for anyone to participate in space exploration, and the global director of Science Hack Day, a grassroots endeavor to prototype things with science that is now in over 25 countries. In 2013, Ariel received an honor from the White House for being a Champion of Change in citizen science.
Previously, Ariel worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate. For the Obama White House, she authored a white paper on Democratized Science Instrumentation that was presented to the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Recently, she built Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the active spacecrafts that freckle our solar system. For her work on Science Hack Day, Ariel has been awarded grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, as well as a fellowship at Institute for The Future.
Ariel is based in San Francisco but loves to travel internationally to speak to a variety of audiences and work on fun projects. She has appeared on Syfy and the Science Channel, as well as keynoted DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Symposium and OSCON. Her work with Science Hack Day has taken her to Colombia, China, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Russia and South Africa to help grow budding science enthusiast communities.
As an art school student without a formal science background, Ariel grew up in Kansas where she worked at the interactive ad agency, VML, as a digital anthropologist, and attended art school at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her mission is to enlighten others on how anyone can actively contribute to the furthering of science and space exploration in clever new ways.
