Cryptography podcast, research updates, job openings & more - Foresight Institute
How is September already coming to an end? 2022 has come and gone so fast! We wanted to share with you some of our highlights, and keep you in the loop with some of the exciting events coming up!
Events: We have our famous Vision Weekends in the US & FR coming this November & December, and we’ve made appearances at several conferences that we’re excited to share.
Get involved: Buy your Vision Weekend tickets, or apply for a subsidized ticket.
New seminar summaries have been produced in our groups on Molecular Machines and Space Tech.
Updates from our fellows, past and present.
Media: Check out our final episode of Shielded Transactions podcast with Whyrusleeping.
Vision Weekends FR & US
Our Vision Weekends are the annual member festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, top talent across biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, computing, and space are encouraged to burst their tech silos, and plan for flourishing long-term futures.
Vision Weekend Europe | November 18-20: at Chateau du Feÿ, Villecien, a laboratory for the future disguised as a stunning 17th century castle, 90 minutes outside of Paris.
Vision Weekend US | December 2 – 4: at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and Sunday’s afternoon sessions at the Bird House Villa in the Berkeley Hills.
New Seminar Summaries!
New seminars out of our Space, Biotech, and Existential Hope groups:
Jennifer Garrison, Buck Institute | Reframing Health and Aging through the Lens of Reproduct
Earth, Mars & More | An interview with Tanya Harris, Planet Labs
Grace Han | Harnessing Photoinduced Phase Transition of Organic Materials for Energy Storage
Community News
UCLA postdocs Abasalt Bahrami, Alessandro Lodesani, Natsumi Komatsu, and faculty Clarice Aiello are thrilled to offer a very special Fiat Lux class on quantum biology.
This is an introductory course following the chapters of the book “Life on the Edge”. It’s an excellent opp for people wanting an overview of the quantum biology field. It will be PT 11am-12pm on Fridays, from Sep 23 to Dec 2.
It is open to anyone on the internet — the more people we reach, the merrier. No quantum mechanics or biology pre-requisites necessary.
We hope you attend and have fun!
Abasalt, Alessandro, Clarice & Natsumi
ImYoo has recently released a small age-immune related finding!
They also launched their first citizen science campaign! Now you can be part of the research. Donate just $5 or simply re-Tweet.
Seed funding for Foresight Dao & funding Tech Tree bounties with Gitcoin!
Our latest matching round with Gitcoin was for two purposes:
To fund more Tech Tree bounties that allow anyone from anywhere to contribute their own insights & novel approaches to technological progress & roadblocks.
A seed fund for Foresight DAO, which would allow our community to crowd-fund research proposals via IP NFTs, incentivize project work via bounty boards, democratize decision-making via governance tokens, coordinate on novel projects of shared interest, and onboard additional supporters from the crypto community.
These quadratic matching rounds are closed now, but we’re excited to open more in the future!
Open Positions
Gordian Biotechnology discovers treatments for age-related diseases using technology that lets us put hundreds of potential therapies into a single animal and independently measure the effects of each one. The ability to scale up testing at the in vivo stage lets us use much more realistic animal models, such as aged animals that develop disease progressively, to include the full complexity of aging in the drug discovery process. Our team is full of experts who enjoy working together, and we’re looking to add three more:
Molecular biologist – Create DNA constructs to regulate gene expression in vivo, and more
Single cell scientist – Extract cells from large animals and turn them into therapeutic screening scRNAseq data
Machine learning computational biologist – Use our data to predict both effects of interventions and physiology from transcriptomic states
Would love to hear from PhD grads, technicians, postdocs and other people with the right skills!
Shielded Transactions: Whyrusleeping
The final episode of our three part privacy series!
In this episode of Shielded Transactions, we chat with Whyrusleeping, engineer at Protocol Labs and Zcash advocate, about what the future will look like in a post zksnarks world and how we need to protect our identities in a future that relies so heavily on machine learning and complex systems.
Events
Our Crypto, Security & AI Workshop is upon us! In less than a week, this two-day event will bring together top researchers, builders, and funders in computing, cryptography, cryptocommerce, security and AI to explore undervalued areas for progress. Themes are loosely based on technologies highlighted in Gaming the Future.
Check out the event page here.
Foresight President, Allison Duettmann, shared about our ongoing Tech Tree project at DeSci Boston, a 1-day event bringing together web3 developers, DeSci leaders, and funders in the DeSci ecosystem. More on Tech Trees here.
We were thrilled to finally host another in-person salon after a pause! We were joined by Jason Crawford at The Commons, SF. Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress – a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century – spoke on the topic of Philosophy of Progress. Recording here.
Fellow Updates
The Foresight Fellowship is a one-year program committed to giving change-makers the support to accelerate their bold ideas into the future. Here’s what our fellows have been up to.
Yip Fai Tse is a research assistant for Professor Peter Singer at Princeton University. Fai is researching the impact and ethics of artificial intelligence concerning nonhuman animals. Fai has been a researcher in the field of animal welfare advocacy and effective altruism. His latest paper is Speciesist bias in AI: how AI applications perpetuate discrimination and unfair outcomes against animals
Yuanning Feng is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern with Professor Fraser Stoddart, and 2021 winner of Foresight’s Distinguished Student Award. His latest publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society can be found here.
Jamie Joyce, Society Library, recently released a database which articulates the 5,000+ arguments and evidence from all points of view on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant debate (the last remaining nuclear power plant in California). See press release here and links to the database here.
