Fab 6

Pat Colgan, Chief Executive, Special EU Programmes Body

Pat Colgan, joined the Special EU Programmes Body in September 2004 from the Austrian Institute for Spatial Planning and Regional Development where he was Head of the INTERACT Secretariat – an EU funded Programme which provided assistance to cross border, interregional and transnational co-operation programmes. He is a member of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) Expert Group set up by the EU’s Committee of the Regions.

Pat has been involved in the design, delivery and evaluation of EU funded programmes and other public policy programmes in all of the member states. He was Team Leader for the Evaluation of the Efficiency of the Implementation Methods of Structural Funds on behalf of the European Commission. He also worked with a number of the new member states and accession countries in their preparation for joining the EU.

Pat has worked with the Irish Management Institute, KPMG and the former Irish Goods Council (now part of Enterprise Ireland).

Pat Colgan’s presentation on FAB6.

Executive Director, TIES (Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM)
Executive Director, Envision Excellence in STEM Education (501(c)3)

As the Executive Director of TIES and Envision Excellence in STEM and a recognized leader in STEM education, Jan provides vital support to National and State STEM initiatives most recently serving as the Senior STEM advisor to The White House and the U.S. Department of Education in development of their sweeping Race to the Top and Innovate to Educate education reform programs. Current national engagements include her work as the Senior Consultant for STEM Education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NASA STEM education initiatives, Battelle Memorial Institute, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the National Governors Association, Innovate-Educate Mexico, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian and the National Academy of Engineering as it developed the SEEK-16 project. She also serves on the task force designing the national engineering education standards and is a co-contributor in the national task force investigating the efficacy of AP engineering and pre-engineering.

Jan is currently advising the following states as they craft their vision for STEM education; Arizona, California, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Washington. In that capacity, her work on curriculum and professional development and project-based learning is reaching millions of children in classrooms every day.

As a leader in engaging business and industry in the K-16 STEM education pipeline Jan also acts as STEM advisor to numerous corporations and philanthropies including General Electric, Intel, The Carnegie Foundation, Siemens and Chevron among others. Her work with these partners includes organizing regional and national convenings, speaking at industry conferences and customized briefings for senior management and community outreach staff. Her most recent focus has been building capacity within the energy sector to facilitate teacher training in cutting edge and emerging technologies to ensure current students are exposed to these vital career paths so the future U.S. workforce pipeline is filled with well trained STEM professionals ready to address our growing energy needs.

I am a PhD student of Prof. Ehud Shapiro at the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics and Biological Chemistry in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot , Israel 76100.

I am part of the Laboratory for Biomolecular Computers:
Laboratory’s link: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~lbn/
Molecular computing devices have the clear advantage of small size, as well as the ability to interact directly with their biological surroundings due to their inherent biological nature, therefore holding the promise to be used in future biological and medical applications.

To see the FAB6-presentation.

In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, London, and then researched a PhD in tribology there.  In 1977 he moved to Bath University’s Maths Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry.  He then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran that for four years.  After that he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath’s Engineering Faculty, where he is now a senior lecturer.

His current area of research is self-replicating machines – he is the inventor and developer of the RepRap replicating rapid prototyper.

He also works on geometric computing (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, the biochemistry of smart materials, and biomimetics.

To see the FAB6-presentation.

Vicente Guallart is director of Guallart Architect and The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. He have been pioneer in the interaction of architecture and new technologies. His work have been
featured at NY MOMA and Venize Binealle among others.

Vicente’s presentation on FAB6

Bre Pettis makes things that make things. Passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY, Pettis builds infrastructure for creativity. He is a founder of Makerbot, a company that produces robots that make things, and a founder of NYCResistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn. Besides being a TV host and video podcast producer, he has created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make’s podcast Weekend Projects, and has been a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer.

Co-Founder – Makerbot Industries – Bringing creative robots to the masses – 2009
Co-Founder – Thingiverse.com – Sharing Digital Design – 2008
Founder – NYCResistor – Brooklyn’s Hacker Collective- 2007
Founder – I Make Things – Producer of tutorial videos to support the public’s playful and creative intelligence – 2006

Video Producer – Etsy.com 2008
Video Producer – Make: Magazine 2006-2008

Bre Supports The Creative Intelligence of Young People: Art Teacher – Seattle Public Schools 1999-2006.

See Bre Pettis’ presentation.

My research focuses on programming new cellular behaviors by designing and embedding synthetic gene networks that perform desired functions in single cells and multi-cellular environments.  We genetically engineer a variety of cell types including bacteria, yeast, and mammalian stem cells.  This nascent field of Synthetic Biology holds promise for a wide range of applications such as programmed tissue engineering, environmental biosensing and effecting, biomaterial fabrication, and an improved understanding of naturally occuring biological processes.

The construction of de-novo genetic circuits begins with the assembly and characterization of genetic parts, or building blocks.  We have assembled a library of genetic components that regulate transcription, translation, phosphorylation, and synthesis of and response to signaling molecules such as acyl-homoserine lactones in bacteria and cytokinins in Eukaryotes.  We then combine these parts into various network topologies that elicit new behaviors in a programmable fashion.  In single cells, we have constructed transcriptional cascades and other network topologies with feedback and feed-forward motifs.  We have shown theoretically and experimentally that these networks can perform digital computation, attenuate gene expression noise, or exhibit analog programmed functions such as pulse generation.  Through the construction and analysis of such fundamental network motifs, we aim to demonstrate sophisticated programmed control over gene expression as well as improve our quantitative understanding of naturally occurring complex gene networks.

Another major emphasis is engineering synthetic multicellular systems through the integration of intracellular circuits with cell-cell communication mechanisms (e.g. lux and rhl quorum sensing systems).  Beginning with simple sender-receiver systems, we have built a variety of more sophisticated multicellular interactions for coordinated cell behaviors.  One such system is the pulse generator where sender cells communicate to nearby receiver cells, which then respond with a transient burst of gene expression whose amplitude and duration depends on the distance from the senders. In another system, receiver cells have been engineered to respond to cell-cell communication signals from senders, but only if the signal concentrations fall within prespecified ranges.  We demonstrated experimentally how a multicellular system that consists of several different detection thresholds can generate a variety of interesting spatial patterns (shown in the figures below).  In a third system, cells have been engineered to “play” Conway’s Game of Life, where cells live or die based on the density of their neighbors.  This system exhibits complex global emergent behavior that arises from the interaction of cells based on simple local rules.  We are currently building a variety of other multicellular systems in bacteria that have interesting spatiotemporal dynamics.  Finally, we are also implementing synthetic gene networks and artificial cell-cell communication in mammalian stem cells in order to control the spatiotemporal expression patterns of cell fate regulators, with novel applications in programmed tissue engineering.

To see Ron’s powerpoint-presentation.

Joseph Porter Jackson III is a philosopher and social entrepreneur. A graduate of Harvard College AB (Government 2004) and the London School of Economics Msc (Philosophy of Science 2005), he has been studying Open Source and user innovation as a subset of the emerging political and economic phenomenon of Peer Production (P2P), since the “Napster Revolution” of 2000. Working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, he analyzed these themes in the context of Digital Media, before moving to Australia as a visiting academic to observe the workings of a non-profit research institute attempting to pioneer Open Source principles in bio-agriculture. He now leads the Network for Open Scientific Innovation, a 501(c)3 organization and distributed think tank with partners in Brazil and Australia, coordinating a variety of research seeking to promote the emergence of Open Source models in the life sciences.

To see the presentation.

Director of Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor, Dept of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley

Adam Arkin, 43, a leading authority on the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and their application to systems and synthetic biology.

Arkin received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Carleton College in 1988 and his Ph.D in physical chemistry four years later from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then pursued postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in chemistry with John Ross and in developmental biology with Harley McAdams and Lucy Shapiro. In 2000 he was featured in a special edition of Time magazine on “Future Innovators,” is a member of the first class of the Technology Reviews TR100, and in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology.

The thrust of Arkin’s research has focused on developing the physical theory, computational tools and experimental approaches for understanding cellular processes critical to life. The goal is to provide a framework that will facilitate the design and engineering of new functions and behaviors in cells through synthetic and systems biology. He once compared synthetic biology to computer design and said, “Most genetic engineering has been done by hook-or-by-crook. It takes a lot of trial-and-error to build simple things into cells, like the ability to produce a lot of a functional protein. We want to actually program cells as if they’re computers or design them as if they were advanced aircraft so they can do much more complicated tasks of benefit to society.”

Arkin has been serving Physical Biosciences Division as the head of its Synthetic Biology Department until his promotion in May to Division Director. In addition, he directs the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s Bioinformatics Group and Berkeley Lab’s Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress. He is a Professor of bioengineering at the University of California (UC), Berkeley and was an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) until 2007.

To see the powerpoint-presentation.

Matthias Kohler and Fabio Gramazio are joint partners in the architects’ office Gramazio & Kohler in Zurich. Their recent works include the sWISH* Pavilion at Expo.02 (for IBM and Swiss Re), the new Christmas illuminations in the Zurich Bahnhofstrasse as well as the contemporary dance institution “Tanzhaus Zurich”. Part of their professional activities includes developing innovative construction and material solutions. Owing to their interdisciplinary experience, Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler have a well-founded and specific understanding of the integration of CAD and CAM logic in the architectonic and construction process.

The research activities of the professorship for architecture and digital fabrication are concentrated on the development of fabrication processes for the additive production of highly informed, non-standardised architectonic products. Parallel to this, they develop strategies for architectural design that are capable of working with these new production possibilities. These are explored within the teaching process in terms of their architectonic, constructive and economic potential. An industrial robot installation developed by the assistant professorship with a processing space of approximately 6 x 3 metres is used for research and teaching and permits the direct construction of building parts on an architectonic scale.

To see the FAB6-presentation.

Dr. Kamau Gachigi is the Chairman and Coordinator of the University of Nairobi Science and Technology Park.

He is also a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya (since 1999), where he teaches materials science to both mechanical and electrical engineering students. His current areas of research include activated carbon from agricultural wastes for use in affordable potable-water filtration, and investigation into value addition of titanium and iron bearing ores. He also runs a Fab Lab which serves as a rapid prototyping center within the S&TP. He has published 6 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, and was awarded a U.S. patent during his doctoral studies. He obtained his PhD (1996) in Solid State Science at the Pennsylvania State University, USA where he specialized in electronic ceramics for capacitor applications. He spent 2.5 years in Japan as a researcher for the electronic, and component manufacturer TDK. He is also a lay Christian preacher, with a particular interest in the linkages between science and spirituality. Prior to becoming a Christian he spent 10 years as a practicing Hindu, during which time he performed a pilgrimage to India.

To see Kamau’s presentation.

Tim Lynch retired for the United States Marine Corps after 22 years of active service. He joined the United States Navy in 1979, spending six years as a hospital corpsman. Tim completed the requirements for a B.S. in business administration shortly after completing his enlistment and entered the USMC Officer Candidate Course in October 1985. He served the next sixteen years as an infantry officer, commanding at every rank until his retirement in 2000. During this period, he participated in three overseas deployments with Fleet Marine Force units, served in instructor billets at both the Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course, and served as the Officer in Charge, Special Missions Branch, Special Operations Training Group, Marine Forces Atlantic. He received his A.S. in medical laboratory technology from George Washington University in 1983 and his B.S. in Business Administration in 1985.

He has been working in Afghanistan since 2005 when he headed the transition at the US Embassy from a US military to private contractor guard force as the Project Manager for Global Risk Strategies. In 2006 he co-founded Vigilant Strategic Services Afghanistan, a security consulting company based in Kabul servicing United States Government agencies as well as the Government of Japan’s development arm, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA.) In 2008 he founded Free Range International; a rapidly growing military oriented blog. Tim remains in Jalalabad working as a USAID project manager specializing on large cash for work projects.

To see the FAB6-presentation.

End of the eighties I learned my first profession (toolmaker) in a
Mercedes-Benz factory.

In the early nineties, I changed into a creative environment. I began working
as a photojournalist for a newspaper (taz). Parallel I studied art. First with
the focus on photography. My degree I received in the master class of the
Japanease sculpture Yuji Takeoka.

End of the nineties I started working in an art-museum (Kunsthalle-Bremen). As
a projectmanager I worked in the technical department.

Since two years I am interrested in Fab Lab. Februar 2010 together with a
colleague, I organised the first german Fab Lab-barcamp (fablabcamp.mixxt.de).

In my hometown Bremen I like to build up a Fab Lab with the main focus on
education.

To see Jonathan Ward’s presentation.

In 2001 Hod Lipson joined the departments of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and the faculty of Computing & Information Science of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is also a member of the Computer Science and Computational Biology graduate fields at Cornell. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis University’s Computer Science Department and a Lecturer at MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Before joining academia, he spent several years as a research engineer in the mechanical, electronic and software industries.

To see the FAB6-presentation.

Larry Sass is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT, where he conducts advanced research and teaching in the field of Digital Fabrication. He began his studies in the early 1990s, working with hyper-realistic rendering and animation programs for design exploration.Today research questions are based on the use of digital fabrication equipment and software to reason through design problems.

His ongoing research demonstrates that buildings can be designed and constructed in paperless environments – using CAD/CAM for fabrication. Current research projects are focused on the advancement of design tools for fabrication laboratories. His long-term goals are to develop design and fabrication tools that better mediate the relationships between – and engender ongoing communications with – designers, the physical and virtual models they produce, and the actual physical buildings that get constructed and need to be maintained.

Before going into academia, Professor Sass worked for several large architectural practices in Boston and New York between 1990 and 2001. He received his B. Arch. from Pratt Institute, and his M.S. Arch. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. Professor Sass teaches four overly subscribed courses on digital fabrication at MIT, and serves as the Director of Digital Design and Fabrication Group within the School of Architecture.

To see the presentation.

I am an independent researcher at the intersection of business administration, society and technology. My interest and expertise are in management systems, such as quality and knowledge management, in the application of technologies, particularly Internet and Web 2.0 technology, to support the implementation of management systems, and in the overall architecture and design of the social, technological and commercial aspects of enterprises. I am equally intrigued by the challenges of investigating models that explain and applying these models to both companies as permanent and projects as temporary organisations.

More recently I have started to investigate and develop models and formats of co-creation, in the context of his work as a senior project manager at Waag Society, within the Fablab community, and together with colleagues Abdul Samad Kazi (VTT, Helsinki, Finland) and Patricia Wolf (ETH Zurich, Switzerland). First results of this endeavour have been the development and delivery and evaluation of “unconference” and co-creation formats in academia and business.

In addition to the organisational and interactional aspects of co-creation, I am also investigating how structural and societal conditions influence and are influenced by various forms of co-creation, one example being the current intellectual property and copyright regimes.

I have worked as a research manager in knowledge management and technologies at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK; 2001-2004) and I have been a researcher in industrial psychology at ETH Zurich (1993-1999). I have also worked in business as a senior consultant for Akronym GmbH (since 1997) and for GEC Alsthom (now Areva T&D) as an industrial engineer (1988-1995).

Next to my business and academic assignments, I have helped to initiate various interdisciplinary cultural and artistic projects – in Lucerne (Switzerland) and Melk (Austria) I co-founded the group p&s (2000) that is responsible for the European project readme.cc virtual library (funded by the European Culture 2000 programme), and in Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) I initiated the project Oil and the City (2004/5) discussing the impact of the oil industry on the social life an cohesion in the city. My contribution was in bridging the gap between culture and entrepreneurship. My interest in these projects was integrating arts, academia and media, and bringing about public involvement and public discourse.

I received a Dr. sc. techn. and an MSc. in industrial engineering from ETH Zurich, and a certificat in International Copyright Law from the University of Amsterdam. I received formal training in online journalism, in educational video production, as a facilitator for Local Agenda 21 and for future workshops, and in sound engineering. I am proficient in German, English, Dutch and French.

Bas van Abel is Creative Director of Waag Society. With a background in interaction design and a personal interest in prototyping technologies and electronics Bas has been working on many Waag projects both as a designer and technical engineer. As head of the Open Design Lab the current focus of his work is on designing tangible interactive experiences and open design.

Prototyping is an essential part of Waag Society’s design based research. Bas developed several workshop formats based on prototyping techniques, ranging from design education to innovation processes.
Waag Society’s prototyping facilities are open to the public under the Fablab program. Fablab is an abbreviation for Fabrication Laboratory. In a Fablab, (almost) any type of object can be created beyond the confines of Research & Development departments of industrial monopolists. Fablabs directly facilitate self-expression through personal fabrication. According to Waag Society, Fablabs may be the key to true open innovation.

Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. His unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from creating molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, and the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American’s 50 leaders in science and technology, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/FP as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors and an honorary Doctor of Science from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. from Cornell University, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.

Research advances by Dr. Gershenfeld and his students and colleagues working at the boundary between physical science and computer science include: one of the first complete quantum computations, using nuclear spins in molecules; microfluidic bubble logic, with bits that transport materials as well as information; physical one-way cryptographic functions, implemented by mesoscopic light scattering; noise-locked loops that entrain on codes, which led to analog logic integrated circuits that use continuous device dynamics to solve digital problems; Internet 0 for interdevice internetworking; microslot probes for ultra-small-sample structural studies; integrated 6-axis inertial measurement based on the dynamics of trapped particles; and charge source tomography for electric field imaging.

He’s the originator of the growing global network of field fab labs that provide widespread access to prototype tools for personal fabrication, and directs the Fab Academy, the associated program for distributed research and education in the principles and practices of digital fabrication.

He plays the bassoon, has ski patrolled and raced, and swam competetively.