On the Industry Stage at the MediaTech Hub Conference we kick off the Society track with “Verification vs Manipulation”: universally accessible technology – think smartphones or bodycams – as it impacts everyone’s lives. How does technology at the “coalface” translate upstream into our social narrative and what happens if it is manipulated along the way? Balancing the views of official usage and potentially disruptive deployment, we give our audience a multi-faceted view of something we all engage with every day, often without a second thought about what it really is or how we should process it: information.We look forward to an exchange between Sabine Schumann (German Police Union) and Holger Volland (Executive Board Member brand eins).

In “Consumerism: The Rules Have Changed”, we’re looking at something we’d all prefer not to admit: how we have become products in somebody else’s Greater Scheme of Things. What is surveillance capitalism? How – and why – should we push back and take control over our individual internet presence? What are NFTs and how do they underpin IP? And is there a balance between convenience and integrity? This exciting discussion will bring together a retailer from the “Old Economy” seeking to transform itself to suit the consumer future, an avant-garde creator of a totally new type of ownership and a controversial reactionary urging us to rethink all our actions: Michaela Regneri (Senior Expert AI & Cognitive Computing bei OTTO), Marjorie Hernandez de Vogelsteller (Co-Founder of LUKSO and owner of The Dematerialised) and Aral Balkan (Co-Founder Small Technology Foundation). 

At the other end of the conference, in the Learning track, “Equipped for the Future” brings together experts from across the learning spectrum – from learning designed for the individual through curiosity-driven lifelong ‘learning’ (we’ll never stop) to the kind of learning fuelled by a combination of kinesthetics and neuroscience, the spectrum is as wide as it is deep. In this session you will meet Hans Jörg Stotz, board member at Festo Didactic,  Antonello Ceravola from the Honda Research Institute, and Lucia Pannese, CEO and Research Director at Imaginary.

The second session of this track “Learning Journeys Enabled by XR” features Gayatri Parameswaran, immersive storyteller at NowHere Media, Gerda Leopold, Amilux Film, Kathrin Brunner, Senior Expert AI & Cognitive Computing at mYndstorm.

Our closing keynote on Serious Games is from a pioneer in the creation of the “special sauce” that is game-based learning: Noah Falstein (Founder of The Inspiracy). We’ll find out what took Serious Games from a strange but cool nice-to-have to a full-blown science in a quarter of a century. Exciting stuff! 

Join #mthcon2021 and write MediaTech history with us!