Friday Night Panel

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm @ The Franklin Institute

Come to the Franklin Institute to see a group of societal visionaries speak about how they have sustained the spirit of innovation in their work.

• Dan Barcay - Lead Software Engineer, Google Earth
• Alex Gilliam - founder, Public Workshop
• Zoe Strauss - artist, photographer, innovator.
• C. J. Taylor - Professor, U. Penn GRASP Robotics Lab
• Phoenix Wang - Co-Founder, Startl
• Moderated by Dr. Frederic Bertley - Vice President of the Center for Innovation in Science Learning, The Franklin Institute

Driven by his passions for flying, technology, and story-telling, Daniel Barcay has spent the last five years at Google focusing on computer graphics and geospatial technologies in Google Earth. Recognizing the potential of Google Earth to be a platform for immersive cinematic experiences, he has focused on creating tools to enable users to create animated visualizations and share their stories with others. In so doing, Daniel invented the Touring feature and animated GPS tracking, and worked on converting Street-View into a fully 3D experience. In his 20% time, Daniel co-invented an interactive exhibit called Liquid Galaxy: a room of screens arranged as a virtual observation deck in which users can navigate anywhere on Earth, the Moon, or Mars. Called "Google's Coolest 20% project" by Tech Crunch, the Liquid Galaxy is now installed in over 20 locations worldwide including the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Recently, Daniel shifted focus to Google Latitude where he continues to advance technologies for visualizing, understanding, and sharing GPS information."

A cheerleader of possibility, Alex Gilliam is the founder of Public Workshop, an organization that redefines the way youth and communities participate as citizens and leaders in the design of their neighborhoods and cities. Alex fundamentally believes that great design, empowerment, innovation, and having fun are not mutually exclusive. He creates inspiring curricula, transformative youth design leadership programs, innovative participatory community design tools, engaging events and thoughtful strategies that help people rethink possibility. Alex has worked with numerous organizations, museums, universities, architecture firms and city agencies including the Charter High School For Architecture and Design in Philadelphia, Rural Studio, Hester Street Collaborative, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, Chicago Architecture Foundation, Landon Bone Baker Architects, Open House New York and the City of Austin, Texas. In addition, Alex is a national expert on K-12 design education with an emphasis service learning and was the 2010 Field Fellow at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Alex is a Senior Lecturer in the Design Department at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he is helping develop the University’s social entrepreneurship program. His work has been featured on NPR’s Studio 360 and in magazines such as Metropolis, ID and the Architect’s Newspaper as well as showcased on various company websites including Kaboom!, Core 77, Yahoo and NBC’s TODAY.

Alex’s recent work includes creating a green design leadership program in the Chicago that trains young people to gather the environmental data and collect the stories that substantiate design changes in their neighborhoods; developing unique design-build place-making events to better engage youth and community in a master planning process in Austin, TX; designing a NEA funded youth community design leadership program for middle schools in the Bronx; leading a #teendesignheroes camp in rural Wisconsin for Chicago Public School students; and creating a full scale building system that allows young people to prototype their own playgrounds in under-used public spaces.

Zoe Strauss, born 1970, is an installation artist and photographer living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Strauss recently completed “Under I-95,” a 10 year long project that culminated in an installation of photographs under interstate 95 in South Philadelphia. She has exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia ICA and had two solo shows at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. In 2005, Ms. Strauss was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and in 2007 she was awarded a USA Gund Fellowship. Her first monograph, America, was published in 2008.

Ms. Strauss is the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Public Art Project.

Dr. C.J. Taylor received his A.B. degree in Electrical Computer and Systems Engineering from Harvard College in 1988 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1990 and 1994 respectively. Dr. Taylor was the Jamaica Scholar in 1984, a member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and held a Harvard College Scholarship from 1986-1988. From 1994 to 1997 Dr. Taylor was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty of the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania in September 1997. He received an NSF CAREER award in 1998 and the Lindback Minority Junior Faculty Award in 2001. Dr Taylor's research interests lie primarily in the fields of Computer Vision and Robotics and include: reconstruction of 3D models from images, vision-guided robot navigation and smart camera networks. Dr. Taylor has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has also served on numerous conference organizing committees and was a Program Chair of the 2006 edition of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Phoenix Wang is passionate about transformative innovations at personal, organizational and systemic levels. She co-founded Startl.org, a Sundance Institute like model for catalyzing learning innovations through digital media and technologies. She currently advises a number of early-stage start-up companies, national foundations such as Hewlett, McArthur, Gates, and Noyce, as well as agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education and New York city schools. She has directed philanthropic investments while at the Hewlett Foundation and led large-scale business transformation initiatives while at Accenture Consulting and NBC/iVillage. The trend that currently fascinates her is the confluence of the DIY maker community, the reinvention of creative play, and the opportunity to engage kids in science, technology, design, and creative arts. Phoenix lives outside of Philadelphia