6th Future Worlds Symposium

The Future Worlds Symposium is a yearly tech conference organized by Sacramento's professional ACM chapter with assistance from local ACM student chapters. Each year the symposium takes on a new theme, guiding the topics and ideas covered by speakers throughout the conference. The theme for this year's symposium is "Living in an AI World". The event will be held in hybrid mode, both virtually and in-person, with virtual attendance as well as an in-person networking reception and a Community Forum organized by Intel around OneAPI at UC Berkeley. We cannot wait to share the talks and discussions we have planned for the event! We hope to see you there!

The 6th Future Worlds Symposium is happening on October 6th and 7th, 2023.

As stated above, the theme for this year's symposium is "Living in an AI World". We have wonderful talks planned from various great speakers, starting with an introduction and welcome by our Chair, Dr Harsh Verma. On Friday afternoon, ACM Distinguished Speaker, Dr. Heloisa Candello will give an intriguing talk regarding generative AI, followed by Rishabh Banga, whose talk will be centered around AI and education. Afterwards, we will split up into breakout rooms to have thought provoking discussions regarding various fields and how they might interact with AI. Later, ACM Distinguished Speaker, Dr. Gianluca Martini, calling in from University of Queensland, Australia, will finish Friday's agenda with a talk about AI and humans working as one.

On Saturday, Intel will be hosting an in-person event surrounding their impressive technology, oneAPI, at UC Berkeley. This event will run alongside the virtual symposium, where the focus will be on several shorter tech-talks throughout the day.

See the agenda for a more detailed view of each day's schedule.

If you are interested in reading more about previous symposiums, below are quick summaries of each, including speakers, talks, events, and more.

2018 - The 1st Future Worlds Symposium, the fire-starter event, was held in 2018 at Sacramento City Hall, with keynote speaker Dr. Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, also known as one of the “Founding Fathers of the Internet”, The event kicked off with welcome by Mayor of Sacramento, Darrell Steinberg. Other keynote speakers included - Sean Harrington, Vice-President of Products and Engineering at Verizon, and Maria MacGunigal, CIO, City of Sacramento, with the decision of Verizon to make Sacramento the first city to roll out its 5G technology, with a $100 million investment, and Volkswagen’s initial $44 million investment in electric vehicle technology.

A very interesting Q&A was moderated by Louis Stewart, Chief Innovation Officer, City of Sacramento.

Further, we had talks from Intel Worldwide Communities Head, Robert Duffy, on Democratization of Innovation. Professor Bebo White from Stanford SLAC, on BlockChain and IOT for Future World. Professor Sven Koenig from USC and Chair SIG AI, on an AI World, and many other speakers and Innovator demos presented and supported with gracious sponsorship from Google, Verizon, Intel, SMUD, Impact, R Systems, SymSoft, Glocol Networks and other organizations, led by ACM Sacramento Chapter.

2019 - The 2nd Future Worlds Symposium was held at the Sacramento Public Library in 2019 with the opening keynote speaker being Michael Wilkening, Special Advisor on Innovation & Digital Services, Office of Governor. Later, a technical keynote by Mighael Botha, CTO, N America, Software AG and a panel of the CIOs from Sac County, State of California and SMUD as well as poster sessions from students.

A very interesting panel on Innovation in Government was held - How would IOT and AI accelerate Digital Transformation? Included panelists Scott Gregory, Chief Digital Innovation Officer, California Department of Technology, Rami Zakaria, Chief Information Officer, Sacramento County, and Stephen Clemons, Chief Information Officer, SMUD moderated by Dr. Harsh Verma, Chairman, ACM Sacramento Chapter, Intel Innovator and Vice-President, R Systems.

2020 - The 3rd Future Worlds Symposium was the first symposium to be held virtually, with the event being held on Zoom. The symposium included very interesting keynotes, speakers and panels from around the world.

It was exciting to hear the morning keynote by Bill Pearson, Vice President, IoT Group, Intel Corporation, co-sponsored by Intel Corporation, as well as the afternoon keynote by Dr. Josiah Dykstra, Deputy Technical Director for Cybersecurity Operations, National Security Agency (NSA), with distinguished speakers and panelists from around the World – US, Canada, Austria, UK, Singapore, India, Australia – to talk about AI, Machine Learning, IOT, CyberSecurity, Robotics, and Healthcare.

2021 - The 4th Future Worlds Symposium was held virtually, again. Moving on from Sustainable Innovation, the year’s theme was Computational Sustainability. We had some great speakers - a workshop keynote by Walt Fehr, Principal Technical Advisor, US DOT Volpe Center. Asfand Siddiqui from Caltrans gave a great talk. As well as an interesting talk by Ajay Gupta, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, California DMV. And finally the industry keynote by Stefan Schwab, CEO, Siemens Comfy. The virtual format, like in 2020, allowed a wider variety of speakers and subject matter experts than would have been feasible in-person.

2022 - The 5th Future Worlds Symposium was once again held virtually, with a kaynote by Grady Booch, best known for developing the UML - Unified Modeling Language, Software Engineering in a Post-AI and Post-Quantum World, and other keynotes by Dr. Peter Robinson on Driving the Future, by Dr. Sudeep Pasricha on AI at the Speed of Light and a Workshop on "Essentials of Intel DevCloud for AI Edge Workloads" by Meghana Rao, Snr AI Evangelist, Intel Corporation.