NPUC 2006 July 24, 2006

A host of new technologies, loosely called Web 2.0, enables interactive social computing applications and empowers everyone to become a publisher. It no longer takes a team of programmers, graphic designers, and content authors to create a compelling web experience. Individuals can now author fairly sophisticated sites using blogs and wikis that tend to look better than the ones "geeks" did only a few years ago.

And media authoring isn't limited to text and pictures -- podcasting technology allows many more people to publish audio and video. Web services and related technologies allow semi-geeks to create new services out of existing ones (mash-ups) without the extreme amount of work required to build comparable applications from scratch. As a result, we have a new set of questions to consider:

* What are the cultural implications as more and more people publish? Is there a limit to how many people will publish?
* What will the web look like five years from now? What tools will we need then?
* How will wide deployment of these new technologies affect accessibility and reusability of content?
* What impact will these technologies have on the information economy? Who are the winners and losers?
* Is it inevitable that desktop software will be replaced by web applications?

We will bring together innovative thinkers from academia and industry to engage in a dialogue that addresses these questions and more at this year's New Paradigms for Using Computers (NPUC) workshop. This non-confidential, invitation-only networking forum for the community is hosted annually by the IBM Almaden Research Center.

NPUC bridges academic and industrial centers of work by focusing on a common theme. We invite several leading experts in the topic area to give a perspective, and then invite the audience to interact. It's a chance to hear the latest, best work in our field, and a premier opportunity to network within the human-centered computing field.

Official Website: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/npuc2006/