BIL Conference

Stem Cells … Hype, Hope or Reality

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:55:49 +0000

About the Speaker
Dr. Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist with over 20 years of innovative biomedical research and clinical experience. He is an NIH funded faculty member with the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and is on clinical faculty with the UCSF pediatric bone marrow transplantation service.

Daniel’s research has focused on novel therapies involving stem cells, including understanding and manipulating the stem cell niche (recently published in Nature and Science). Daniel is the inventor of the recently FDA approved ”MarrowMiner” device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founder of StemCor systems, a clinical stage company which is developing the MarrowMiner and other tools and technologies to enable regenerative medicine.

About the Conference
BIL:PIL is a healthcare unconference, bringing the concepts and ideals of the BIL Conference to the Healthcare industry. We held BIL:PIL 2009 on October 30-31, 2009 in San Diego at the San Diego State University’s BioScience Center. More information at bilpil.com.

A New Volumetric Eye: Light Field Microscopy

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:48:30 +0000

About the Talk
Light field cameras instantaneously capture a volume by recording both the location and the angle of photons arriving at a camera sensor. This means that each camera exposure results in a 3D structure, visualized through panning sequences, focal stacks, or volume renderings. Recently, my colleagues and I have applied this technique to microscopic objects. In this talk, I will describe our microscope and present examples from marine biology, particularly 3D neural activation patterns in the zebrafish brain (example). In addition, I will describe a concept for a classroom version which would allow interactive 3D exploration of microscopic specimens from anywhere with an internet connection.

About the Speaker
Image making is my main unifying interest. In graduate school I helped apply a new microscopic imaging technique (light field microscopy) to a model system for neuroscience (larval zebrafish), and am now working on version 2.0 of this tool. This summer I made a lot images photographing the road from Scotland to Mongolia. I love bicycling, which leads to additional imaging. I am also interested in sensory substitution (vibrating hats), science on the cheap (specifically in building a science-themed hostel in Baja), biologically-inspired design, and of course cephalopods.

About the Conference
BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. BIL2010 was held at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA on Feb 12-14.

Can Sleep Shed Light on the Brain’s Dark Matter?

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:56 +0000

About the Talk
A discussion of what insights can be learned by studying your brain’s activity during sleep.

About the Speaker
Dr. Philip Steven Low is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO, NeuroVigil, Inc. He’s also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford School of Medicine, and Research Affiliate of MIT Media Lab & The Salk Institute.

Capitalism and Activism for Healthcare Reform

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:10:57 +0000

About the Talk
Today, doctors are manipulated by the fear of malpractice into recommending unnecessary procedures that individuals accept because of an information disadvantage. We have little compulsion to overcome this disadvantage because we are not the primary buyers of our own health care. The current position is untenable, and it’s in our interest to influence more systemic governmental change with the free market. There are models we can build off, and the first step to getting there is creating patient-advocates that possess the medical knowledge and fiduciary responsibility to allow their clients to decrease their personal costs and increase their quality of life despite a broken system.

Slides from the talk

About the Speaker
Tyler Willis is the Director of Marketing of Involver, which helps companies build audiences on social networks.
Personal Website

About the Conference
About the Conference
BIL:PIL is a healthcare unconference, bringing the concepts and ideals of the BIL Conference to the Healthcare industry. We held BIL:PIL 2009 on October 30-31, 2009 in San Diego at the San Diego State University’s BioScience Center. More information at bilpil.com.

Full Digital Reconstructions of Brains

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:58:41 +0000

About the Talk
The Knife Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM) is a tool that allows high-throughput digital microscopy. It can take an entire mouse brain (or human tumor) and digitize it at a sub-micron level. Originally developed for analyzing long neural paths, it’s also excellent at tracing microvasculature in a sample. This technology has been under development for 10 years at Texas A&M, and is now being commercialized by Todd Huffman and his company, 3Scan, for many different industries including cancer research (angiogenesis inhibitors).

About the Speaker
Hello my name is Todd Huffman, and these are the things that I do…toddhuffman.pbwiki.com

Pillbox – Identify Unknown Drugs

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:09:55 +0000

About the Talk
Pillbox is a tool for rapidly identifying unknown pills. It combines high-resolution images of tablets and capsules with FDA-approved appearance information (imprint, shape, color, etc.) to enable users to visually search for and identify an unknown substance.

This is a great tool for poison control, doctors, or anyone who is trying to identify drugs based on pictures and/or descriptions.

Best of all, all the data is public domain and they’re building an API, which will allow other companies to build tools on top of it.

About the Speaker
David Hale works for the NIH as the Project Manager of Pillbox. Pillbox lies at the intersection of his interests: patient safety, biomedical informatics and user experience.

Personal Website | Twitter

Attraction

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:35:34 +0000

About the Talk
When you become more comfortable with yourself, it will improve all aspects of your life, including your dating life.

About the Speaker
David Wygant is a dating coach and image-maker.

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.

Communities in Healthcare

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:00:43 +0000

About the Speaker

Chia Hwu is the Community Manager for 23andme and a former organic chemist. She has worked in biotech and tech, been a volunteer coordinator and online community manager at various start-ups. You can find her on Twitter (@chiah) and at her blog, The Subtle Influence.

The Top 10 BIL Videos for 2009

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:57:38 +0000

It’s been about 6 months since we’ve launched the new BIL Conference site to showcase the videos from past BILs.

Here’s the list of the ten most popular talks by traffic:

The Story of TOMS Shoes by Blake Mycoski (founder of TOMS)
Your Religion is False by Joel Grus
How To Do Cool Things Around the World by Alex Lightman
Teaching Kids to Code with Kodu by Lynn Langit
Open Source Architecture: From TED Prize to Reality by Cameron Sinclair
Rethinking the Modern GUI by Jayson Elliot
What’s Funny about the Interwebs by Ben Huh (CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger)
University of the Future by Alexandros Pagidas
Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Turian
Demo: Brainwave Controlled iPhone App by Eric Gradman

If you enjoyed the talks, try and make it out to BIL 2010.

You can also subscribe to the Video RSS feed to get notified of the newest videos. We’re currently posting videos from BIL 2009 and BIL:PIL 2009.

Personalized, Open Source Therapies for Breast Cancer

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:14:25 +0000

About the Talk
The inspiration for The Pink Army Collective is open source software successes like Apache and Linux that compete with billion-dollar software giants. We believe open source biotechnology can do the same with big pharma, and we’re creating a community of professionals to build our own drug development company.

We’re focusing on breast cancer to start, and because we’re structurally different than any other biotech or pharma, we can take novel approaches to making medicines. In fact, rather than use the conventional drug development “pipeline”, famous for being slow and expensive, we’re championing a new system that we believe will be able to produce safe, effective, and individually personalized medicines quickly and inexpensively today, and be faster and cost even less as further improvements are made.

About the Speaker
I am a consultant-catalyst for open source biology, synthetic biology, the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) program, DIYbio, and open innovation models, with a focus on Canada. I am also faculty and co-chair of the biotechnology and bioinformatics track at the Singularity University.