SPEAKERS AND PRESENTATIONS

Philip Aaberg
CONTACT Keynote Banquet Speaker
A 2002 Grammy Nominee, world-class composer and pianist Philip Aaberg is a musician with incredible range and a boundless, distinctive style. He finds devoted listeners among rock, country, blues, jazz, new age, and classical music fans, and his range of performances includes everything from solo piano concertos with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Latvian National Symphony to appearances with luminaries like Peter Gabriel, Elvin Bishop and John Hiatt.  His most recent albums on Sweetgrass Music include "Live From Montana", "Field Notes", "Christmas" and "The Big Open".

Carol Anderson
"COTI HI"
Carol is a nationally recognized science teacher. With Dave Tamori, she is bringing the student team from Oroville high school to participate in the Cultures of the Imagination simulation.

Lara Battles
"Where the Aliens Roam"
A light hearted look at primitive art's replication in contemporary engineered structures. Giant Anthropomorphs duel with Occam's Razor and win in this Realm of Whimsy. Darwinian purists are forewarned... the Aliens are among us!

Trained as a Marriage and Family Counselor, Lara Battles has maintained a private practice in Arroyo Grande, California, where she specializes in the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Her interest in CONTACT is a derivative of her work; working with patients whose minds are "formatted differently" has created a sensitivity to some of the ways non-earthly minds may develop. She hikes, kayaks, and claims she never met a petroglyph she didn't like.

Yvonne Clearwater
"Everything I Need to Know I Learned From my Robot"
Dr. Yvonne Clearwater will reveal how the early study of robotics can have life changing impacts on children. She will present highlights from NASA's nationwide program in robotics education, including a highly successful online resource for educators that she developed and now operates, the Robotics Curriculum Clearinghouse. Audience members will be encouraged to share their own ideas about how to attract students, especially girls, into math, science and technology.

Yvonne Clearwater has conducted innovative design research and creative problem solving in the intersection of science, aesthetics, engineering and communications. Her award winning environmental design projects span underground work settings to the International Space Station, from clean rooms to new communities. For NASA she has served as a Principal Investigator in space human factors, Mars habitat simulation Project Manager, and Sr. Producer of media ranging from nationally broadcast television documentaries to e-educational resources.

Bruce Damer
"Cyber-Space-Exploration"
This year's report on the emerging shape of the Space Exploration and Commercialization landscape in the years 2006-2016. DigitalSpace provides support to NASA to visualize and design missions through 3D simulations and thus reaches out into these possible futures. We will demonstrate robotic lunar south polar water ice mission designs using real-time human telepresence (CONTACT made... with Luna). With tourism, commercial services to the ISS, China, Japan and the Europeans all forging their own paths independent of the US, it promises to be a fascinating coming decade in space!

Bruce co-founded the Contact Consortium, a sister organization to CONTACT, with Jim Funaro in 1995. The Consortium built on the work of SolSys and Epona to carry out experimentation with and hold conferences about multi-user virtual worlds on the Internet. Bruce also founded DigitalSpace, a 3D design studio that is engaged in a number of projects, many with NASA to model potential future space vehicles and missions.

Kathryn Denning
"The Adjacent Possibility of Music"
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is, of course, just one example of Earth's musical fauna - we are merely one of many species that sing. What do we all have in common? Where does music come from? Or, put another way, what exactly makes music possible here on Earth? This talk will consider the biological evolutionary origin of our own music, and what this tells us about the possibility of music on other worlds.

Kathryn Denning merrily traipses through the terrain of anthropology, archaeology, and philosophy, as she examines metanarratives about Others, and compares ideas about the best ways of knowing Others. Her subjects range from aliens to zoos. She is a professor in the Anthropology department at York University in Toronto.

Keith Doyle
"Musical Complexity, Echos of the Past, Glimpses of the Future"
Artist and musician Keith Doyle presents his ideas about little understood domains in music, based on some of his own work and that of composers who have forged some unique paths. Keith suggests there may be significant musical territory yet to be fully explored, which may give us some insight on what the future holds.

Keith Doyle is a computer programmer, artist and musician who's been experimenting with music, art and mathematics in various forms since the 1970s, and is currently developing portable exhibit platforms for interactive art and music. His interactive musical exhibit, the Sonic Carousel, can be experienced at the Contact 2006 art show.

Andrew Fraknoi
"The Music of the Spheres: Astronomically Inspired Music"
A summary of some of the most interesting examples of music inspired by real astronomy, from rock and roll songs about black holes to classical music simulating the big bang. We'll look briefly at the astronomy that has inspired some of the most intriguing pieces and at some examples of collaboration between composers and astronomers over the years. The talk will be illustrated with color images from the largest telescopes in the world. Participants will receive an annotated bibliography of astronomical music.

Andrew Fraknoi is Chair of the Astronomy Program at Foothill College and the founder and director of Project ASTRO at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He is co-author of "Voyages through the Universe," one of the leading introductory astronomy textbooks in the country. With Byron Preiss, he edited two collections of science and science fiction pieces for Bantam in the 1980's, and now is co-editor of "Astronomy Education Review", an electronic journal. He appears regularly on local and national radio, explaining astronomy in everyday language. Asteroid 4859 was named Asteroid Fraknoi by the International Astronomical Union to honor his contributions to astronomy education.

Gus Frederick
"Movie Music: The Second Half of the Picture"
Ever notice how most of the highly successful films have dynamic and lyrical sound tracks? Matching the action, not just with sound effects, but with a musical score helps fill the other half of an experience that is both visual and auditory. Frederick will offer a brief over-view of this phenomenon as it relates to a selection of his favorite science fiction films, scored by a selection of his favorite composers.

Frederick is a free-lance multi-media artist, animator and technical illustrator who lives in Silverton, Oregon with his two cats, lots of books and tons of 78rpm phonograph records. A long-time space enthusiast, he is an active member of the Mars, National Space and Planetary Societies, as well as serving as Webster for the Mars Society's analog Mars Habitat program.

Jim Funaro
"Simulations of Extra-terrestrial Contact: What Have We Learned in 20 Years?
For more than two decades, CONTACT has been bringing together professional scientists, writers and artists to create scenarios that simulate contact with extraterrestrial cultures. Such simulations are metaphors for the kind of intra-terrestrial contact that forms the basis for cultural anthropology and allow us to test protocols for cross-cultural interactions whenever and wherever they occur. The results of simulated face-to-face and remote contact with humans, aliens and machines have brought up many issues of relevance to anthropology, the space program and the SETI community, including the problems of preconceptions and ethnocentrism, the reaction of interest factions on Earth, and the question of universals of culture and intelligence.

Founder of CONTACT, Jim is an instructor emeritus in anthropology at Cabrillo College, which recently awarded him its highest honor for teaching excellence. Publications demonstrating his research interests are "Anthropologists as Culture Designers for Offworld Colonies" and "On the Cultural Impact of Extraterrestrial Contact." Besides his degrees in Anthropology, he has a BA cum laude in Literature and is a published poet; he won the American Anthropological Association's 1997 prize for poetry.

Joel Hagen
"Backyard Mars: Notes From An Optical Vagabond"
Joel Hagen is an artist and imaging specialist who divides his time between physical and computer media. Joel is a founding member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, an award-winning sculptor and animator and an instructor of computer graphics at Modesto Junior College. Currently working with the microscopic imaging team on MER, Joel was also part of the NASA Ames teams on Pathfinder and Polar Lander. Joel is known for his short experimental films with subjects as diverse as anchovy schooling, early lunar missions and anatomical cross-sections.

Al Harrison
"The Right Stuff: From Kitty Hawk to Mars"
The biological and psychological demands of extreme flight conditions and the future prospects for human explorations of deep space.

Dr. Albert A. Harrison has conducted extensive research on next-generation space missions, including a return trip to the Moon and initial human exploration of Mars. He recently received a large grant from NASA to investigate ways of integrating behavioral health research with flight operations.

Marsha Ivins
"Life and Music in Orbit"
An astronaut's talk and pictures of life in space, past, present and future, and what "musical" they manage to do in orbit.

Marsha Ivins was selected in the NASA Astronaut Class of 1984 as a mission specialist. Her technical assignments to date include: review of Orbiter safety and reliability issues; avionics upgrades to the Orbiter cockpit; software verification in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL); Spacecraft Communicator (CAPCOM) in Mission Control; crew representative for Orbiter photographic system and procedures; crew representative for Orbiter flight crew equipment issues; Lead of Astronaut Support Personnel team at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, supporting Space Shuttle launches and landings; crew representative for Space Station and Space Shuttle stowage, habitability, logistics, and transfer issues; Head of the Astronaut Office Exploration Branch, Special Assistant to the Constellation Program Manager. A veteran of five space flights, (STS-32 in 1990, STS-46 in 1992, STS-62 in 1994, STS-81 in 1997, and STS-98 in 2001), Ms. Ivins has logged over 1,318 hours in space. Ms. Ivins is currently assigned to the Astronaut Office, Space Station/Shuttle Branches for crew equipment, habitability and stowage, is head of the Exploration Branch of the Astronaut office. She has a special interest in music in space.

Jeroen Lapré
"Work-In-Progress on Maelstrom II: An Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Film Short"
Based on the short story by Arthur C. Clarke, Maelstrom II is an independent film short produced and directed by Jeroen Lapre', a digital artist at Industrial Light and Magic. His nine years of film effects credits include the Star Wars Prequels, Artificial Intelligence, the Hulk, and Harry Potter 3. Jeroen is an avid science and space exploration enthusiast, and has a passion for science education.

Maelstrom II is an Arthur C. Clarke film short about the resourcefulness and courage of fragile Humanity in the unforgiving environment of space colonization.

Maelstrom II is a space science education project, intending to present celestial mechanics and space colonization to the science student and enthusiast in a compelling manner. The DVD release will include supplemental educational material on those topics. Jeroen will be presenting his work in progress on Maelstrom II, which will include production design, artist impressions, animatics, and actor screen tests.

Gerald Nordley
"Orbital and Acoustic Resonance"
Orbital resonances in planetary systems and the analogy between the orbital frequency of moons and planets and the frequencies of tempered scales used in music.

Gerald is a retired Air Force officer, author and astronautical engineer who has published both technical and science fiction work and has won Analog's annual "Anlab" reader's award three times for fiction and once for non-fiction. His latest book, writing as "G. David Nordley" is After the Vikings, a collection of futuristic Mars related stories. Gerald writes a science column for Speculations, an electronic/print magazine for Science Fiction writers and also serves as CONTACT's treasurer.

David P. Miller
"The Sooner Lunar Schooner"
Dave describes a Lunar robot mission he is putting together at the University of Oklahoma.

David Miller is the Wilkonson Chair Professor of Engineering & Intelligent Systems at the University of Oklahoma. He is also the Chief Scientist at the KISS Institute for practical Robotics, an organization dedicated to technology education. Miller has been doing robotics for over twenty years and has been involved in a variety of projects ranging from Mars rovers to automated wheelchairs. He currently lives in Norman, OK with his wife Cathryne Stein and his son Bob.

Carol Oliver
"Getting Connected to the Future of Science Education: It's Virtually Here"
The paper will describe three international projects that have employed, or will employ, the lenses and tools - one from Australia that opens learning experiences in how science is undertaken, another from the US that will allow up to 80,000 participants to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge and a third project under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics - the Virtual Global Space Exploration Education Portal, which will provide a single point of information about these and other learning technologies and the projects that use them.

Carol Oliver is a science communicator and the Assistant Director (Management and Outreach) of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. She holds a research Masters in Science Communication from Central Queensland University and is in the final year of her communications doctorate in Earth and Planetary Sciences with Macquarie University. Her main interest is in science literacy among a broad range of audiences, including high school students, general public and science policy makers. She sees the role of emerging hi-tech visualization and interpretation tools in space exploration as being a key in making science more accessible to all, particularly where the tools have application for astrobiologists too. Carol is active in these areas in the international arena, both in her job and as a corresponding member of the International Academy of Astronautics. She was also instrumental in getting a SETI experiment on the Parkes 64-metre radio telescope in New South Wales in 1998, and hopes to make Southern SERENDIP the forerunner of another long-term - but larger - SETI project in Australia sometime in the near to medium future.

Jim Pass
"The Astrosociological Implications of Astrobiology"
The recent scientific furor over astrobiology, while indeed justified, continues to assemble formalized associations and organizations to support it under the guise of the so-called "hard" sciences (e.g., biology and the related physical sciences). The "soft" sciences, including sociology, remain largely separated from this dynamically forming new field. However, as argued in this paper, space exploration involving the search for extraterrestrial life should be viewed as consisting of two interrelated parts: astrobiology and astrosociology. Together, these two fields cover the topics related to aliens as appropriate, but also their relationships to human beings as well as their cultures and social structures.

Jim Pass, Ph.D. received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1991. He is the founder of Astrosociology.com and currently maintains the website and its related activities. Dr. Pass considers himself the first astrosociologist and strongly advocates the establishment of astrosociology as a new subdiscipline of sociology.

Douglas Raybeck
"Music and the Brain: What Music Says about Us and Possible Others"
I review some of the literature concerning the neurological concomitants of musical ability and the degree to which it rflects hard wiring patterns. I also discuss some of the exploratory efforts to include music as a medium of communication with extraterrestrials. These range from the Pioneer series to Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

A Psychological Anthropologist, Douglas Raybeck received his Ph. D. in anthropology from Cornell University. He is a Professor of Anthropology at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323. He is widely regarded as a wonderful person.

Reed Riner
"Retrospect on CONTACT: What Have We Learned?"
(An academic trip down Memory Lane)
Since 1983 the annual Contact Conference has encouraged systematic speculation about human futures in space especially including the possibility of contact with alien intelligence. The Conference was originally convened to address and hopefully remedy (ameliorate) the generally very poor record humans have had in first contact situations between human sociocultural systems. The elaborate "thought experiments" sponsored by the conference have taught us probably more about ourselves than about any aliens we may eventually encounter, but these exercises have also facilitated identification and eradication of fallacious assumptions in out thinking about extraterrestrial aliens and intelligences that have been imported from popular culture. Contact with ETI is the kind of event that futurists categorize as a wild card - an event of low probability but with potentially very high impact when it finally occurs. The contact with ETI is possibly the most beneficial wildcard that we can explore, hence its perennial fascination. This paper will present an organized synopsis of the findings from Contact thought experiments, then apply anticipatory anthropology to suggest an informed scenario with substantial probability of being accurate.

Reed Riner a co-founder of CONTACT, is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff where he regularly teaches courses on the anthropological study of the future, aka anticipatory anthropology. His current interests include the Flagstaff Tomorrow project, the NAU Solar System Simulation, simulation modeling in general, and gardening.

Kim Stanley Robinson
"I Tried to Write Science Fiction About Music"
Stan discusses what happened when he wrote The Memory of Whiteness.

One of today's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers, Robinson's work has received many honors including the Nebula, the Hugo, the Asimov, John W. Campbell, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Among his novels are the Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars series. Robinson's newest book is, THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, with FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN released in June 2004 from Bantam.

Carlo H. Séquin
"Music of the Spheres in More Than 3 Dimensions"
In his "Mysterium Cosmographicum," Kepler related the size of the planetary orbits in our solar system to the spheres fitting inside and outside the five Platonic solids. Since we now know of more than 6 planets, perhaps we could also include the 4-dimensional regular polytopes to obtain enough spheres to try to match all the different ratios of the orbit diameters. An introduction to the 4D "Platonic" solids will be given and models (in 3D) will be shown.

Carlo H. Séquin, originally a physicist, has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. For the last 20 years he has been interested in computer graphics, geometric modeling, and computer-aided design tools for circuit designers, architects, and for mechanical engineers. During the last ten years he has also collaborated with artists, and has created several designs for geometric sculptures.

He recently received the "IEEE Technical Achievement" award for his early work on charge-coupled devices for solid state cameras and for his more recent activities in computer-aided design.

Seth Shostak
"E.T.'s Music"
It's happened in science-fiction, and some have considered it a real possibility: if we make contact with the extraterrestrials, we needn't worry about a universal translator. We'll just speak to them with music. But does this make sense? Will E.T. recognize music, or for that matter, even be able to hear it? In this paper, we'll discuss the aliens' likely interest (or otherwise) in terrestrial tunes.

Seth is senior astronomer and official spokesman for the SETI Institute. A distinguished astronomer with many publications to his credit, Seth is also a photographer, filmmaker and widely known media personality. Seth's book, Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life has received much public and scholarly acclaim.

Michael Sims
"Update on Mars: the MER Results"
Dr. Michael Sims is Research Scientist with the Center for Mars Exploration and the Computational Sciences Division of NASA Ames. Michael received a BS in Physics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rutgers University and has been at NASA Ames Research Center since 1987. His research includes robotics, machine learning, visualization, and tools for enhancing and easing scientific modeling. He was one of the founding members of the artificial intelligence and the intelligent mechanisms groups at Ames. Previously he served as agent for artificial intelligence, robotics and human performance for NASA's Office of Exploration. Michael is actively involved in plans for future planetary missions including robotic activities and human settlements on the Mars and the Moon. He was a participating scientist on the Pathfinder mission and is co-investigator on the Mars 2003 rover missions.

Allucquére Rosanne Stone
"From Kwamina to Kesh and Beyond: Real Music of Imagined Cultures"
Science fiction (and fiction in general) has a fine history of authors whose fictional worlds escape the frame of representation and bleed over into the "real world". For example, from an anthropological perspective one of the best known is Ursula leGuin's culture of the Kesh, part of whose rich musical heritage is available on cassette. More trivial and fragmentary examples include music of the Ewoks (Star Wars), the Elwyn (Willow), and so forth. While with modern technology it is relatively trivial to generate unfamiliar melodic and rhythmic patterns, it is considerably more challenging to create music which is both "alien" and still "musical" to listeners trained only in mainstream music of the Western developed world. Second, creating a music which is both exotic (the hallmark of otherness) and deeply moving (the hallmark of the familiar) is definitely a nontrivial effort. Finally, from the theoretical and practical perspective of the field anthropologist, issues such as orientalization, subaltern discourse, and other hegemonies inevitably color the modes of production and reception of such musics.

Dave Tamori
"Drumming as an Educational Experience in Team Building"
Besides being an award winner art teacher and one of the original designers of the COTI HI curriculum, Dave has been a drummer for most of his life. He will lead the CONTACT group in a drumming circle experience. The presentation demonstrates the use of the technique as a team building activity.

Dave has been teaching visual arts and coaching at Oroville High School for thirty-one years. He is the Visual and Performing Arts Coordinator, Head Wrestling Coach and advisor to the National Art Honor Society. I've been a co-director for the Northern California Arts Project, Assessor for Educational Testing Service Advanced Placement and Panel Member for the development of all of the current arts assessments exams. Dave is a 4th Degree Belt in Judo and has received many awards including Teacher of the Year.

Douglas Vakoch
"SETI and Music"
Interstellar messages inspired by terrestrial music may let us convey something about the human sense of aesthetics in a form intelligible to extraterrestrial scientists. Drawing on the mathematical and physical foundations of music, this paper introduces a primer of basic musical concepts such as duration and rhythm, which could be transmitted by radio waves or brief laser pulses. As an additional benefit, this primer tells extraterrestrials something about human cognition and perception.

Doug Vakoch is the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, as well as the only social scientist employed by a SETI organization. Doug researches ways that different civilizations might create messages that could be transmitted across interstellar space, allowing communication between humans and extraterrestrials even without face-to-face contact. He is particularly interested in how we might compose reply messages that would begin to express what it's like to be human. He also serves on the core faculty of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Israel Zuckerman
“COTI”
Israel Zuckerman is the long-time coordinator of the COTI: Cultures of the Imagination workshop. He finds that CONTACT allows him to combine his secret agenda of teaching ecology and evolution with his hobbies of gaming and science fiction. He has a B.A. in Anthropology and is a board member.