South by Southwest revealed 600-plus new speakers and sessions that will grace the stages at its interactive, film and music conference March 8-17 next year.
The list represents a dizzying array of innovators, thought-leaders and celebrities whose presentations will generally fit into one of a variety of tracks ranging from enterprise tech to cannabusiness, design, blockchain, politics, sports, food and VR, AR and MR.
“Many of these sessions align with the 10 trends that we think will dominate discussions in March 2019," Hugh Forrest, SXSW's chief programming officer, said in a news release. "The bottom line for all this programming is creative thinking and creative doing — which is the foundation of all aspects of SXSW.”
The 2019 SXSW speakers were selected after the organization gathered 5,000-plus applications via its PanelPicker online platform. Then, community members voted online for their favorite sessions, SXSW's advisory board weighed-in and SXSW officials added their input to ultimately select this year's lineup.
It should be noted, however, that SXSW typically reveals several additional big name guests as we get closer to the start of the festival -- even then, SXSW will sometimes surprise us with a guest who is announced just hours before taking the stage.
Here are a few tech-oriented highlights announced today.
- The Dark Side of Tech: Surveillance and Propaganda: Megha Rajagopalan (BuzzFeed News), Alex Gladstein (Human Rights Foundation), Michael Anti (Chinese journalist) and Abduweli Ayup (linguist) discuss how repressive regimes use tech to retain power.
- Better with Friends: The Social Life of VR: Aaron Lemke (TheWaveVR), Autumn Taylor (Owlchemy Labs), Patrick Curry (FarBridge) and Dante Buckley (Downpour Interactive) talk about bringing users to high-level VR experiences and what it takes to combine the real and virtual worlds that connect us.
- Morphing into the Future: "Shapeshifter" Materials: Lining Yao (Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science) looks at how products could build themselves by using adaptive materials.
- Easy to Fool? Journalism in the Age of Deepfakes: Erica Anderson (Google), Paul Cheung (Knight Foundation), Jeremy Gilbert (The Washington Post) and Kelly McBride (The Poynter Institute) talk about how digital tools can lead to fictionalized news -- and how journalists can detect these deepfakes.
- Startup-Corporate Partnerships Key To Innovation: Sara Chapman (Dell), Karen Kilroy (Kilroy Blockchain), JD Weinstein (Oracle) and Sabrina Wojtewick (Bunker Labs) talk about how startups can partner with corporations and how big companies are approaching innovation in new ways.
- How AI Will Design the Human Future: Amir Husain (SparkCognition), Heather Berlin (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) and Peter Stone (University of Texas) discuss advances in AI and how it changes our perceptions -- as well as our ideas of what is possible.
There are, of course, hundreds more to check out on the full schedule site.
