Cyber Transform

Sponsorship

While the Dot Com Boom and Bust are nearly forgotten, computing technologies continue to advance at an extraordinary pace, radically altering the function of economics, politics, and societal interaction. Although attention on technology is focused upon Silicon Valley, as the largest research university in what will likely soon be the third largest city in the United States, we need to forge ahead in understanding how these technologies are changing our home, for good and bad. We began the process of thinking about how the University of Houston should study the rise of cyberspace, and with it the grave problem of cybersecurity. That is the issue of how information technologies let us down. How they don’t work as expected. But to pay myopic attention on what it means to be secure, largely a matter of perception, reduces our capacity to think about the futures we may occupy. Instead, we must seek to be integrative and understand the transformation as it plays out, rather than merely responding to its unanticipated by-products.

For this reason, we want to pull our campus together to look holistically at how the ongoing Information Revolution is changing the way the members of our community live. Cybersecurity is a form of reductionism; a problem to be solved; a cut in need of bandage. Our charge for this conference is to think about the technology-mediated interactions we face that are altering business, politics, the arts, and other areas of human endeavor. This means consideration of everything from how the information technologies enable community resilience to a collapse in privacy; how they reorganize education and contribute to disinformation; how they empower and alienate. It is asking the hard questions regarding how our socio-technical evolution that is the right role for the University of Houston. For this reason, we are hosting our First Conference on Cyber Transformation in fall 2018.