At May 24 we were invited to held an Engage-session at The Next Web conference. This is one of the biggest conferences on tech, innovation in Europe and attracts about 15.000 people in two days to Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.

Since 2006, TNW Conference has brought together the ecosystem of technology agents driving business innovation. Now in 2018, we’re expanding into 19 carefully curated tracks to shape a much deeper conversation on how technologies such as blockchain and AI will directly affect industries, professions and the way we innovate. Join us and 15.000 attendees on May 24 & 25 2018.

This year the conference created several tracks and formats for sessions. The track Machine:Learners

In the race to building a truly general artificial intelligence, narrow AI is already radically changing your business. At Machine:learners we discuss the current and future use cases for machine-, deep learning and neural science.

The Engage session we organised was themed on ‘Things That Think, new ways of living in future cities’.
With the rise of artificial intelligence the objects in our cities will get more agency. In the current paradigm smart cities are seen as dashboards. When intelligent objects start to populate our streets we get Cities of Things. The Things will have a role as citizens.
In this session insights from the research program PACT (Partnerships for Cities of Things) will be shared. With a special developed card game we invite you to discuss the consequences of these cities of intelligent things.

The Engage session is 45 minutes with a small group of people meant share thoughts and debate consequences. Maria Luce and Iskander Smit prepared a short presentation on the project and a set of cards with situations based on a future scenario, that makes it more tangible to discuss the consequences.

We had a diverse group of people from innovation consultants, user experience designers and investors. The discussions where interesting and touched some of the primal discussions. The cards worked very well to make it concrete.