Spring is in full gear and you know what that means — event season! Check out a few of our favorite upcoming gatherings this April:
April 5th – Sustainable Urban Housing Beyond LEED
Housing advocates, policy makers and developers are increasingly interested in what is beyond LEED when it comes to sustainable housing. As California moves toward zero energy buildings, design tools and building codes tend to side-step mid-rise residential developments. Join a multidisciplinary panel for a look beyond current municipal policies to the future of energy sustainability in the multifamily sector.
- Katie Ackerly / David Baker Architects
- Stet Sanborn / Integral Group
- Matthew Christie / TRC Energy Services
- Sasha Wisotsky / Oakland Housing Authority
April 6th – Code for San Francisco
Code for San Francisco is a Code for America “brigade” or local chapter focused on improving San Francisco. You’ll be surrounded by folks who are interested in working together to change The City for the better. They fix government services, create insightful visualizations from opened data, and engage people who may have been excluded from the economic boom in the Bay Area. Come by to join an existing project (they need ALL types of skills – not just coders), to pitch your own project, or simply to experience the global movement to change the areas in which we live for the better.
April 7th – Presidio Presents: Entrepreneuring the Sustainable City
With over half of the world’s population living in urban areas, there are countless opportunities for, and challenges to, encouraging sustainability. What is the larger conversation that is driving sustainable thinking today? Join a stellar panel for a discussion of the people, policies, innovations and improvements that will help evolve cities toward sustainability. Co-presented by the Presidio Graduate School.
- Clara Brenner / Tumml
- Nils Moe / Urban Sustainability Directors Network
- Jonathan Ballon / Intel IoT Group
- Allison Arieff / SPUR
In this webinar, we’ll explore how different government organizations are tackling issues in collecting data, sharing it and using it to solve complex urban problems. The focus will be on Microsoft’s work with partners in both government and academic institutions, specifically on how data is changing the way resources like water are managed as well as infrastructure projects on corporate and university campuses.
April 14th & 26th – Code for San Jose
Code for San Jose is a Code for America brigade — a volunteer civic innovation organization that welcomes citizens, coders, designers, data geeks, policy wonks and community activists with an interest in solving community problems through the use of technology. Their goal is to help open, improve, and engage local governments in the San Jose area, and to pursue projects that solve real problems in our communities.
April 15th – CEO Business Climate Summit 2016
This event will bring together a select group of CEOs and executive officers, elected officials and community partners for three in-depth panels, analysis and discussion on how we can work together to strengthen our region, state and nation’s competitiveness in a global economy.
April 15th – Preparing for Driverless Cars
Driverless cars will be hitting our streets before we know it, but planning for them brings up numerous questions. How will they integrate with — and shape — our cities? Will they lead to shared mobility or mass congestion? Will we need more or less parking? What role will fixed-route transit play in the future? Hear from experts about how cities can anticipate and craft policy to anticipate the arrival of driverless cars.
- Stefan Heck / Stanford
- Lauren Isaac / WSP|Parsons Brinckerhoff
April 19th – A Vision for the Future of Regional Governance
The Bay Area’s current system of regional governance includes a series of single purpose regional agencies. In the past, several attempts have been made to merge them but only recently, with a new study proposing combining ABAG and MTC, have these attempts seemed feasible. What are the outcomes of this study and what does it mean for better integrated regional planning in the Bay Area?
- Dave Cortese / MTC
- Egon Terplan / SPUR
April 20th – Machine Learning at Pinterest
Machine learning is at the core of Pinterest. Pinterest personalizes and ranks 1B+ pins, 700+ million boards for 100M+ users all over the world, using data gathered from collaborative filtering, user curation, web crawling, and more. At Pinterest we model relationships between pins, handle cold-start problems and deal with real-time recommendations.
In this talk Jure will give an overview of the problems and effective solutions developed at Pinterest. We will focus on systems and effective engineering choices made to enable productive machine learning development and enable multiple engineers effectively develop, test, and deploy machine-learned models.
April 21st – City on Demand
How are new digital services affecting the way we build, live in and move through American cities? What is the relationship between ridesharing and new transit lines, or between homesharing and displacement, residential architecture and neighborhood identity? As tech companies reshape physical as well as digital space, what are the implications for contemporary urbanism, equity and public space? Join us for an evening of discussion and debate about the role of technology in urbanism. Co-presented by Occidental College.
- Emily Castor / Lyft
- Allison Arieff / SPUR
- Matt Buchanan / The Awl
- Christopher Hawthorne / Los Angeles Times
- Gillian Gillett / City of San Francisco Office of the Mayor
April 22nd – Triple Bottom Line Challenge
April 27th – The Role of Sound in Our Cities
From the chirp of a crosswalk signal to the echo of noise off of built forms, sound plays a vital role in wayfinding around our urban environments for everyone. For those who are blind or visually impaired, however, the importance of that role is amplified exponentially. Join us for a fascinating discussion about the interweaving of blindness, sound and cities from experts with firsthand knowledge.
- Bryan Bashin / LightHouse
- Chris Downey / Architecture for the Blind
- Shane Myrbeck / Arup
- Joshua Cushner / Arup
April 27th – Social Media, Event Television, and Big Blue Live with Carly Severn (of KQED)
In Summer 2015, PBS and the BBC joined forces to present Big Blue Live: a multi-night live TV event filmed at Monterey Bay Aquarium and screened both in the UK and US. The show’s US broadcast placed in the top five TV shows being discussed on nationwide social media for all three nights of its airing. Hear how KQED, as the Bay Area’s PBS station, joined forces with PBS and the BBC to leverage social media around this TV event, build buzz and command online conversation while driving that very traditional thing: TV tune-in.
April 27th – Structuring a New regional Government
Why is regional planning and government important? How can we improve our regional planning functions in a way that leads to better incentives for local communities? In light of the study on ABAG and MTC merging, join us for a conversation about regional planning from the perspective of local cities.
- John Rahaim / San Francisco Planning Department
- Jennifer Ott / Alameda Point
- Egon Terplan / SPUR
April 28th- The Costs of Innovation: Inequality and the Tech Bubble
As the tech economy has boomed, newcomers have flocked to San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon Valley from all over the US and indeed the world. But how has the city that once hosted the Gold Rush and the Summer of Love fared in the era of Unicorns? Our fireside-style panel discussion will examine the larger context of costs and quality of living at the epicenter of innovation in the 21st century, from gender inequities to the many gaps that form in an on-demand economy. Are these permanent realities of a new economy, or the temporary conditions of a bubble that will soon pop (or has already)?
- Dominique Piotet / Fabernovel US
- Nora Poggi / She Started It
- Jonathan Dinu /Zipfian Academy
- EJ Harkness / Fabernovel
April 28th – A Burglar’s Guide to the City
Urban planners see the world one way. Taxi drivers see it another. But burglars? They see the world completely differently than anyone else. The new book, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, encompasses nearly 2,000 years of heists, tunnel jobs and escapes to offer an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You’ll never see the city the same way again.
- Geoff Manaugh / BLDGBLOG
April 29th – Yale Tech 2016 Conference
Yale Tech is excited to be holding its third annual conference focused on the changing face of the technology industry and how Yalies in technology are leading the way in change.
