Program | Lift Basel 2014

The final version of our program is now available in PDF!

Big Data and Beyond

Thursday, November 6, 2014 - 14:15 to 15:30

Personal genomics, the quantified self movement, smart watches, clever contact lenses and intelligent pills: each second we accumulate more and more data and struggle to extract meaning from it. What ways are there to cope with the data deluge, how can visualization and storytelling help? What can we do to find sustainable ways to manage our personal and institutional health data, what businesses practices, what policies should we foster - and which should we fight?

The Man-Machine Interface

Thursday, November 6, 2014 - 17:45 to 18:45

Yesterday it sounded like outlandish science fiction, today it’s becoming engineering reality: computer-brain connections, intelligent implants and social robots and the like are becoming real, with consequences yet unknown to the way we deal with our bodies and with each others. What is it like, for example, to have an extra sense for magnetism? Or how should we deal with, let’s say, a robot looking after a sick kid?

Shaping Healthy Habits

Friday, November 7, 2014 - 10:30 to 12:00

User Experience Design at the boundary between the health and IT industry is already having a tremendous impact on many, many lives: gamified systems help us get or stay in shape, with motivation and monitoring, new apps and trendy wearable devices are waiting to come to the store next door, and they’ll shape behavior and patient engagement in ways we have not seen yet. What’s to learn from game theory and behavioral economics about that new kind of iPhone psychology?

Future Business Models : Who’s going to pay all of this?

Friday, November 7, 2014 - 14:00 to 15:30

In the end, all innovations will have to find some kind of market. This is by far not only a marketing question: the system we have in place directs research and development to work on drugs for which there are not any kind of patients, but paying patients, and the patent system dictates the lifecycles of many products. At the same time, families and countries are struggling with their insurance premiums, and many ways to better health, such as a lot of preventative approaches, are not followed due to a lack of clear and scalable business models. Where is this all going to take us? Can Crowdfunding help? And, it the end, how much longer can our current post-world-war-two health system stay afloat, and what would be actual alternatives?

Collaboration: Faster, Broader, and More Open

Friday, November 7, 2014 - 16:15 to 17:30

Working together in a global environment is never trivial, and new challenges arise as the need to coordinate across disciplines continues to grows: how can the life science community keep up with more and more complex settings? How can biologists work with hackers, designers learn from medical experts, and policy specialists from science fiction authors? How do new cloud infrastructures change the pace of innovation?

  • Thomas Landrain
    Co-founder of One of the World's Largest Do-it-yourself Biology Labs
  • Oscar Jasklowski
    Crowdfunding the next Wave of Scientific Research
  • Chas Bountra
    Faster Innovation Through Open Access Research and Public-private Partnerships