swissnex San Francisco

swissn

ex San Fran

cisco

issue«1 —

2012

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swissnex San Francisco730 Montgomery Street, San Francisco CA 94111, USA t: (415) 912-5901 f: (415) 912-5905www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org

Editorial

Creative Direction

& Design

PHOTOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION

MEGAN MANSELL WILLIAMS

Lindsay Beaman

Christian Simm

Tolleson

ERIC HAINES

Orange PHOTOGRAPHY

JAMIE CALDERON

SATOMI NAGATA

WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE SWISSNEX SAN FRANCISCO

MAGAZINE, WRITTEN AND DESIGNED TO TELL THE COMPELLING STORIES

OF OUR COMMUNITY, OUR SERVICES, AND THE STAKEHOLDERS WE SERVE.

SWISSNEX SAN FRANCISCO IS AN Initiative of the State Secretariat for

Education and Research (SER) AND AN Annex of the Consulate General of

Switzerland. swissnex is part of a knowledge network with outposts in

Bangalore, Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Singapore.

www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org

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CONTENTS

SWISSNEX‘STORY

9

LANDSCAPE«OF‘INNOVATION

14

PEOPLE

16

SOCIAL‘MEDIA:«THE«SHORT«COURSE

Swiss academia harnesses the power of social networks

18

BIG‘DATA.«HUGE«INSIGHTS.

Better living through open data and data visualization?

40

A«NEW«GRASP«ON«SCANNING

Meet the world’s first scanning mouse

28

UPCOMING‘EVENTS

52

DIRECTOR'S«LETTER

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Social Media: The Short Course

What Swiss academia can learn from the @ladygaga Twitter handle and Charlie Bit My Finger YouTube video.

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A New Grasp on Scanning

DACUDA

IT’S SOMETHING NEARLY EVERY DESKTOP COMPUTER HAS: A MOUSE.AND IT’S SOMETHING ALMOST EVERYONE NEEDS FROM TIME TO TIME:A SCANNER. NOW THE TWO COME IN ONE HANDY DEVICE.

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Big Data. Huge Insights.

Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always show the whole story either. Especially given the scale at which data proliferates, piles up, and just sits there mutely. Fortunately,data visualization experts and amateurs are helping to make sense of it. And that means taming data to shape a better world, a better life, and just maybe to find better parking.

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Nexus, Catalyst, Curator

At swissnex San Francisco, we often describe ourselves by our varied activities, such as the number of events organized, number of startups served, or number of universities assisted. Rarely do we provide a peek into the complex endeavors and nuanced motivation behind why we do what we do, or exactly what is entailed in our mission to connect the dots between Switzerland and North America in science, education, art, and innovation.

We do connect the dots by bringing together talented people from diverse disciplines, true. But there’s more than you’d expect in facilitating those links. The fact is, we are often responsible for proactively identifying and joining the people, places, subjects, and audiences that comprise our dots. By doing that, we can shape their size and color, and place them on a canvas for others to see and to experience and to pass on.

This year, in the first ever swissnex report produced as a magazine, we highlight three compelling stories that peer deeply into our multi-layered work. Each involves intersecting ideas and demonstrates the central role of swissnex San Francisco—a nexus, a catalyst, a curator to conceive opportunity and bring it to fruition. These accounts spotlight our methods and results, from shaping the data conversation and fostering the data visualization community in Switzerland and San Francisco, to influencing the way Swiss academic institutions communicate, to creating opportun-ities for young companies entering the US market. In other words, the stories show that we do much more than just make introductions.

Innovation is a process, whether it entails presenting new ideas or fashioning opportunities for those ideas to cross-pollinate on a larger scale. It requires new approaches that transcend traditional boundaries while remaining steeped in historical precedent. At swissnex San Francisco, we are inspired by the Swiss tradition to create a secure and neutral place for people of different interests to come together and exchange views. Today, we offer a safe haven for cutting-edge ideas. But we encourage experimentation and believe wholeheartedly in the value of creative, interdisciplinary approaches to sparking meaningful exchanges. The science and knowledge diplomacy we engage in is transparent and meant to be shared with the public in open forums. In this way, we showcase Switzerland’s capacity to innovate and contribute by exporting the most precious natural resource of all: knowledge.

So every day, we seek out, create, pursue, and connect ideas and intelligent people who aren’t afraid to challenge conventional thinking. They may be scientists or entrepreneurs, students or artists. They may be mainstream or avant-garde, but they are all thought leaders who represent the best and most innovative in their field. We give them a voice, a stage, and the chance to share unexpected perspectives. And we are honored to be the talent scouts, the impresarios, and the proof-of-concept lab for this special chemistry.

Our knowledge leadership promotes intellectual exchanges that serve more than Switzerland. Through the opportunities we provide to share and generate understanding, the world becomes smaller and good ideas rise to the fore—good ideas that could one day help address humanity’s most profound challenges.

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Future Spotting

swissnex San Francisco is nearing its 10–year anniversary. What strikes me is that, after almost a decade, we have never once slowed down. I am constantly surprised, astonished, and amazed by what our growing team is capable of, and equally impressed by the people and subjects we encounter daily.

While the passing of time has me reflecting on where our organization is today, I also can’t help but contemplate where we are headed tomorrow. With this in mind, it didn’t seem fitting to report on swissnex in our customary way this year. We are constantly adapting internally to stay agile and receptive to change, such as rapidly evolving new communication technologies.

In the pages that follow, we bring you stories and images of the people we’ve touched, the ideas we’ve triggered, and of course, the connections we continue to make between Switzerland and North America. We hope you’re as inspired by our engaging magazine approach to story telling as we are by the innovation of our collaborators.

Evolving communication is at the core of Social Media: The Short Course (p. 18). When we realized that Swiss higher education wasn’t using social media tools with the same vigor and intensity as universities in California and across the US, it spurred us to act.

It’s our job to soak up West Coast trends, technologies, and innovations, and to connect these to all that Switzerland has to offer. So swissnex San Francisco is now enabling Swiss academia to harness the power of social media. The individuals who participated in our Silicon Valley study tours on the subject are helping to promote change within their institutions, and we strongly believe this serves a greater good. Spreading knowledge and connecting communities, after all, is what swissnex San Francisco and the other swissnex locations around the world strive for. Social media is supremely effective at that.

This year, the Swiss startup Dacuda released the world’s first scanning mouse, and we showcase how gaps between the digital and printed realms are quickly closing in A New Grasp on Scanning (p. 28). Finally, in Big Data. Huge Insights. (p. 40), we see how massive quantities of data are increasingly making their way to the public for exploration, visualization, and informed decision–making on a personal and civic level.

Who knows what the next big idea will be or what new technological breakthrough will transform industry? Whatever it is, we promise to keep paying attention and to help shape the dialog around it.

Christian Simm Founder and Executive Director, swissnex San Francisco

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VALUE

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CONSTITUENTS

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Landscape of Innovation swissnex San Francisco is part of a global network and is situated at the crossroads of people, ideas, activities, and opportunities that together create a complex and powerful panorama. It is a dynamic landscape that constantly evolves as individuals and information contribute to it. Each spot—or dot—on this patchwork connects to the others and represents a constituent, a service, an activity, or a value that swissnex makes possible. This mottled yet harmonious terrain knows no national or intellectual borders. For every landmark that’s familiar, many more remain uncharted. In embracing and initiating this shifting scenery, swissnex San Francisco contributes to and promotes innovation.

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SERVICES

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ACTIVITIES

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Constituents include institutional and mandate partners, study tour and delegation visitors, event partners and sponsors, policy makers, innovators, speakers, startups, universities, event attendees, and others who benefit from our leadership and expertise.

Services refer to the ways in which we connect, curate, and catalyze. swissnex San Francisco provides a multitude of opportunities to share and learn, from public events to targeted intro-ductions, private consulting to startup support, communication and outreach to study tours, university affairs to independent research.

Value to our network is imparted through interactions with swissnex San Francisco. Our community is consistently exposed to new thinking and presented with occasions to propagate knowledge, build partner-ships, meet relevant contacts, and gain visibility in North America and in Switzerland.

Activities inspired by science, education, art, and innovation are rich, robust, and varied at swissnex. We act as scouts to conceive and produce unexpected conferences, panel discussions, exhibi-tions, and workshops. We also develop new initiatives and programs that drive conversations and push ideas forward.

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People

Christian Simm, PhDExecutive DirectorFounder, Complexity Manager,

Recovering Physicist

Liliane AckleProject ManagerEvents, University affairs, Creative Cook

Birgit ColemanHead of Innovation ServicesCorporate Partnerships, Startup Consulting,

TEDster

Aurélie Coulon, PhDHead of Life SciencesEvents, Science & Research Scout,

Onion DNA Magician

Gioia DeucherHead of Startup ServicesUS Market Entry CAMP, Innovation Consulting,

Bikes for Scholarships

Vanessa DrigoHead of University AffairsAcademic Partnerships, Alumni Programs,

BICYCLE Racer

Laura EricksonAssociate DirectorHead of Finance & Operations, Reporting,

Juggler

Natasha FeigerFacilities and Logistics ManagerBuilding & OfFice Operations,

Accounting, Patriots Fan

Julia Kuhn MirzaCommunications ManagerSocial Media, Program Coordination,

Intercontinental Foodie

Sophie LamparterHead of Interdisciplinary ProgramsEvents & Exhibits, Internship Coordinator,

Boundless Optimist

Luc MeierAssociate DirectorHead of Public Programs &

Interdisciplinary Projects,

Resident McEnroe

Florencia PradaHead of Digital MarketingPublic Relations, Community Management,

Travel Junkie

Megan WilliamsHead of CommunicationsWriting & Editing, Media Relations,

Marine Biology Nerd

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The faces of swissnex San Francisco are as diverse as the disciplines we engage in every day. We are scholars and scientists and business experts. But we are also photographers and bicycle racers and avid world travelers. These differences allow us to be better scouts for Switzerland and better practitioners of science diplomacy on the West Coast of North America. Above all, we are passionate. We are dedicated to our work and unceasingly curious about the world around us. We consider these traits to be assets, and we bring them to all that we do to create, connect, and inspire.

swissnex San Francisco attracts numerous

interns every year who are fully integrated

into the team, as well as temporary staff

from Credit Suisse who assist us with our

Information Technology support. We work

with talented contractors in a number of

areas to help our business hum.

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The Short Course

Social MediaWhat Swiss academia can learn from the @ladygaga Twitter handle and Charlie Bit My Finger YouTube video.

Photography byOrange Photography

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Gilda is right. She’s one of fourteen people from Swiss higher education who’ve come to San Francisco for a crash course in the Silicon Valley social media scene. Over the next week, each day will be busier than the next as they absorb a blend of intensive learning and non-stop meetings with the Bay Area’s leading universities and social media companies.

Most participants on this study tour work in communications for universities and colleges in Switzerland. Like marketing professionals in all sectors, they grapple with how to best put social networking to work for their jobs. They recognize the need to engage online audiences and stay current with new technology. But like most in higher education and research, they face slim budgets and scant human resources with which to support their institution’s reputation and goals.

The staff of swissnex San Francisco, who organized the study tour, welcomes the group to their offices on Montgomery Street and introduces the organization’s many facets. This is the second such trip offered as part of a program developed by swissnex. It’s called Swiss Academia and the Social Media Landscape, a two-year curriculum available to all Swiss higher education institutions. That includes federal institutes of technology, universities, universities of applied sciences (equivalent to state schools in the US), national labs, and research institutes. Thirty-eight in total are taking part.

The program is a mix of social media monitoring, independent research, online training, study tours like this one, conferences in Switzerland, and more. Funding for it comes from the Gebert Rüf Foundation and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research. The tours themselves are the ultimate field trip, inspiring and motivating participants to jumpstart social media activities within their institutions, and helping them overcome obstacles like misunderstandings about the tools and resistance to change.

By the next morning after the welcome session, the group of Swiss visitors will already be communicating about where to meet for coffee in 140 characters or less—the maximum length of a tweet. But as Gilda Schertenleib (@Gilda_) of the University of Lugano in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland points out, it’s time to get some rest before the frenetic week ahead.

Cultural anthropologist Chuck Darrah, a professor at San Jose State University, characterizes Silicon Valley for his visiting students. Simply put, it is a land of risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and the consummately optimistic. That’s what makes the region’s great successes as well as its epic failures, which by the way are more than acceptable here.

Next, everyone packs into passenger vans and heads south to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. In a sleek meeting room with iPads and nametags perfectly placed around a pristine conference table, the iTunes U teams give an equally sleek presentation. And with impressive effect. Participant Daniel Ducommun (@ducom5) represents the student affairs office at the Haute Ecole de la Santé La Source, a nursing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. He likens being on the Apple campus—the touchstone of iconic technology—to a nearly religious experience.

Then it’s back in the vans and off to the University of California, Berkeley to meet the school’s social media team. swissnex San Francisco’s @JuliaClaud, dubbed “Queen of the Highway” by the participants, puts pedal to metal and hits the fast lane to get there in time.

Monday, March 19, 2012:

Sunday, March 18, 2012:

Years ago 50% of all the email addresses were in Northern California. introduction to Silicon Valley by Chuck Darrah #springstudytour

—@LadiCap

Thank you @swissnexSF for this welcome session and dinner! Let’s get some sleep #springstudytour, we’ll need it for sure!

—@Gilda_

“Welcome to #Cal campus, @swissnexsf. Looking forward to speaking w/ u & yr guests today about our social media work!” tweets the social media director for @Cal, Christina Sponselli (@sponselli).

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“ Social media is called social media because it’ssocial. It’s all about helping people to engage withone another and form communities and make connections. That’s a basic human drive. We just have different ways of enabling those connections to occur right now.”

Spring study tour participant Ladina Caprez (@LadiCap)

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There’s no question that Silicon Valley is ground zero for the social media revolution. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn—they’re all here. Naturally, then, universities in the US were among the first to begin experimenting with these new tools for marketing and outreach. Bay Area universities in particular were early adopters. UC Berkeley has more than 100,000 Facebook fans today, while Stanford University has more than 300,000. The @Stanford Twitter account has 68,500 followers as of this writing. Both schools have branded channels on YouTube, company pages on LinkedIn, and a host of other social outlets for sharing news and events, engaging with audiences, and providing an online place to connect.

Statistics like these reflect how education and research leaders are integrating social and open channels into their communication practices. Michael Stoner, President of mStoner, a marketing and communications consulting firm that works with schools, colleges, and universities says, “If you look at data from here in America where social media of various kinds are embedded in the daily habits of millions of people, you can really see that if institutions like colleges and universities don’t understand how to use these tools effectively, they’re not going to be very successful at engaging with audiences they really care about—and who also really care about them.”

But in 2009 and 2010, when swissnex San Francisco started looking into social media for higher education, it found that the trend hadn’t quite caught on in Switzerland. Its research gave a telling snapshot, revealing that 12 leading world universities were 95 percent more active on social media than the 12 Swiss universities were at that time. Ninety-five percent. When swissnex polled a select number of relevant staff at Swiss universities about their desire to participate in social media as an institution, they responded that they did have an interest but lacked resources and support.

That gap was the trigger that inspired swissnex’s communications department and its digital marketing lead, Florencia Prada, to develop the two-year program and secure the necessary funding to move forward.

“The use of social media in the higher education sector in Switzerland still has the image of being something not very serious, something for very young people, something which is not really compatible with academia,” remarks Philipp Egger, CEO of the Gebert Rüf Foundation, the program’s largest supporter. “This is a bit of our role [at Gebert Rüf], to enable noble ideas and to try them out, to say ‘Well, give a good idea a chance. You can’t answer a question before you’ve asked it.’ I was quickly convinced that in comparison to other university areas such as California and the US, Switzerland simply doesn’t really exist on the social media map. That’s why we thought, ‘This is an opportunity, this is a chance, this is a gap, let’s try to help fill it. ’”

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Annika Glauner (@anniblu) is with Euresearch, the International Research Programs of the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She tweets the above after the morning’s appropriately lightning-fast visit to the offices of Twitter in San Francisco, where Thomas Arend (@techno) receives the group. The Twitter Product Manager explains the company’s beginnings and next steps, such as adapting Twitter for users in different countries. He thanks the visitors, by tweeting of course, for “stopping by the Birdhouse today:)”

Later in the afternoon at Stanford University, social media leaders from the medical school, alumni center, and the engineering school share three rules for engaging with audiences. Consider what they care about, tell compelling stories, and put the institution forward as a leader.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012:#springstudytour: am even more moved by the power of 140 characters

—@anniblu

“ When I first read the proposal for Swiss Academiaand the Social Media Landscape, I was smiling. Itwas a crazy idea. But after five minutes of studying the proposal, I got it. swissnex had the guts to turn up with this idea. They are able to push novel topicsinto the sector of higher education.”

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Swiss higher education is catching on to social media. Since Swiss Academia and the Social Media Landscape launched in early 2011, many schools have established official channels. And perception is changing too. In December 2011, swissnex asked communications departments of Swiss universities and universities of applied sciences whether or not social media was a priority internally. Forty-two percent indicated that it was, compared to just 21 percent in 2010.

Seventy-nine percent of Swiss higher education institutions surveyed have official presence(s) on social media today. Sixteen percent are in the midst of establishing official accounts. Only five percent have no managed presence. Ten out of the 12 Swiss universities have a branded Facebook page in 2012, and three of these were created in the last quarter of 2011. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) leads Swiss universities on Facebook with more than 3,500 likes, while the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne’s page comes in a close second. swissnex San Francisco has been a media consultant for EPFL since 2009. All Swiss universities now have at least one official Twitter account.

Social media savvy communicators should take note of this trend and consider checking the job boards at Swiss universities and other academic institutions in the coming months. Forty-two percent of those surveyed say they plan to hire a social media manager in the next 12 months, and 27 percent already have.

“ The tour helped me to do these workshops andconvince people to get on the boat, and it helped with discussions around the critical questions thatalways come up. It is no longer a question if or ifnot [to do social media], but just a question of how you should use it.”

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Zurich University of Applied Sciences study tour participant Lara Canonica summarizes meetings with the social media trifecta. The program has the group a bit giddy. After Arthur Woods of YouTube EDU Partnerships describes how the Google-owned company provides educational access to all, members of the study tour can’t resist a race down the company’s giant red slide separating two floors of the office. @philippe_fabian (Philippe Fabian, also from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences) congratulates the winner. “Well done @manuelnappo http://twitpic.com/8zeic2 #springstudytour”

According to Woods, universities are wise to create official YouTube accounts to aggregate their videos, whether the content focuses on research news, course lectures, or campus life. One Swiss university taking full advantage of YouTube’s reach is the University of St. Gallen.

Markus Zinsmaier is head of the University of St. Gallen’s corporate publications and web team. He led his university into the social media waters just this year after taking part in the swissnex San Francisco 2011 fall social media study tour to Silicon Valley.

When Zinsmaier joined the fall study tour, he and his colleagues in St. Gallen were already in the planning stages of their social media rollout. They had a working concept to create official university profiles on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. They were also planning to open sub accounts that would appeal to their various audiences: prospective students, current students, alumni, and researchers.

“For me [the study tour] was quite helpful,” Zinsmaier says. “We were discussing this concept but it was more abstract. Certain people knew we should do this, but others were more difficult to convince. I had quite a few discussions where I tried to show what we wanted to put online. The tour helped me to do these workshops and convince people to get on the boat, and it helped with discussions around the critical questions that always come up. As we heard over and over again on the fall study tour, it is no longer a question if or if not [to do social media], but just a question of how you should use it. In 10 years we won’t even be discussing this.”

In December 2011, Zinsmaier took his goals to the next level. To manage the institution’s presence on social media and to coordinate the growing efforts across campus, the communication department of the university hired expert Katja Wenk as social media officer.

In January 2012, Zinsmaier and Wenk launched the university’s social presence in a full-court press. They announced the channels in a news release and promoted their social accounts directly on the school’s homepage. The offerings include a blog portal as well. Their most popular social media post so far is a music video from a rock band made up of university professors. Maybe not serious news, but subjects like this engage and contribute to relationship and brand building between the university and its community. Not to mention positioning the institution as a place that’s academically first-rate, but fun, too.

“It’s getting better each day because people begin to understand the media more and our followers and fans grow,” Zinsmaier says of the university’s new social presence. “It will be interesting to have this conversation in a year and look back, but the beginning is good.”

Wednesday, March 21, 2012:Morning @youtube, lunch @facebook, afternoon @LinkedIn—Thanks @swissnexSF #springstudytour

—@laracanonica

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Michael Stoner sweeps into swissnex to discuss how US universities are leveraging social media for marketing and communications and to demonstrate how, despite cultural differences, everyone is trying to figure it out just the same.

“Social media is called social media because it’s social,” Stoner remarks. “It’s all about helping people to engage with one another and form communities and make connections. That’s a basic human drive. We just have different ways of enabling those connections to occur right now. Identifying who your audience is, what your audience is interested in, how they want to interact with you, what channels they’re going to use. Those are questions that any good marketer should be asking himself or herself, and I don’t see that it’s a whole lot different in social channels.”

Next, the group braves the San Francisco bus system, MUNI, toward verdant Golden Gate Park and the California Academy of Sciences. Marketing manager Amie Wong handles all the social media channels for the science center, which includes a natural history museum, an aquarium, a four-story rainforest, a planetarium, and more. Their Facebook page has nearly 50,000 likes.

Spending a week immersed in a place where social media is now a part of everyday life even for universities and museums offers Swiss visitors an added boon. They are free to withhold a certain amount of skepticism; to open up and to learn by example (failures as well as successes) from those who have been at it longer. Face-to-face interactions with innovators and campuses that have years of experience in how to use the tools effectively can help to propel them forward.

Philipp Egger, of the Gebert Rüf Foundation, agrees that San Francisco and swissnex are in a special position to nurture enthusiasm for social media and to help Swiss visitors use it within academia. “swissnex is located in the area for showing off social media in academia. Within swissnex, you also have experienced people with a track record that is perfect for teaching social media.” A case in point is swissnex social media program head, Florencia Prada, whose own track record includes working at LinkedIn, where she educated others about the potential of the social network.

The final day. Communications consultant David Harris has the group mocking up strategies, identifying audiences, and figuring out how to measure success. There’s a quick walking tour of swissnex’s historic neighborhood, once called the Barbary Coast and infamous during the Gold Rush for gambling and prostitution. Then a last meeting at Blackboard Mobile, maker of iPhone apps for universities. It’s a fitting ending to the sessions and one that lands on a future-forward note: mobile is here and cannot be ignored.

What will the study tour group take home from this week of hyperactive tweeting, blogging, Storifying, Instagramming, and checking-in? At the very least, the idea of social media has taken root within Swiss academia. Now the question is, will it flourish thanks to these few individuals and others like them? Each institution will decide what is best and how to adapt to emerging trends. The goal of the Swiss Academia and the Social Media Landscape program and of swissnex San Francisco, however, remains consistent: to report on the latest innovations and to offer up opportunities for leaders in Switzerland to harness their power and accelerate adoption.

Spring study tour guest Philippe Fabian is responsible for social media activities and strategy in the online communications department of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur. “I will try to implement my learning and my impressions into a training program for employees at my university,” he says. “I can carry on the spirit of Silicon Valley and bring it back to my university whenever I’m talking to people about social media.”

David Spring is a journalist at the University of Lausanne in the communication department. He also thinks that passing on the knowledge he gained on the spring study tour is the ultimate souvenir from Silicon Valley. “We had a tour on the Gold Rush,” he says. “What I have to do now is take all these nuggets and craft gold bars. I’ve received tools, advice, insight, and I know I can rely on the constant help of swissnex to convince my upper management and my colleagues, to make them enthusiastic about social networks. I will plan meetings with colleagues, I will blog everything that I’ve done so that everybody in the university can have everything I saw. And I will create a group on campus… once a month informal meetings to speak about good practices, mistakes we’ve made, and to leverage everything.”

Friday, March 23, 2012“Fail fast or fail forward.” By @physicsdavid #quotes #springstudytour

—@philippe_fabian

“We had the absolute pleasure of hosting Swiss guests doing a social media #springstudytour w/@swissnexSF —thanks for stopping by!” tweets Wong from @CalAcademyofSciences.

Thursday, March 22, 2012“Being a community manager is really a challenge” @mStonerblog #springstudytour

— @davidspring

Spring study tour participants Philippe Fabian and David Spring

Michael Stoner

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Saturday, March 24, 2012: I left “My comfort zone” and went “Where the #awesome happens”. #springstudytour

—@manuelnappo

Thanks to the swissnex social media program and study tours, there’s a growing momentum inside Swiss academia to take advantage of social media’s potential. There’s also now an expanding community of individuals who formed close bonds over the course of the weeklong study tours, and those bonds last long into the future after the individuals return to Switzerland and to their campuses.

In an appropriate demonstration of the lessons they learned, the spring study tour set up a Facebook group to keep in touch and share news and tips. They’re also still tweeting using the #springstudytour hashtag. swissnex hopes this legacy will continue; that the individuals keep talking, keep sharing, and keep growing Swiss academia’s social media presence. Who knows, maybe @ladygaga will soon have some rivals.

Learn more about swissnex San Francisco’s social media program for Swiss academia: socialmediaswitzerland.org

For the funders of the program, time and results will be the ultimate measure of success. Philipp Egger expects a full report once Swiss Academia and the Social Media Landscape wraps up at the end of 2012. If the numbers tell the story and there are true examples of the change within Swiss higher education, then the two years have been beyond worth it.

“When I first read the proposal for Swiss Academia and the Social Media Landscape, I was smiling,” Egger says. “It was a crazy idea. But after five minutes of studying the proposal, I got it. swissnex had the guts to turn up with this idea. They are able to push novel topics into the sector of higher education.”

Egger adds that he’s already heard feedback from participants of both the fall and spring study tours. “People are just amazed at how swissnex managed to create these contacts, to actually visit the headquarters of these places. It shows that they are connected on a very high level. This brings much more to a topic than theoretical knowledge. It’s authentic, it’s one-to-one. You could never ever experience it anywhere else besides California.”

Thank you @swissnexSF for providing us with excellent building blocks. Now we have to create and deliver. http://instagr.am/p/IiCHZLhv7e/”

—@herwigdaemon

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A NEW GRASP ON SCANNING

THE LSM-100 SCANNER MOUSE WAS USED TO CREATE ALL BACKGROUND IMAGES FOR THIS STORY. 29

On February 2, 2012, an audience in San Francisco was among the first to put a brand new data input gizmo to work. Its debut happened weeks earlier at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, when electronics juggernaut LG and Swiss startup Dacuda introduced the LSM-100 Scanner Mouse to the US. The lucky early adopters of February joined the “Scan What You Can” competition at swissnex San Francisco and vied for a chance to take one home. The event showcased the device’s swift, maneuverable interface linking the digital and printed realms, and how it now integrates with popular cloud applications including Dropbox, Expensify, Evernote, and others.

Dacuda’s patented SLAM Scan® technology combines principles of robotics with computer vision to accomplish its feat. The scanner’s camera captures a video stream of overlapping images as the user swipes the mouse over business cards, graphs, books, maps, even fabric. Dacuda’s software then stitches the pictures together by detecting and aligning corresponding points in real-time and optimizing the final result. What makes the mouse so incredibly valuable, aside from eighty-sixing the clunky scanner hogging all your desk space, is that the captured images are instantly editable in Word, Excel, and other popular applications. That also means that they can be shared with a single click on social networks or by email. Since Dacuda developed the scanning mouse and secured LG as a launch partner, several hundred thousand units have shipped, winning over users in more than 118 countries and recognizing text and tables instantly in over 190 languages. Software for Windows and Mac gives the mouse broad appeal, and Dacuda has received accolades for its success. The company earned the Swiss innovation prize in 2010, the Swiss Economic Award in high tech and biotech in 2011 (one of most important prizes in Switzerland), and it made the cut for the 2012 Red Herring Global 100 list of the best tech startups worldwide.

“Dacuda has a mashup of two technologies and it’s easy for consumers to understand what it is,” remarks Ulf Claesson, of the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), which provides support for early stage Swiss startups.

“That makes it accessible to consumers and to consumer electronics companies who get it, too. They know it will be relatively easy to bring that kind of product to market. The other interesting factor about Dacuda’s technology is what it can do with other devices. From my perspective, this is only the start.”

It’s something nearly every desktop computer has: a mouse. And it’s something almost everyone needs from time to time: a scanner. NOW THE TWO COME IN ONE HANDY DEVICE.

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“ I see a lot of companies and sometimes there is a great team and an average idea. Sometimes there is a great idea and an average team. I THINK WITH DACUDA, WE SAW THAT BOTH WERE GREAT.”

Dacuda’s founding team met in an entrepreneurship class towards the end of 2007 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Alexander Ilic, Michael Born, Erik Fonseka, and Martin Zahnert had the idea for the scanning mouse but not much else. They worked for a year using their own funds to build the first demo, which consisted of a wooden box with a CD-size footprint, inside which they mounted an off-the-shelf webcam. This early prototype proved that their real-time image stitching technique—their secret sauce—worked. With that crude little box, they went in search of funding and officially founded the company in early 2009. It wasn’t long before Ilic reached out to swissnex San Francisco.

Ilic studied computer science and computer linguistics in college at TU Munich in Germany before enrolling in a cross disciplinary Ph.D. program between ETH Zurich and MIT. He spent one full year at MIT as part of the Entrepreneurship Lab Program at the Sloan School of Management. It was there that he became aware of the swissnex network and its outpost in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When he returned to Switzerland and started Dacuda, he got in touch with swissnex San Francisco’s Birgit Coleman, the organization’s startup services leader at the time and a resource for finding contacts in the Bay Area.

In 2010, Ilic thought of swissnex San Francisco again because of a new startup accelerator program being offered there: the US Market Entry CAMP. The CAMP is a joint initiative between the swissnex offices in Boston and San Francisco, and CTI. Only companies with or working toward a CTI label, attained through active coaching by the Swiss startup promotion agency, can apply. Of those that apply, only the companies deemed ready are accepted and receive a stipend for expenses, a workspace for three months, and access to swissnex’s support, contacts, and expertise.

Ulf Claesson, who advises Dacuda through the CTI program and is a co-creator of the CAMP, felt the company was ready. Dacuda was accepted and in November 2010 became the very first startup to camp out at swissnex San Francisco. “I see a lot of companies and sometimes there is a great team and an average idea. Sometimes there is a great idea and an average team. I think with Dacuda, we saw that both were great,” Claesson says. “It was clear that Dacuda’s technology was mature enough, that they needed partners, and it was clear where those partners were—Silicon Valley.”

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Dacuda CEO Alex Ilic wears a gentle smile, a crisp shirt, and neatly combed hair. He says of the CAMP, “It gave us the chance to get to the US faster. Before that, it’d be one week of activity, then silence for two months. We realized that when you show up and have a great meeting but then are gone again, you get out of your partners’ sight and they lose interest. The CAMP really gave us the opportunity to stay close with potential customers and work on a more local basis. There isn’t an international flight connected to a yes or no. You can organize meetings here a lot easier than if you have to plan two weeks ahead from afar.”

Two of the partnerships (with Expensify and Evernote) that came to fruition in 2012 during the scanning competition also had roots way back to the days when Dacuda was a CAMPer. “There were random situations that led to cool things,” Ilic remembers about working in the swissnex office. “One time, Luca Rigazio from Panasonic was there to visit Gioia [Deucher, who now heads the swissnex startup services with Coleman], and since I was sitting at the desk in back she introduced us. The next day I had a meeting at their office in Cupertino. This contact wouldn’t have happened if I was in Switzerland. If you’re there, it’s easy to connect. That’s one of the most important things.”

Arguably Dacuda’s most important milestone so far is the deal it snagged with LG. After getting contacts rolling with a number of electronics companies thanks to time in the Silicon Valley area, Dacuda fielded multiple offers to license its novel technology.

“At the end of the day, LG made the cut because its people were looking for a chance to bring the world’s first product to market,” Ilic says. “This isn’t something that happens every day.” Ilic explains that LG was one of the last meetings they had over an eight-month period during which they screened the top 20 consumer electronics brands out there. The Korean company saw the opportunity, they were fast, and they made a good offer. Even after the first meeting, with nothing in ink, LG impressed Dacuda by going out and conducting a full-scale market research study. They surveyed thousands of people and figured out what it would take to ramp up production on a demo.

LG won the exclusive rights to be Dacuda’s launch partner and producer of the world’s first scanning mouse. The product made it to market in early 2012 and is available today at major retailers including Amazon and Fry’s. And Dacuda is now opening up the market to other vendors.

“ IF YOU’RE THERE, IT’S EASY TO CONNECT.”

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“ THIS ISN’T SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS EVERY DAY.”

So you have a scanning mouse. Now what? Connect it to other useful products, of course. To easily access personal data any time and from any device, digital citizens are increasingly using applications that store their information in the cloud. Forty-five million people use Dropbox for sharing and storing files, for example. Evernote’s 25 million users store their digital notes with that service. Expensify lets close to a million people create online expense reports “that don’t suck,” according to the company.

Digitizing information quickly and easily, however, has been problematic. Enter the scanning mouse. Dacuda approached these and other cloud services about integrating their shareability and accessibility with Dacuda’s scanning prowess, and the conversations paid off. At the swissnex event in February 2012, Dacuda’s partnerships with Evernote, Dropbox, Expensify, Lemon, and NewSoft officially debuted. Moreover, attendees got to try out how the mouse brings tangible content online in an editable format—and fast. The young, tech-savvy crowd was anxious to get their hands on the device and begin experimenting.

David Barrett, Founder and CEO of Expensify, represented his company at the swissnex event. “I can see Dacuda moving its technology out of mice and into other devices. That’s what’s brilliant about their plan. It doesn’t require a lot of fancy hardware. It really works with anything with a camera. It’s really clever technology that focuses on fast and nimble software.”

To show off that speedy and flexible appeal over a traditional desktop scanner, Dacuda created a friendly little competition for the event: whoever scanned a twisting, turning racetrack (with a cheese reward at the end) the fastest, won. Victorious contestants like Christian Prada received their very own scanning mouse as well as other prizes such as a year’s membership to Evernote. “You have to imagine that while you move, the mouse software is stitching the images together like a mosaic,” Prada says. “If you want to know how I won, I noticed that basically the software was a lot faster than the rendering on the screen. Other people were watching the screen. I did it in a couple of seconds by watching what I was scanning.”

The event highlighted how, with the scanning mouse, the entire notion of what scanning is shifts. “Before Dacuda, scanning usually took time and was never fun,” Alex Ilic says. “We showed it can be fun and you can do cool things with it.” Scanning off the page for example. There are no size restrictions to what you can scan with the mouse. Objects or images don’t have to be perfectly flat or fit on a rigid tray.

Alex Ilic, Dacuda CEO

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Dacuda’s goal is to enable users to instantly edit and share the things they see in front of them with the devices they actually use. The mouse is perfect for those who work on laptops or desktops, but what about the huge group of mobile users and people interacting with computers in their living rooms? Dacuda is paying attention. “Everywhere there’s a computer and a camera, we’re looking,” Ilic says.

If Dacuda is successful, we can soon imagine scanners in our smartphones and embedded in gaming devices, tablets, TVs, and remote controls. We may never have to transcribe text from documents again. We’ll be capturing street art, maybe, or patterns in nature using the electronic objects in our pockets and bringing these scenes into our digital worlds to riff on, augment, and enhance. It all seems so plausible, it’s as if the technology was always there—or should have been. It slips right in. Did Dacuda scan our brains to find out exactly what we were waiting for?

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39

Big Data. Huge Insights.

Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always show the whole story either. Especially given the scale at which data proliferates, piles up, and just sits there mutely. Fortunately, data visualization experts and amateurs are helping to make sense of it. And that means taming data to shape a better world, a better life, and just maybe to find better parking.

PHOTOGRAPHY«BY

ERIC«HAINES

∂

40

41

It’s Saturday morning on a sunny June day in 2011 in the spacious, brick-walled, San Francisco offices of Adobe Systems. Roughly 100 nerds have locked themselves inside for the foreseeable future, hunched over computer screens crunching numbers. By nerds we’re talking smart, successful, talented men and women whose expertise spans design, user experience, programming and coding, data analysis, and more. Ian Johnson, for example, is an intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the visualization group. He’s also working towards a Ph.D. in computational sciences at Florida State University. But still, it’s Saturday and sunny, and Ian and the others are here why?

The answer is Data In Sight, a data visualization hackathon taking place over a weekend and co- organized by swissnex San Francisco, Creative Commons, and the Netherlands Office for Science and Technology.

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A hackathon describes a competitive event in which computer programmers, software developers, designers, and the like collaborate over a pre– defined period of time—a gorgeous weekend, for example—on an intense project with a specific focus. This hackathon has participants mashing up and tweaking freely accessible, or “open data,” to tell visual stories.

More than a dozen high–profile sponsors have signed on to support the initiative, including Adobe, which donated its space, Mozilla, LinkedIn, Gephi, Nespresso, and others. There’s free food and caffeinated beverages (they’re in this for two days), along with couches, flip charts, work tables, and plenty of WiFi. Speakers and judges at the top of the field are here from around the world to inspire, advise, and select winning projects on Sunday evening.

One such speaker is Benjamin Wiederkehr, of Zurich–based user experience and data

visualization firm Interactive Things. “Data and data literacy are important fields,” he says. The hackathon certainly proved data visualization’s impact on intern Ian Johnson’s future a few months afterward, when one of his teammates hired him based on the experience. “This was my first time doing data visualization as a real thing,” he recalls.

“ I’d done interactive, graphical coding before. But I’d never taken data, visualized it, and told a story about it. And now I’m deep into it.”

Johnson’s teammate at Data In Sight, Kristen Chan, worked for Visual.ly at the time, a company that offers solutions for infographics and visualizations. She was impressed with the young coder and encouraged him to apply to her company. He got the job, left his Ph.D. program, and is now embedded in the “data viz” scene in the Bay Area and working as a senior software engineer at Visual.ly. Quite an outcome for a weekend of nerding.

BENJAMIN«WIEDERKEHR

∂

“Data and how people collect and understand and act on it is definitely something that will impact our lives in the future quite profoundly. I think we can make better decisions [using data] and be smarter about our own behavior based on real insights, not just assumptions.”

Visualization«of«Swiss«Train«Flows

by«Interactive«Things

∂

43

Deconstructing Big Data Data visualization simply refers to the visual representation of data. Think not only graphs and charts, but also genuinely complex and dynamic stunners. For instance, Wiederkehr’s studio conceived the City of Geneva’s swirling, Van Gough–like animation of mobile phone traces. Or consider the interactive Crimespotting maps of the cities of Oakland and San Francisco that Stamen Design compiled. Both demonstrate the power of rendering large data sets.

But why data, and why now? The topic of Big Data, the massive amounts of unstructured zeroes and ones our digital world spawns, is hot and only getting hotter. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2012, the topic of the data deluge was a central theme. In a February article in The New York Times, technology reporter Steve Lohr wrote, “Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.”

Recently, the popular tech blog GigaOM covered the booming job market (and rising salaries) for anyone with skills as a data scientist. Why? Because companies in all industries are realizing the need to interpret the huge data sets now available,

and they need specialists with skills in math and statistics to help. Two projects rooted in Switzerland demonstrate data’s timely relevance. Both are under consideration for EU Flagship funds on the order of a billion Euros each over a 10–year period. Both are multidisciplinary and international in scope. Both involve data and lots of it.

FuturICT, led by Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), is described in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American. Helbing and his collaborators seek to use the ever–increasing streams of data to build a computing system that would predictively model the entire world and discover options for a sustainable future.

Guardian Angels is the second project, and is led by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with ties to ETH Zurich as well. It imagines smarter, healthier living through autonomous nanosensors integrated into daily life and linked to the cloud. The sensors could be embedded in our clothes and surroundings and alert us to potential harm or threat to health.

Visualization‘of

the«Marvel«Universe«social«graph«by«Kai«Chang,

Tom«Turner,«and«Jefferson«Braswell.«Data«In«Sight

award-winner:«Most«Aesthetically«Pleasing.

∂

44

“ Humans are bad at understanding scale and time. When you talk about war in Iraq or the Gulf oil spill or climate change, these are big, huge, abstract problems that are hard for people to understand in a real way. People get shape and color easily but not spreadsheets. The rise of visualization is part of coping with that influx of data and the need to understand the scale of the problems we’re dealing with.”

As the amount of data blooms, data visualization and other techniques provide a crucial dashboard for helping us cope. Sha Hwang was a Data In Sight juror and is Design Technologist at Trulia, a real estate search engine that helps users decide where to live. “We’re generating more data than ever,” he says. “The number of tweets every day is just insane to me. People upload several billion photos every month to Facebook. On the flip side of that, humans are bad at understanding scale and time. When you talk about war in Iraq or the Gulf oil spill or climate change, these are big, huge, abstract problems that are hard for people to understand in a real way. People get shape and color easily but not spreadsheets. The rise of visualization is part of coping with that influx of data and the need to understand the scale of the problems we’re dealing with.”

swissnex San Francisco’s leadership in the hackathon was a natural fit. Over the last couple of years, from its position in the middle of the world’s technology center, the swissnex team observed as the topic of data rose in prominence and urgency. The event concept aligns perfectly with the organization, which connects people and ideas across continents in science, education, innovation, and even art where it intersects with technology.

Data visualization in particular blends science and technology with creative pursuits such as graphic design and art. The growing importance of open data and the power it gives citizens to explore complex issues make it even more compelling. So for swissnex the decision to curate an experience around open data and data visualization was a no brainer. Data In Sight was the result, but the hackathon was only the beginning.

45

46

47

48

Is access to data an inalienable right?

Some would argue so. Perhaps in recognition of this, governing bodies are heeding the call. In 2009, the US government started Data.gov, a Web site that makes government data available to the public.

At the local level, San Francisco is a leading city in its sharing of data. DataSF, the city’s site for government data, also launched in 2009 and includes nearly 200 datasets from a range of city departments. In 2010, the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer, Jay Nath, authored Open Data Legislation requiring that all non–confidential datasets be made available as part of a larger goal to engage constituents and enhance transparency and accountability. The site features an App Showcase with a collection of applications developed and built by private individuals and organizations using

public data. Examples include apps like EcoFinder for iPhone that helps you figure out where to recycle. Or Routesy, which aids in navigating the region’s transit systems.

In June 2012, the city of Zurich in Switzerland will follow municipalities like San Francisco and release a significant portion of its data to the public. At the same time, public accessibility to technology for creating and consuming data visualization is keeping pace. And now that the public has a taste, they want more.

“There’s something important about the idea of open data,” Data In Sight juror Hwang says. “Data should be out there so people can investigate different aspects of it. A lot of people take for granted that even the visualizations they see are truth with a capital T. The reality is that all these things are

filtered in some way. It’s important to have more angles to look at and more perspectives.”

Peter Gassner is the research and technology strategist at Interactive Things in Zurich, and he attended Data In Sight along with his colleague Benjamin Wiederkehr. “The data that decisions are based on in the government should be open to the people,” he adds. “If they are, they’re mostly in very difficult formats or available on request, or you have to pay for them. The value [of open data] is to bring transparency to enable the people to check on what their government is really doing. That’s in a way our responsibility.”

Data«In«Sight«Winner:«Best«Dynamic/

Interactive«Visualization.«Disaster

Strikes,«From«Barret«Schloerke,«Edward

Fine,«Mariana«Anderle,«Mary«Becica,

and«Norman«Klein,«Represents«natural

Disasters«Over«Time«By«Number«Killed,

Affected,«And«Total«Monetary«Cost.

∂

Opening Up to Open Data

BENJAMIN«WIEDERKEHR

∂

“ I really like how swissnex identifies the trend and really supports it on so many different levels, and you push the idea through. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Switzerland as being on the forefront of visualization. But nonetheless, Switzerland can play a role and is in a great position to push this field forward, especially if we can nurture collaboration.”

49

Interactive Things’ Wiederkehr, who blogs at datavisualization.ch, became involved in Data In Sight when members of the swissnex San Francisco team met him in 2011 at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Wiederkehr hosted a panel there on Social Media Data Visualization. After the conference, he agreed to return to the US for the hackathon and to serve as a judge and a speaker at the weekend event. The experience led to more than Wiederkehr could have expected: new professional connections, new friends, and new growth in the data visualization community in Switzerland.

“I was really surprised by how many people showed up to the hackathon, how enthusiastic they were, and how good the projects were that they were able to achieve within those two days,” he remembers. “I was very happy to sit on the jury, get to know really high level folks from San Francisco and the Bay Area, and have good, high quality discussions about visualizations. What’s important to note is how swissnex connected the dots by including speakers from the Netherlands and Switzerland, and bringing them in touch with the local community in San Francisco.” One of those fellow jury members was Stanford University computer science assistant professor Jeffrey Heer, who is now an unofficial advisor to Wiederkehr’s research. He’s pursuing a master’s in interaction design at the Zurich University of the Arts. For Wiederkehr’s company, the hackathon reaped important results as well. They were able to use connections made at Data In Sight to visit Mozilla and LinkedIn and give presentations about their work. And based on relationships established in San Francisco, Wiederkehr brought Visual.ly on board for a panel he organized at the 2012 SXSW conference.

Although the hackathon came to a close after two days, the data conversation continued. swissnex San Francisco followed up a few days later with a sold out panel discussion on the topic, “Does data tell us what to think?”, which explored trends in data visualization and the ways it can be deceitful.

Shortly after Wiederkehr returned to Switzerland, he helped organize concurrent hackathons in Zurich and Lausanne called Make Open Data CH, which

swissnex sponsored. These simultaneous events were firsts for Switzerland and brought together thinkers, data experts, and makers for workshops and project development. The organizers expected 30 participants at each location. In the end, over 100 people showed up. The city of Lausanne provided data about its buildings and energy consumption, and through the eZurich initiative the data enthusiasts had access to that city’s most recent investment statement. Projects like Where Did My Taxes Go? calculated how long the city could run on one contribution alone. “Make Open Data CH was highly influenced by Data In Sight,” Wiederkehr says. “It was good that I could bring in some experience that I learned [in San Francisco]. This knowledge transfer was something that helped us.” Another round of these open data camps took place in Switzerland at the end of March 2012 on the theme mobility.

Throughout 2011 and into 2012, swissnex continued to support the data conversation and the data visualization community by hosting gatherings called meetups in the swissnex event space with Visual.ly, Ian Johnson’s new employer. Johnson also started a group specific to the D3 tool, a programming library for making html5 visualizations, and he held one of the first meetups on the subject at swissnex.

In 2012, Data In Sight returns with an ambitious, multi–city initiative. Together with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), swissnex San Francisco is organizing a three–week, online visualization competition in which people from all over the world are invited to merge transportation–themed data sets and draw meaningful insights from three cities: San Francisco, Singapore, and a city in Switzerland.

“I think what you have planned with GAFFTA and cities around the world is super exciting,” Wiederkehr says. “I really like how swissnex identifies the trend and really supports it on so many different levels, and you push the idea through. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Switzerland as being on the forefront of visualization. But nonetheless, Switzerland can play a role and is in a great position to push this field forward, especially if we can nurture collaboration.”

More Data, More Better

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In the Adobe offices it’s now Sunday afternoon, and the hackathon teams are frantically completing their projects. Judges will award prizes, such as LinkedIn Pro Accounts and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium. Of the 20 groups that started off the weekend, 14 present.

A group named Disaster Strikes plots natural disasters by type (fire, earthquake) and country and presents options to view the data by the number killed, affected, or total monetary cost of the tragedy. A team called Academia is an Iceberg mashes up Mendeley data with LinkedIn connections. Another group crafts dazzling representations of the connections between characters in the Marvel Comic Universe (turns out the Invisible Woman is the most connected of the Fantastic Four)—and wins the award for most aesthetically pleasing.

The team behind Parkalator builds a live, real–time Web site to find cost and availability of metered parking in San Francisco. This wins most actionable. And a presentation of CuriouSnakes demonstrates cheerfully colorful bubbles dancing across the screen. Trap one, and you read a question entered into AOL’s search tool. Why is Star Jones in the hospital? Who invented peanut butter?

What year was hemophilia discovered? What is the largest river in California? When do the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano?

Ian Johnson’s project, Silenced, analyzes data on child abuse. “I was having fun figuring out how to visualize it, but at the same time it’s a serious issue that affects more people than we’re even aware of. It was an interesting juxtaposition,” he remarks.

“The amount of data on it and the data sets that were available were not satisfactory. One takeaway was that if more data were accessible, it’d be easier to get the issue out there.”

Although Johnson didn’t win a top prize, he did gain important insight into the role of data visualization. And the next iteration of the hackathon, he says, may yield the biggest prize of all. “Last year’s Data In Sight went beyond connecting people,” says Johnson. “But the next one with the three cities competition, that’s taking it to another level of thought leadership that will directly influence civic change. You’re paving the way for good ideas to come to life.”

“Last year’s Data in Sight went beyond connecting people. But the next one with the three cities competition, that’s taking it to another level of thought leadership that will directly influence civic change. You’re paving the way for good ideas to come to life.”

Visualizing is Believing

Academia«is«an‘Iceberg,«by«William«Gunn,

Giorgio‘Caviglia,‘and‘Pino‘Trogu,«won

Best‘Fusion‘of«Multiple‘Data‘Sets‘at

Data‘In‘Sight.«among‘scientists‘reading

each‘other's‘papers‘on‘the‘Web‘site

Mendeley,‘relatively‘few‘have

LinkedIn‘accounts.

∂

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Selected Upcoming Events from swissnex San Francisco

2012 —

The ETH Zurich professor explains the science behind the

FuturICT project, aimed at understanding and managing

complex, global, socially interactive systems.

swissnex‘San«Francisco —

JUNE 12, 2012

Dirk Helbing on Big Data

The Swiss Design Awards exhibition appears at the West

Coast’s biggest design fair.

Dwell«on«Design,«Los«Angeles«Convention«Center —

JUNE 22 - JUNE 24, 2012

Design Preis Schweiz

Design duo Greutmann Bolzern take their ethereal

installation of zip ties to the technomadic masses in

the Nevada desert.

Burning«Man,«Black«Rock«City,«Nevada —

August 27 - September 3, 2012

The Third Space

Selection of new typography works from ECAL/

THE UNIVERSITY OF ART AND DESIGN LAUSANNE.

swissnex‘San«Francisco —

through JUNE 15, 2012

Types We Can Make

Exhibition of art developed during a residency called

Swiss artists-in-labs on view at Utah’s Museum for Science,

Technology and Art.

The«Leonardo,«Salt«Lake«City,«Utah —

through August 5, 2012

Think Art—Act Science

Long-haul workout regimen featuring topics on the

aerodynamics of swimming, the controversy over doping,

and social media in sports.

swissnex‘San«Francisco —

Starting August 20, 2012

New Event Series: Sports and Technology

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swissnex presents several Swiss projects during the West

Coast’s premier art and technology biennial.

San«Francisco«Bay«Area —

September—December, 2012

ZERO1 Biennial

Programmers, scientists, city officials, and digital

artists collaborate to create visualizations using

open city data.

Online«and«in«person«everywhere —

2012

Data In Sight: 3-City Data Visualization Challenge

swissnex is a key partner in the second annual festival

encouraging the public understanding of science.

San«Francisco«Bay«Area —

October 27—November 3, 2012

Bay Area Science Festival 2012

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swissnex San Francisco

swissn

ex San Fran

cisco

issue«1 —

2012

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swissnex San Francisco730 Montgomery Street, San Francisco CA 94111, USA t: (415) 912-5901 f: (415) 912-5905www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org