How Technology Powers, Connects, and Protects Our Lives from Grids to Games to Medicine

The electric grid used to have an already a hard job: keeping the lights on. Now it must do that AND juggle renewables, flexible demand, millions of devices, cyber threats, and everyone’s expectation that electricity should work perfectly all the time. Easy. In this talk, Anna Scaglione explores how ideas from signal processing, networks, and AI can help complex infrastructures sense, decide, and coordinate in real time. It is a story about information, uncertainty, and why the world’s most important machine is also one of its most underappreciated.

What if you couldn’t see the screen—could you still race at 200 miles per hour or explore an open world like in The Legend of Zelda? In this talk, I’ll share how we worked with blind players to make blockbuster video games playable using sound instead of sight, without creating a separate “special” version. We will take a behind-the-scenes look at how this research moved from our university lab into Forza Motorsport on Xbox and PC. You'll leave knowing how accessible design can improve how we design technology for everyone.

Every pill you take has a story. Before a medicine ever reaches a pharmacy shelf, it goes through years of testing, thousands of volunteers, and many failed ideas along the way. In this talk, we’ll walk through the surprising journey a drug takes from a scientist’s idea to something doctors can prescribe. Along the way, you’ll learn why it takes so long, why it costs so much, and why that process matters for keeping people safe.