2011 T-HT Conference Growing through Knowledge

The T-HT Conference Growing through Knowledge will be held for the fourth time on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at the Hypo Center in Zagreb. The conference has once again been devised to make attendants more familiar with the contemporary trends in the development of new technologies and applied sciences which push boundaries of what is possible in communication and business. The T-HT conference provides the rare opportunity to rise above day-to-day topics and problems and to bring one’s focus back to the importance of vision, ideas, innovations and guidelines for a better future. The long-term perspective broached by the conference instigates reflections on the necessity to improve both the quality and the exchange of knowledge as one of the key drivers of individual and social development.

In this transition, we will be guided by carefully selected speakers with a world-wide reputation, and the topics of this year’s conference include the interesting Black Swan Theory, which deals with the impact of unpredictable events on the world around us, and the interesting question as to whether we are cyborgs because we rely on our “external brains”, i.e. mobile phones and computers. The guest speakers are two extraordinary individuals, experts and speakers: Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the The Black Swan, a philosopher, risk manager and former trader who has devoted his life to studying the problems of luck, risk, coincidence, human error, probability and the philosophy of knowledge, and Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist who has been declared the most influential woman in technology research by the magazine Fast Company and whose research work focuses on the application of anthropological theories to mobile computing and social software solutions.

The T-HT conference hosts renowned persons, experts and scientists who contribute to and help humanity in a recognizable way with their ideas, reflections, actions, engagement and projects on a local and particularly on a global level, who encourage thinking and actions. Inspired by turbulent events and turmoil as well as constant change and thinking about contributing and the necessity for joint action, we believe that this is, particularly in this day and age, of extraordinary significance.

"The future that we want to have needs to be created. When we allow tomorrow to happen to us spontaneously and without any particular consideration, then we must not be surprised if, as a society and individuals, we find that we live in a community that is less than desirable. While individuals or entire nations enjoy excessive wealth, at the same time literally billions of others cannot achieve even the basic minimum necessary for survival. Such extreme and numerous examples of less drastic but still unacceptable unequal distributions we see all around us every day. If we were to draw all over again what the world should be like, we certainly would not represent it like this. Models of development and patterns of behaviour that have brought us to such absurdities have revealed all their weaknesses and we need to find some new ways to achieve a future that will truly be better. As individuals, companies, organizations and countries, we have a duty to actively search for those ways because the extraordinarily fast technological development is unstoppably changing our way of life; the adjustment of individuals and societies to those changes is becoming more challenging and, therefore, we often do not have the time to even stop and contemplate whether we are doing everything the best we can. That is why we are organizing these conferences and inviting everyone who is not afraid to think and contemplate. We grow through knowledge, and in between conferences we are enriched through new intellectual exchanges, and we act more confidently and bravely, which is why I am personally looking forward to this year’s conference as well" said Ivica Mudrinić, President of the Management Board of HT.