This year's Accelerating Change 2005 conference (AC2005), Sept. 16-18 at Stanford, promises to be "outstanding," organizer John Smart tells Accelerating Intelligence news, with 51 top speakers and emcees.

The conference focuses on "artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification transforming technology, empowering humanity." Consistent with that theme, Ray Kurzweil will keynote the event and will distribute pre-publication signed copies of his The Singularity is Near to the first 250 attendees, and keynoter Vernor Vinge will describe strategies for avoiding a disruptive "hard takeoff" Singularity.

Among the many other interesting speakers: Robert Hecht-Nielsen on how the brain actually computes, Ron Kaplan and Jan Pederson debating strategies for making a conversational user interface (CUI) by 2015, Daniel Amen with SPECT scans showing the physical damage to your brain from alcohol and drug abuse, Dileep George of Numenta and Bruno Olshausen of Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience on the new biologically inspired AI models that Jeff Hawkins described in On Intelligence, Tom Malone of MIT Sloan School of management on how the new network decentralization has permanently changed the business landscape, Steve Jurvetson on open collaborative exchange, and Harold Morowitz on using DNA-guided protein synthesis as a self-organized computing system built on fats, proteins and nucleic acids.