Geek Picnic
| Geek Picnic | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Genre | science and technology festival |
| Frequency | Annually |
| Location(s) | St. Petersburg |
| Inaugurated | 2011 |
| Organised by | ООО «EXPONENTA» |
| Website | http://geek-picnic.ru |
Geek Picnic — is an annual science and technology open-air festival in St. Petersburg.
Ideological component
- Mission
The mission is to plunge the world into the atmosphere of a modern and lively science, advanced technology and design. Distinctive features of the event Scale In the large Playground a real riot of science, technology and art is happening.
- Atmosphere
The sensation of a festive atmosphere does not leave a participant even for a minute. Absolutely everyone, great and small, whether he is a programmer, or a novice researcher, a free artist or a head of a family feels here as a part of one whole, interesting, progressive and constantly surprising world. Everything that is happening around is impressive, it inspires new ideas and initiates good mood for a long time. A constant stream of information exchange, knowledge and experience, is soaring in the air. It helps people to realize themselves in interesting activities and to try something that could only be a dream before: robots’ construction, 3D printing of items, flying robots’ management, and also communication with the inventors of these robots, great scholars and media personalities.
- Format
Three educational tent in which lectures from experts in the field of technology, art and science, are held. Side by side with the picnic area, scattered throughout unique participatory events, performances in the open air, an exhibition of contemporary art and informative educational programs. Anyone can get acquainted with the latest novelties of the world here and, a few meters near, to be charged up by nutritious food, or play ping-pong.
Geek Picnic 2011
- When: August 6, 2011
- Where: New Holland Island, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Number of visitors: more than 5,000 people
About the event
Yury Lifshits and Ilya Bolkhovskiy were the first organizers of Geek Picnic. The staff of Vkontakte, Yandex, Iota, LookAtMe, Veeam Software could be found among the participants, as well as the representatives of the leading investment funds and incubators: Runa Capital, ABRT, Ingria, etc.[2][1] «This event met all the expectations. And to be honest - I would have liked everything that could happen there! Just because it exists in principle. It exists in St. Pete, where the very essence and dynamics of the city requires such events, people like those, similar projects. Encouraged by the number of investigators 1,500 and the scale of the designated picnic - New Holland stretches widely and opens its grounds for sport activities and open-air games.»
Geek Picnic 2012
- When: August 3, 2012
- Where: New Holland island
Number of visitors: more than 7000 people
About the event
The main group of Geek Picnic 2012 visitors consisted of programmers and IT-specialists, representatives of creative class, young families. The program of Geek Picnic contained three parts:
IT
- Exhibition of robotics
- A special tent with lectures and master classes from specialists from various Russian IT companies
- Informal fair of vacancies for programmers
- Start-up session on popular technological projects
- Speed dating for programmers
Educational part
Lectures in the format of TED organized together with Tedx Neva River «Hello, World!». Among speakers there were Gaidar Magdanurov, Hrachik Adzhamyan, Alexey Voinov, Philip Katz, Kirill Shihan and Yury Lifshits. Open stage for speeches on the modern technological life of St. Petersburg (presentation laboratories, IT projects, educational programs, co-working spaces, publications) Lecture hall Windarium from Windows
Entertainment part
A large picnic from the organizers New Holland exhibitions Open library Jumpers Juggling school Game zone with game consoles Children Playground Playground with board games Geek-goods market Activities (ping-pong, trampoline, badminton, basketball) Segway Mechanical sculptures by Alexander Ghetoi Kicker and Golf Competitions and prizes (*5)
Geek Picnic 2013
- When: 3-4 August,2013
- Where: St. Petersburg, Elagin island
- Number of visitors: Over 2 days, the festival gathered more than 15 000 visitors, making it the largest and, indeed, record in Europe.[6]
About the event
Unbelievable but true - after two years of existence of this special-purpose, at first glance, event, it was more successful than many summer music and gastronomic festivals. Geek Picnic not only showed that St. Petersburg citizens and guests from other cities try to keep up with the modern time and seek new knowledge in the field of technology, science and art, but also made a firm bid to become a new business card of St. Petersburg along with the White Nights Festival, the International Economic Forum and the Hermitage. During the days of Geek Picnic Elagin island became a real Mecca for the fans of modern technologies, science and art. Guests of the event were able to participate in battles between robots and competition of quadrocopters, to admire natural meteorites, to attend master classes and lectures of world-renowned scientists. The forum was divided into 5 thematic areas[7]:
Technology Zone
Here you can not only get acquainted with the latest achievements, but also to communicate with inventors, cybernetics professionals and scientists. The Technology Zone, has become one of the most popular sites of Geek Picnic and included: Lecture hall (robotics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and other):
- Program
| Speaker | Lecture subject |
|---|---|
| Andrey Ryabykh (Expert in the field of creation and monetization of Internet-projects) |
«Top 10 Technologies that will Change the World» |
| Volkov Alexander (Cosmonaut, hero of the Soviet Union, commander of the Legion of honor, Legend of the Russian cosmonautics, worked on the orbital scientific station “Mir”) |
«Life of Astronauts on the ISS» |
| Sergey Volkov (Cosmonaut, hero of the Russian Federation) | «Prospects for the Development of Space Science and On-orbit Scientific Projects Realized by Astronauts» |
| Sergey Zhukov (Executive Director of the «SKOLKOVO» Cluster of Space Technologies and Telecommunications, President of the Moscow Space Club) |
«Technological Trends in Cosmonautics» |
| Dmitry Satin (Advisor to the Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation) |
«Usability at the Intersection of Technology, Design and Psychology. How to make Complicated Mechanisms Understandable for the End-user» |
| Mikhail Averbach (Managing partner of the startup accelerator iDealMachine, entrepreneur) |
«On Investments in Russia and in Technological Startups» |
| Artem Filippovskiy | «The Internet of Things & Machine-to-machine. Everything about М2М» |
| Andrey Medvedev | «Office in Clouds - @Secretary,FMC, Cloud Technology» |
| Tatiana Gavrilova (Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor. Chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence) |
«Artificial Intelligence. Myth or Reality» |
| Anton Steputin | «Principles of Operation of Mobile Networks» |
| Nigel Ackland (One of the first people with a bionic limb) |
«Ordinary… Extraordinary, Life With A Bionic Arm» |
| Sergey Krichevsky (Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Candidate of Technical Sciences, test cosmonaut, member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics named in honor of Tsiolkovsky) |
«Space Future of Man and Humanity: Problems and Prospects» |
| Andrey Terekhov (Geneticist, Associate Professor, Department of Genetics, St. Petersburg State University) |
«Stories about the Technologies of Programming» |
| Oleg Shmakov (Head of the Department of Special Machinery Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics) |
«Projects of SMRI RTC and the Prospects of Development of Robotics in Russia"» |
- A large exhibition of the latest developments in the field of robotics, robot assistants, 3D printers, robots-dancers, robots-miners, telepresence-robots. Special attention should be paid to the presentation of non-contact sensor display, which projection of a picture is the most high-quality image in the world today.
- Championship of Russia among quadrocopters (50 robots from different countries, this championship has caused universal admiration. Flying robots were to perform the whole complex of tasks: fly through hoops, burst a balloon and solemnly land in a limited site. The Commentator of the Championship became Courage Bambey, the legendary voice of «the Big Bang Theory».
- An open laboratory for scientific-technical creativity - Fab Lab
- Conference on mobile applications
- Conference on systems for online payments
- Start-up session
- Hackaton
Science Zone
- Lecture hall with leading Russian and Western scientists (space, bioinformatics, genetics, intelligence, physics)
- Program
| Speaker | Lecture | |
|---|---|---|
| George Bazikin (Candidate of Biological Sciences, PhD, Princeton University, Manager of the department of Molecular Evolution IITP RAS) |
«How to Know the Name by a genome, Using Only the Internet» | |
| Dmitry Petrov (Polyglot, simultaneous interpreter, lecturer, broadcaster-master of the reality show «Polyglot» on the TV channel «Kultura») |
«The Magic of the Word: Language as a Phenomenon; the Evolution of Languages
in the Modern World; the Author's Method of Learning Languages» | |
| Sergey Popov (Russian scientist-astrophysicist and popularizer of science, Doctor of Physico-mathematical Sciences, leading researcher of the State Astronomical Institute named in honor of P. K. Sternberg) |
«10 Astrophysical Discoveries that Will Amaze the World» | |
| Victor Petrenko (Psychologist, Professor, corresponding member of RAS, head of the Laboratory of Psychology of Communication and Psychosemantics at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University) |
"The Psychosemantics of Consciousness and Unconscious (in the Context of the Movement "Global Future 2045)» | |
| Anatoly Vasserman (Engineer, journalist, political consultant, a frequent winner of intellectual game shows) |
«Development of Technologies as a Macroeconomic Factor" (Political scientist, chief Scholar in Russia) | |
| Alexey Semikhatov (Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, popularizer of science, leading researcher at the Department of Theoretical Physics, Physical Institute named after P.N. Lebedev RAS (FIAS)) |
«The large Hadron Collider and the Picture of the World» | |
| Oleg Tikhodeev (Geneticist, Associate Professor, Department of Genetics, St. Petersburg State University) |
«Alternative Forms of Life Around Us» | |
| Ekaterina Vinogradova (Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of the Higher Nervous Activity and Psychophysiology) |
«The Differences between Man and Woman» |
- Museum of interactive science, a unique exhibition on Chelyabinsk meteorite
• Museum of interactive science, a unique exhibition on Chelyabinsk meteorite
Art Zone
In this area you can find out all about the contemporary art, its place in the world and the role an artist in the new society, and also:
- Visit lecture hall
Speaker Lecture
| Speaker | Lecture |
|---|---|
| Alexander Sokurov (Film Director and a scenarist, an honored art worker of the Russian Federation, people's artist of Russia, a winner of the Golden Lion, the 68-th Venice film festival) |
"РThe Role of an Artist in the Contemporary Art, where to Find Yourself between Technology and Pure Creativity |
| Paul Markaitis (Head of Exhibition Projects of the Museum Erarta) |
«Actual Art Practices» |
| Dmitry Bulatov (Russian leading expert in the field of art science, Curator of the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for Contemporary art, artist) |
«Art and Science as an Estimated Possible» |
| Yury Piotrovsky (Senior Researcher at the Hermitage, Deputy Head of the Department of Archeology of the Eastern Europe and Siberia) |
«Archaeology and Contemporary Art» |
| Lev Lurie (Historian, Petersburg regional ethnographer, journalist, Candidate of Historical Sciences) |
«How else can you Sell Petersburg» |
| Oleg Goncharov (Director of the Centre for Territorial Initiatives "Archopolis", Director of «Nikola-Lenivets», urbanist) |
«New Leaders of Territorial Development» |
| Denis Kotov (General Director of the bookshops chain «Bookvoed») |
«Paper Books in the World of Modern Technologies» |
- to take part in installations
- to visit an exhibition of contemporary art
- to participate in master classes
- to watch tech-art exhibits
EXPO Zone This area consisted of the most interesting exhibitions of the goods of the future:
- web-design
- electronics
- history of computers
- companies providing IT services
- digital solutions for business
- geek witted Souvenirs
Picnic Zone The relaxation area includes:
- spacious food court,
- Board-games playground spaces
- game-area for computer games
- several outdoor exhibitions.
Also here it was possible to assemble an airplane, to participate in a robots’ battle, to listen to the best electronic music from St. Petersburg and much more. The distinctive feature of the picnic was an incredibly large for mass events number of children. The largest number of kids gathered around fighting robots. The place of the battle of soulless machines, shooting each other with plastic bullets, was fenced by plexiglass. This attraction has existed in St. Petersburg for several years. The organizers claim that the technologies used in the creation of combat vehicles, if are not to run ahead of the whole planet, at least are not to lag behind.
1* The company «EXPONENTA Ltd.» is engaged in organization and holding of Russian and international exhibitions on the territory of the Russian Federation. The company is professionally engaged in HR branding, advertising campaigns and involvement of the audience in the activities of its clients.