Dear Dr. XXXX:
I hope you are well and productive during these trials and tribulations.
The Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool are organising a digital conference series on Emerging Industries: Opportunities and Risk Trade-offs from this summer onwards distributed over the year. Prof. Scott Ferson and I are thinking of you as a critical speaker for one of the key themes, XXXX, and would like to cordially invite you to present on a date that is convenient around May or June. Would you be able to present? We will bring together leading academic and industry researchers to share their knowledge and research results on emerging industries. This will provide an interdisciplinary platform to discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns. We would like to examine the risk trade-offs around their impacts on economics, health, environment, and ethics, as well as foresee ways of mitigating the downsides. The goal is to inspire and inform researchers to utilise this information to understand how they can best support these industries to minimise the risky nature of innovation and improve the likelihood of successful emergence.
Provisionally we are aiming to have multiple sessions to address these key questions:
What are the current and coming trends and developments in emerging industries?
How can we promote information and technology exchange in emerging industries?
What are the largest obstacles to the maturation of emerging industries?
What are the threats and risk trade-offs that these sectors may pose?
How can we begin to de-risk these sectors to encourage appropriate policy, regulation and investment?
We have a plethora of exciting topics we would like to cover, and each session will focus on one of these topics:
Quantum computing
Psychedelic medicine
Sex robots
Cryptocurrency
Autonomous vehicles
Cyborgs
CRISPR
We hope to encourage a lot of discussion, and foster opportunities for emergent collaborations, so we would like 2.5 hour sessions to consist of a pair of talks (40-minute presentation, 20 minute Q&A), followed by 30 minutes of open discussion amongst participants and the speakers around how to best address risks and challenges.
We have decided instead of having the sessions back-to-back, they will be distributed over the year. The idea behind this is that, rather than squeezing everything into one or two exhausting days, they will be less susceptible to the distractions of emails or other pressing business, and much easier for speakers to find a slot that fits their schedules.
To accommodate as many people as possible internationally, most sessions will be during the afternoon in Europe. However, we will try to accommodate speakers for whom this time period is inconvenient. All talks will be recorded and shared on-line shortly after the event.
I really hope you can provisionally accept this invitation to speak. If so, you might like to let me know a tentative title for planning purposes. If you can anticipate your schedule during May-June, please feel free to indicate times and dates you’d prefer (or cannot do) so that we can build the schedule around you.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kindest regards,
Francis Baumont de Oliveira