60 Seconds with WITS West Keynote Speaker — Shelley Peterson

Shelley Peterson is the Emerging Technologies Lead at Lockheed Martin. Her keynote talk at WITS West is “Really!?! Augmented Reality Is Real?”

Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

I have had the wonderful opportunity to attend technology events throughout my youth and my career, and have taken fantastic information from speakers to employ in my daily professional pursuits. Sharing information can have compounding effects, and what better group to collaborate with than a group of sharp, successful ladies at the Women in Technology Summit.

What inspires you?

When I see technical expertise and persistence transform dreams of the past into today’s reality, I get excited!

When you were a kid what was your dream job?

I had many dreams.. What better way to influence the world than to teach?! I also wanted to be a pilot and an engineer. I wanted to optimize. I loved Rube Goldberg and puzzles. I changed my degree plan five times in my three years of undergraduate school. There are too many wonderful options and simply not enough time.

A quote about your session

As humans, we are on a constant pursuit for “information”. In our daily lives, we look for improved methods for our access to information, from tracking schedules, to keeping track of activities around us… from optimizations to keep up with friends, family, and colleagues, to methods to work more efficiently. Information access started with language and expanded to print. Then came computing technology. Today we have desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and displays in almost every room and on every city street. What is next? Can we take the information that exists today, primarily in “two dimensional rectangles”, and pop it out into our 3D space? And even if we could, would it be beneficial? We are in the early stages of this exciting transformation, and we will discuss what happens to information flow when augmented reality becomes real.