Pilar Manchon, an artificial intelligence expert at Amazon, says the age of the technology-enhanced superhuman has arrived, and it's up to everyone to grab those ever-growing superpowers to help change the world for the better.

"The age of superhumans is here. Are you ready to jump?" Manchon asked several hundred El Paso and Juárez high school and college students Thursday at the second day of the Reset binational technology conference in Downtown El Paso.

Organizers said about 600 students attended the El Paso portion of the conference at The Venue at Union Plaza meeting facility. About 3,000 attended Wednesday's session at Juárez's Technology Hub, a startup incubator and one of the Reset conference organizers.

Manchon said, "Technology is already here today that allows us to do much more than we were meant to do" — from Google's proposed cyborg eye implants to Crispr technology for editing genomes.

"Through genetic enhancement and everything else that is coming, we have a great opportunity to make this a better world, " Manchon said

"Change is already here; change is happening. How intelligent are you going to be about it? Talk about resetting your mind; the ability to foresee what is coming and make sure you are ready to adapt to those changes" by education and continuous updating of skills, she said.

"Become agents of change and inspire those around you. You might have 1,000 followers on Twitter, or some of you may become famous," she said.

Manchon's Spain-based company, Intelligent Dialogue Systems, or Indisys, which she sold several years ago for millions of dollars, developed a leading human-computer interaction technology. Last year, she became director of cognitive interfaces at Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com subsidiary that provides cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and government agencies.

She was one of several high-powered speakers at the two-day conference, which included not only technology experts, but film directors and musicians.

David Shrier, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on technologies tied to the financial industry and personal identity, told the conference Thursday that companies and government agencies still are relying on outdated, paper-based personal identification systems, which is why millions of people have had important personal information stolen by computer hackers in recent years.

Biomechanics and other new technologies can help uniquely identify people and allow people to divide personal information appropriate for the user — from health care providers, to online retailers — instead of providing all personal information to everyone, he said.

Shrier also is founder and CEO of Distilled Analytics, a Boston-area startup that is using data science to predict credit behavior of individuals and small businesses.

A packed house listened to tech experts during theBuy Photo

A packed house listened to tech experts during the second day of the Reset binantional technology conference Thursday at The Venue at Union Plaza in Downtown El Paso. (Photo: RUBEN R. RAMIREZ/EL PASO TIMES)

Ricardo Mora, CEO and founder of the Technology Hub in Juárez, said organizers plan to make the Reset conference an annual event.

The event seeks to inspire youths in the borderplex to use technology to shape their future and the future of this region, Mora said.

Francisco Candelario, 19, an electrical engineering student at the University of Texas at El Paso, said the conference was a good way to help students get new ideas. He was part of a small team taking part in one of the conference's hackathons, in which students were challenged to come up with ideas to improve one of three areas: environment, cybersecurity and the internet of things. He was working on the environment hackathon.

More information: reset.ws


Vic Kolenc may be reached at 546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on Twitter.