IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and IEEE Computer Society, Central New England Chapters
with the Association for Computing Machinery, Greater Boston Chapter
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Doors open: 6:30 PM
Presentation: 7:00 PM

GRAND CHALLENGES FOR ENGINEERING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Presented by
Ray Kurzweil
Author, Inventor, Futurist
Founder, Kurzweil Technologies

This year the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) http://www.nae.edu/ issued a report in which it attempts to identify the greatest engineering challenges humanity will face in this century. With input from people around the world, an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/. We've invited one of the leading authors of the report, Ray Kurzweil, to present some of its findings, give his impressions of the important technological trends and challenges likely to occur over the next hundred years or so, and challenge you, some of the leading students, researchers, and industry practitioners from the Boston and New England area, to help solve them.

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses dedicated to various areas of artificial intelligence, such as OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment and cybernetic art. In 2002 Ray Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. Ray's books include such best-sellers as "The Age of Intelligent Machines", "The Age of Spiritual Machines", "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever", and, most recently, "The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology". Additional biographical information about Ray is available on Wikipedia.

The Central New England Chapters of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the IEEE Computer Society, and the Greater Boston Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery will meet at the Broad Institute, MIT Building NE30, 7 Cambridge Ctr. (next to the Whitehead Institute on Main St. between Vassar and Ames Streets) in Cambridge, MA, in the main auditorium on the first floor near the entrance, on Thursday, May 15, 2008, for the presentation at 7:00 PM. For more detailed instructions please refer to the Institute's official directions page.

Afterwards, at approx. 9:00 PM, the group will have a no-host dinner at Legal Sea Foods Kendall Square, 5 Cambridge Ctr. (corner of Main and Ames Sts.), Cambridge, MA 02142, where more conversations with the speaker can take place. The meetings are open to the general public, and all are welcome at the dinner afterwards.

For more information on IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, please contact Chapter Chair Peter Meyer at (781) 334-0052 or chair@robotics-boston.org, or visit http://www.robotics-boston.org/.