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Computer Society [C016]
Robotics and Automation and Computer Societies and GBC/ACM
Door Open: 6:30 PM, Presentation: 7:00 PM, Thursday, 15 May
GRAND CHALLENGES FOR ENGINEERING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Ray Kurzweil, Author, Inventor, Futurist, Founder, Kurzweil Technologies http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
technology@kurzweiltech.comThis 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 online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil.
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, http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=NE30&Buildings=go, 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 http://www.broad.mit.edu/info/visiting.html.
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, contact Peter Meyer at 781-334-0052 or chair@robotics-boston.org or visit http://www.robotics-boston.org/ For more information on IEEE Computer Society, contact Peter Mager at 781-890-2084 or p.mager@computer.org
Computer Society and GBC/ACM
7:00 PM, Thursday, 19 June
The Semantic Web: It's not just for searching anymore!
Kenneth Baclawski, Northeastern University
The WWW is currently dominated by human-computer interactions using web browsers. However, automated interactions are becoming increasingly common. The Semantic Web is an extension of the WWW in which the meaning of information and services is formally defined, making it possible for machines to understand and satisfy requests. In this talk I will briefly introduce the Semantic Web, and then give some examples of the wide variety of applications that the Semantic Web makes possible. I will also discuss some of the recent progress that has been made in the development of Semantic Web tools and protocols. The application domains include the following:
1. Interoperability and integration of information
2. Web services and composite applications
3. Records management
4. Uncertain, incomplete, conflicting and misleading information
5. Decision and policy making
6. Collaboration tools
7. Wireless communication
8. Behavioral health counseling
9. Epidemiology: disease tracking
Kenneth Baclawski is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Professor Baclawski's primary research area is ontology based computing. This includes research in the Semantic Web, ontology-based methods in the health sciences, and methods for decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Professor Baclawski holds 11 patents and has authored over 80 refereed publications in such journals and conferences as the National Academy of Science, Information Systems, the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and the International Semantic Web Conference. He has served on numerous peer review panels and program committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Association for Computing Machinery. He serves as a consultant to companies and government laboratories, and has edited and written several books and research monographs, including "Ontologies for Bioinformatics" published by the MIT Press, and "Introduction to Probability with R" published by Chapman and Hall.
This meeting will be held at MIT Room NE51-345. E51 is the Tang Center on the corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Sts and Memorial Dr.; it's mostly used by the Sloan School. You can see it on the map at <http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level4;centerx=711791;centery=495971>.
Room 345 is on the 3rd floor.
For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org).
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Updated: May 08, 2008.