Details on Kurzweil talk tomorrow night

We are postponing the meetup this month so that folks can attend the Kurzweil talk happening at the same time. Here are the details (thanks to Jeff Miller):

Joint meeting of GBC/ACM and Boston/Central New England Chapters of
IEEE Computer and Robotics and Automation Societies
Thursday, May 15 2008, 7-9 pm
Broad Institute Auditorium (MIT Building NE30) Main St (between Vassar
and Ames Sts), Cambridge, MA

*Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century

* Presented by
*Ray Kurzweil *
Author, Inventor, Futurist
Founder, Kurzweil Technologies <http://www.kurzweilte...

Abstract:
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) <http://www.nae.edu/&g... this
year 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.engineerin....
We've invited Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the leading authors of the
report, 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.

The Broad Institute is hosting the event.


SPEAKER BIO

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
<http://en.wikipedia.o....




MEETING INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS

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.
<http://whereis.mit.ed... (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 Institutes official
directions page <http://www.broad.mit.....

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. If
you wish to come to the dinner afterwards, please contact either Peter
Meyer (p.j.meyer at ieee.org) or Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org)
in advance so we can make sure space for you is available.

Information about additional upcoming meetings is online at
<www.gbcacm.org> and <http://ewh.ieee.org/r.... In
particular, Ken Baclawski will be talking on "Semantic Web Ontologies"
Thursday, June 19 in MIT room E51-345.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org).
_______________________________________________
Seminars mailing list
Seminars@lists.csail.mit.edu
https://lists.csail.m...