Innovation at the Interface: Technological Fusion at MIT

Wednesday, January 21 2004
MIT's Kresge Auditorium

A look at the unprecedented
business opportunities created when
technologies merge.

 

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Nothing exists in a vacuum, especially in terms of innovation and new ideas. In today's business world, it is at this point of convergence where entrepreneurs are developing the ground-breaking companies of tomorrow.

Two individuals recognized as global leaders in the full potential of when technologies merge are MIT's Dr. Robert Langer CH'74 and Dr. Rodney Brooks, discussing the intersection of their fields at "Innovation at the Interface: Technological Fusion at MIT".

Speaker Biographies

Ed Roberts (moderator) is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at MIT, where he chairs the Sloan School's Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group. He co-founded the MIT Management of Technology (MOT) Program, an executive education Master's degree program for mid-career scientists and engineers, and also founded and is chairman of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Over the past thirty years, Dr. Roberts has been actively involved in many aspects of technology management, including technology strategy, corporate venturing, product innovation management, and technology-based entrepreneurship.

In his entrepreneurial activities, Dr. Roberts co-founded and was CEO of Pugh-Roberts Associates, an international management consulting firm, now a division of PA Consulting Group. He co-founded and is a director of Medical Information Technology, Inc. (Meditech), a leading producer of healthcare information systems. In addition he co-founded and was for 20 years a General Partner of the Zero Stage Capital and First Stage Capital Equity Funds. He has been a co-founder and/or director of numerous emerging technology companies, including at present Advanced Magnetics, HighPoint Systems, NETsilicon, Pegasystems, Selfcare, Sohu.com, and StarNex.

Dr. Roberts has authored over 140 articles and eleven books, including "Entrepreneurs in High Technology" (Oxford University Press, 1991), winner of the Association of American Publishers' award as Outstanding Book of 1991 in Business and Management. Roberts has four degrees from MIT in electrical engineering (B.S. and M.S.), management (M.S.), and economics (Ph.D.). In 1998, the MIT Enterprise Forum honored him by establishing "The Edward B. Roberts Young Entrepreneur Award for Distinguished Leadership", and presented it initially to Michael Dell of Dell Computers.

Robert Langer is the Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT. Dr. Langer has written 753 articles and 420 abstracts. He also has over 500 issued or pending patents worldwide, one of which was cited as the outstanding patent in Massachusetts in 1988 and one of 20 outstanding patents in the United States. Dr. Langer's patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 100 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies; a number of which were launched on the basis of these patent licenses. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board, the FDA's highest advisory board, from 1995 - 2002 and as its Chairman from 1999 - 2002.

Dr. Langer has received over 120 major awards. In 2002, he received the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the world's most prestigious engineering prize, from the National Academy of Engineering. He is also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award; 59 recipients of this award have subsequently received a Nobel Prize. In 1998, he received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, the world's largest prize for invention, for being "one of history's most prolific inventors in medicine." In 1989, Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.

Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Langer as one of the 15 innovators world wide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America, and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America. He has served at various times on 12 boards of directors and 30 Scientific Advisory Boards of such companies as Alkermes, Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals, Warner-Lambert, and Guilford Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and the University of Liverpool (England). He received his Bachelor's Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from MIT in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.

Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. Brooks received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984.

Brooks' research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He has published papers and books in model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary exploration, representation, artificial life, humanoid robots, and compiler design. He serves on the board of the Intelligent Inspection Corporation.

Dr. Brooks is a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence(AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). Brooks has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, the Hyland lecturer at Hughes, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing.
Brooks starred as himself in the Errol Morris documentary movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control", named for one of his scientific papers. His most recent publications include Cambrian Intelligence (MIT Press, 1999), The Relationship Between Matter and Life (in Nature 409, pp. 409-411; 2001) and Flesh and Machines (Pantheon, 2002).