IBM Fellow and VP of Innovation Dr Bernard Meyerson to give IET/BCS Turing Lecture
11/02/2014 Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
IET is delighted to announce that Dr Bernard Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP of Innovation, is to present the forthcoming IET/BCS 2014 Turing Lecture. Continuing the highly successful series of IET Prestige Lectures, this year's Turing Lecture will see Meyerson discuss the importance of sustained innovation in a post-silicon era. Meyerson will examine the key ingredients required to achieve sustained innovation, and the extraordinary outcomes that can be achieved when the right people, infrastructure and motivation come together."Innovation has always been essential for any organisation wanting to grow, but the importance of sustained innovation has been less widely recognised up until recently," says Meyerson. "This has changed as a result of two key factors. Firstly, many of the companies that didn't sustain innovation during the economic downturn did not survive. Secondly, after decades of consistent improvement in the cost, capability and ubiquity of computing through the ongoing shrink of transistors (the famous Moore's Law), further progress via shrinkage offers little or no benefit as ever more material constituents in transistors have shrunk such that quantum phenomena render them useless."
According to Meyerson, these factors have ensured the rebirth of innovation, with future progress in IT performance being realised through new system architectures and materials, and emerging fields such as cognitive computing and its application to Big Data. Dr. Meyerson, an IBM Fellow, is IBM's Vice President for Innovation within the Corporate Strategy Organisation, focused on discovering and addressing key discontinuities, and the opportunities they create, across all elements of IBM's portfolio.
Chief Executive and Secretary of the IET, Nigel Fine, said: "The pervasive nature of computing has had a profound impact on almost every aspect of our lives. The work Alan Turing did in the early 1930s played a pivotal role in the computer revolution and although it was difficult to envision what the limits of computing might be at this time, it was Turing that alerted the scientific world to the possibility that there could be such limitations. The fact we are now approaching a "post silicon" era where these limitations are now being realized makes this both a timely reminder of the need for sustained innovation, and a topic close to Turing's heart."
The lecture takes place throughout the British Isles on the following dates:
Monday 24 February 2014, Royal Institution, London
Tuesday 25 February 2014, University of Cardiff
Wednesday 26 February 2014, University of Manchester
Thursday 27 February 2014, University of Edinburgh
The IET/BCS Turing Lecture is the fourth in a series of nine Prestige Lectures being held over the course of 2013/4, with the next being the Clerk Maxwell lecture. This will be presented by David MacKay FRS, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Cambridge. The Clerk Maxwell lecture takes place on the 6th March at the Royal Institution in London.
The IET Prestige Lectures are free to attend events, offering the opportunity to hear about the future of engineering from the sector's most prominent thought leaders. All the lectures are streamed live as webcasts and are available to watch on demand at IET.tv. Registration for all lectures is through the IET's website: www.theiet.org/lectures/
For more information, please visit: www.theiet.org
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