Upcoming Events
Keyvan Esfarjani: Emerging Industry Trends & Opportunities in Technology
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Time: 1:30 pm
Location: PHYS 112
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, engineering students must stay ahead of the curve to shape the innovations of tomorrow. This lecture is for all engineering students and will provide an insightful exploration of the most promising trends, challenges, and opportunities where technology is shaping the future. The talk will delve into key applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors, examining how each engineering field can play a pivotal role in advancing the new capabilities of the future. By exploring the intersection of innovation, applications, and economic viability, students will gain a deeper understanding of how their unique skills and knowledge can contribute to solving bottlenecks in technology. This lecture will be a combination of presentation and open dialogue, designed to encourage active participation and critical thinking. Additionally, this session will be recorded and made available for further learning and exploration.
Ronald Latanision: Preserving Public Trust in Technology
Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Time: 3:30 pm
Location: FRNY G140
Technology and technologists have had and continue to have crucial roles to play in medicine, meeting energy demand, addressing climate change, k-12 education and in many other ways that affect our lives on Earth. My hope had been that we would have learned some lessons from the history of the evolution of the Internet and The Web that would lead to a responsible and accountable advance of any new technology into our social fabric. But I do not see much to give me the confidence that we have learned many useful lessons. Generative artificial intelligence, for example, has the potential to be supremely useful but also supremely abusive. Any new technology represents something of a double-edged sword. Its evolution is all about how people will choose to use it: for good purposes or bad. Consider the introduction of the automobile or telephone into our social fabric. GenAI is not any new technology. This one is shattering. But I suppose that to the average thoughtful person the telephone must have been shattering. Just as the Model T. What is different is the case of GenAI is that it does not just add a new dimension to our lives, it presents technology as a force beyond nature. I am concerned that this technology may be heading so far out front of humans that people may begin to broadly distrust science and technology on a level that is unprecedented today. That erosion of trust would be to our collective misfortune from my perspective. We must all be concerned about managing the introduction of any new technology into the marketplace in constructive and societally beneficial ways. This two-way conversation will consider how that might be accomplished in the future.