To mark its 100th anniversary, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) will host a two-day celebration on May 23-24.
A symposium on Friday, May 23 will highlight the department's history and research as well as a vision of its future. On Saturday, there will be tours, demonstrations and talks by EECS faculty.
The small group of "electricals" who spun off from MIT's physics department in 1902 initially contributed to electrification of cities and the emergence of calculating machines. It later had a hand in the development of circuit boards, silicon chips, software that learns, digital video, laser surgery, an international power grid and the Internet. By 1974, the department acknowledged a new reality by transforming itself into the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Exploring the development of human-machine relationships, Professor Barbara Liskov, associate head of EECS, will head a panel including Rodney Brooks and Leslie Kaelbling, director and associate director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab; Martin Schmidt, director of the Microsystems Technology Lab; and Victor Zue, director of the Lab for Computer Science.
Telemedicine, MEMS, nanoscale biomedicine, "intelligence" for prosthetics and drug-release chips are among the topics for the afternoon panel with Professor Martha Gray, co-director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; Eric Grimson, associate director of the AI Lab; Dennis Freeman, associate professor of electrical engineering; and Peter Szolovits, professor of computer science and engineering.
MIT community members are welcome to join the celebration. Online preregistration at http://www.eecs.mit.edu/100th is advised as the date nears. The cutoff date has been extended to May 19.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 14, 2003.
