Dean's Seminar Series and INVO Host Commercialization Seminar
The McCormick Dean’s Seminar Series and the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO) welcome electrical engineering and computer science faculty members Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum for a commercialization seminar on Wednesday, April 6 at 4:30 p.m. in the ITW Classroom of the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center.
In this seminar, entitled “Crossing the Chasm: The Process and Problems of Moving Technology Into the Marketplace,” Professors Hammond and Birnbaum will walk through the process of moving technology out of the University and into the world and share some of their experiences over the last ten years of commercializing their work. Sharing both the highs and the some dramatic lows of their own experiences, they will outline the issues and problems that faculty have to confront and solve when they want their work to have impact in the commercial world.
Kristian Hammond is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and director of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. His research focuses on intelligent information systems that attend to user context in automatically searching for information and media, and providing results to those users in interesting new ways. Over the last ten-plus years he has worked on moving his technologies into commercial use through licensing, company formation and work with a large range of industrial partners. He has a war chest of both exciting successes and dramatic failures related to all aspects of the commercial process.
Larry Birnbaum is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and serves on the management committee of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. His research focuses on information diversity in search and on technologies for applying human editorial judgment at web scale. His technologies have been part of three startups and have served as the basis for business transformations in a wide variety of verticals.