SC08 - Closing Ceremony - Keynote Speaker | 
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Advanced Technology, Convergence and Complexity:
An Engineering Perspective Contemporary sciences and technologies are characterized by a powerful blending of disciplines. This convergence, with interactions that are unfolding between its main info, bio and nano components, is generating new synergies. It is largely responsible for the accelerating pace of discoveries. However, our inability to understand and manage complexity is emerging as the key obstacle to the fruitful exploitation of these new resources. With the capability of synthesizing artificial and tightly connected components, the structure of future systems may become akin to that of Life itself. The engineering challenges of designing and managing such systems are immense. They call, in part, for a renewed awareness in social aspects of science and technology and ways of fostering new forms of multidisciplinary education and research. Denis Poussart is Emeritus Professor at Laval University where he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering after obtaining his Ph.D. from MIT in 1968, At Laval he initiated the Computer Vision and Systems Laboratory, which he led until his retirement in 2002. He has published extensively in biophysics and computing. His present research and consulting is the area of cognition and complex systems. He was a coordinator for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems of the Networks of Centers of Excellence program of Canada. He has been a member of the Science and Technology Council of Quebec and aVice-President for Research at Centre Informatique de Montréal. Since 2002 he has been a member of the Information Systems Technology Panel of the Research and Technology Organization of NATO. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. |  |
