The Liberty Science Center will be awarding technologist entrepreneurs Katherine Johnson, Boston Dynamic’s SpotMini and robotics team, and Ray Kurzweil with the 2017 Genius Award on May 5th at the Genius Gala 6.0.
The Genius Gala is an annual event dedicated to honoring the greatest minds in science and technological fields, with Liberty Science Center CEO Paul Hoffman wanting to shed light on, “singularly brilliant technologist entrepreneurs who are inventing a better future for all of us.”
Katherine Johnson was among the first African-American women to be employed by NASA, and is the recipient of other awards such as the 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her work includes major calculations for the first manned space missions by the United States, and has been immortalized in the movie Hidden Figures, along with other female African-American mathematicians at NASA. Johnson’s work has even continued into the more modern era, with calculations on the now retired Space Shuttles and a possible manned mission to Mars.
The SpotMini is the first machine to be awarded a Genius Award, with Boston Dynamics founder and current CEO Marc Raibert as well as the Robotics Team also being honored. Before founding the robotics company, Raibert was a professor of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, and Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon.
Ray Kurzweil is the current Director of Engineering at Google, and is most known for his work developing machines that understand human language, both spoken and written. He is the recipient of several awards, including the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
For more information on the event, visit http://lsc.org/support-us/genius-gala/genius-gala-6-0/ .
