Co-founder of iRobot to keynote EBV graduation Aug. 22

Co-founder of iRobot to keynote EBV graduation Aug. 22July 27, 2009Amy Schmitzaemehrin@syr.edu

The keynote address at the closing graduation ceremony of the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), hosted by the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, will be given by Helen Greiner, CEO of The Droid Works Inc., a start-up robotics company, and co-founder of iRobot, a consumer robotics company. The graduation ceremony will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22.

Started as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off, iRobot is now a $300 million business and a global leader in practical robotics, delivering robots to the industrial, consumer and military markets. The company’s first big government contract came in 1993, when it was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research to design an underwater minesweeper. By 2004, the company employed more than 120 people, had branch offices in Milford, N.H., and San Luis Obispo, Calif., and had contracts in multiple markets, including academic, industrial, military and consumer, making it the largest, privately owned robotics company in the world.

Greiner holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT. She is highly decorated for her visionary contributions in technology innovation and entrepreneurship, including being named an Innovator for the Next Century by MIT’s Technology Review and being included in Fortune magazine’s list of the Top 10 Innovators Under 40 in the United States. She has also been recognized as the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year (2003, with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle). In addition, she was recently honored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) with the Pioneer Award and has been awarded the DEMO God Award. She was named by the Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. News & World Report as one of America’s Best Leaders, and she has been invited to the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow. She has also been inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame.

Greiner’s more than 20 years of experience in robotic technology includes working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She is a trustee of the Boston Museum of Science at MIT, the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) and the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Counsel. Greiner serves as the elected president and board member of the Robotics Technology Consortium, a 120-member industrial/academic group.

For more information about the EBV, contact Ellie O’Neill, EBV coordinator, at (315) 443-6007 or egoneill@syr.edu. Media queries can be directed to Amy Mehringer Schmitz, Whitman director of communications, at (315) 443-3834 or aemehrin@syr.edu.