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.
