Inaugural lecture Mr Prof A.P.J. Engbersen: The Future of IT - You ain't seen nothing yet...

Information Technology as we know and deploy it today found its start in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Since the emergence of the first mainframes, we have continuously automated processes in administrations and organizations worldwide. A significant boost in the use of IT, especially by consumers, came with the emergence of the world wide web in the mid-nineties, still growing today. This created another trend: the increasing digitization of our world. What was once analog is now being digitized or done digitally in the first place.

This massive digitization and the substantial increase in sensors all around us (for medical use, sometimes even inside us) led to the Big Data phenomenon. Everybody speaks of it, but what is the actual significance of Big Data? And do we really need to store continuously and permanently each piece of data we generate? Or are there more natural, more intelligent methods? How will future IT systems deal with the combination of Big Data, smarts and existing automation as we know it?

Prof Engbersen will make the argument that what we observe today, such as targeted advertising (albeit not perfectly targeted most of the time), are just the very shy beginnings of an immense development, ultimately augmenting and extending human abilities beyond what we can even imagine today. Each and every business, university, healthcare institution, administration and each of us will be impacted profoundly. We will exponentially extend our abilities through cognitive computing, changing the face of IT forever.

In other words: IT… you ain’t seen nothing yet!

More information

• Inaugural lecture: Mr Prof A.P.J. Engbersen
• Title: The Future of IT - You ain't seen nothing yet...
• Chair: Data Science Engineering
• Faculty: Mathematics ad Natural Sciences
• Register at the latest one week in advance by returning the replycard or by filling in the form on the website