Ralph Merkle
received his PhD in 1979 from Stanford, where he co-invented public key cryptography, and won the ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work in 1996. He joined Xerox PARC in 1988, pursuing research in computational nanotechnology. He chaired the 4th and 5th Foresight Conferences on Nanotechnology, is on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Nanotechnology, and won the 1998 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for theory. Dr. Merkle has 7 patents and has published extensively. http://www.merkle.com Nanotechnology and Meaning For centuries manufacturing has been getting more precise, more flexible, and less expensive. The limit of that trend is the ability to inexpensively arrange molecules and atoms in most of the patterns permitted by physical law. This will provide an unprecedented leap in computational power; more in a box the size of a sugar cube than in all the computers in the world today. Computers will vanish into our surroundings: walls, doors, and our bodies. Displays will take the next leap: rather than flat images, they'll reconstruct the entire wave front of light. A display will look more like a window into another world: a computational simulation so detailed that no visible flaw will mar the illusion. Our senses could be heightened by medical nanodevices smaller than a cell that "whisper" into our ears or paint images on our retinas. Augmenting rather than replacing what we see and hear, these devices could help us interpret the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world around us. Who *is* that person across the room? When did we meet before? To convert raw information into meaning and convey that meaning to our human brains will require vast computational power and remarkably precise, reliable interface devices. This is the hardware that nanotechnology can provide, and that will drive the computer revolution to the fundamental limits of physics rather than those imposed by manufacturing technology. See schedule.	program BILL BUXTON ANDY CAMERON MATTHEW CHALMERS DANIEL DÖGL BILL GAVER NEIL GERSHENFELD ANDREW GLASSNER PAUL HAEBERLI TOM HEWETT BREWSTER KAHLE PANU KORHONEN DOUG LENAT JO LERNOUT RALPH MERKLE THEODOR H. NELSON CELIA PEARCE MARK PESCE HANI RASHID BILL SCHILIT DAVID SMALL MARCO SUSANI JOHN THACKARA MICHAEL FREEDMAN TURNER WHITTED ANTON ZEILINGER
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