news - 04.20.09

2009 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARDS HONOR RAYMOND KURZWEIL AND STEVEN SQUYRES

Washington, D.C.: Monday, April 20, 2009

The Washington D.C.-based Arthur C. Clarke Foundation today honored the 2009 winners of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. As in past years, two Awards were presented.

The “Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award” recognizes “an individual, a group or an entity that exemplifies the values and accomplishments of Sir Arthur's life. The award honors substantial and enduring contributions that relate the sciences and arts in meeting the challenges of contemporary life and the needs of tomorrow.”

The 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award winner is Raymond Kurzweil, a noted inventor and futurist in the IT field who has written well-regarded books on the revolution in machine intelligence which he projects is coming soon. He has recently founded, in cooperation with NASA, Singularity University, at NASA Ames Research Center, which will seek to train senior executives and leaders how to cope with rapid changes in technology and society.

He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

The “Arthur C. Clarke Innovator’s Award” recognizes “initiatives or new inventions that have had recent impact on or hold particular promise for satellite communications and society, and stand as distinguished examples of innovative thinking.”
This year’s Innovator’s Award winner is Steven Squyres, broadly known for his work in interplanetary sciences, especially his leadership of the ongoing and extremely successful Mars rover program.

Squyres's research focuses on the large solid bodies of the solar system, the terrestrial planets and the satellites of the Jovian planets. His work involves analysis of data from both spacecraft and ground-based telescopes, as well as a variety of types of geophysical modeling. Areas of particular interest include the tectonics of Venus, the history of water on Mars, and the geophysics of the icy satellites of the outer planets. Data analysis and theory are used together to examine the processes that have shaped the surfaces and interiors of these bodies.

“We believe Sir Arthur would have heartily approved of these two gentlemen and their selection since they are noted contributors in two areas of special focus for him: the evolution of Man and Machine together (remember HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey?) and exploration,” said ACCF Chairman Tedson J. Meyers at the event.

Past Clarke Lifetime Achievement winners are CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite, science fiction writer Ben Bova; former Matra Marconi Space board chairman Claude Goumy; retired Space Systems Loral chairman Robert Berry; and first Intelsat director general, Santiago Astrain. Clarke Innovator winners include Bigelow Aerospace’s Robert Bigelow, for leading the way for private sector entrepreneurs willing to advance space exploration and activity with minimum reliance on government programs, Dr. Brad Edwards, for leading in the design of a space elevator to move cargo to the Clarke Orbit from the Earth's surface; and D.K. Sachdev and Dr. S. Joseph Campanella, for designing and implementing the world’s first audio broadcasting (Worldspace) satellite.

The Awards were presented before an invited audience at Washington’s Cosmos Club on Monday, April 20, 2009. For information, contact Foundation Secretary Scott Chase at scottchase@verizon.net or 301/879-1613.

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