Webster N.Y. – An engineer at the Xerox Research Center Webster, who is working on a number of Web technology and online marketplace projects, will participate in this year’s National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 16th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, a gathering of the country’s “most promising” engineers.
 
Venkatesh Rao is one of 86 engineers - from industry, academia and government – selected to participate in the symposium scheduled for September 23-25th in Armonk, N.Y. The event will examine topics such as cloud computing, autonomous aerospace systems, engineering and music, and engineering inspired by biology. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Bernard S. Meyerson, IBM fellow and vice president of innovation.
 
Participants were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations, and chosen from about 265 applicants.
 
Rao works on applying Web 2.0 technologies to next-generation publishing, document and workflow technologies on the Web.
 
He has 20 peer-reviewed publications in journals and conferences, and five patent applications. Rao writes a personal blog called Ribbonfarm, which has been featured on Slashdot.org, Kottke.org and the New York Times blog. He has contributed guest pieces to leading industry blogs such as Mashable, VentureBeat and GTDTimes. Rao also is working on Xerox’s open innovations initiatives with the external technical community. He was the recent recipient of the Rochester Engineering Society’s Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the Year Award.
 
In addition to Rao, Ana Arias, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., a Xerox Company, has been selected to attend the symposium. Arias currently manages PARC’s Printed Electronic Devices group, which uses inkjet printing techniques to fabricate organic, active matrix display backplanes for paper-like displays and flexible sensors. She is internationally recognized for her expertise in polymer-based electronics and printed electronics, including organic light emitting diodes, photovoltaics, and thin-film transistors.

Commenting on Venkat’s award, Steve Hoover, VP of Xerox Research Center Webster said, “We are incredibly proud of Venkat’s accomplishments as well as all of the young engineers at Xerox. This marks the second year in a row that a Xerox young engineer has won this award and it is a testament to the world class talent that has come to Rochester to join Xerox and to the impacts that they have had during their short tenure. Venkat and our other young engineers are literally the future of Xerox – they are already providing innovations across a wide variety of domains from greener printing processes to new services offerings that literally make the future today. My heartfelt congratulations to Venkat for this well-deserved recognition. I have had the chance to work with him on some of his innovations and he is truly a rare breed – a creative spirit with a wide ranging and free-wheeling intellect who delivers results.”