This year's guest speaker is James McLurkin, a senior hardware engineer at Google. He is a robotics engineer with more than 20 years of experience in the field both as an industry project lead and an award-winning researcher at MIT and Rice University. He is a thought leader in multi-robot systems, who says this about his work: "At Google, I am developing cool new gizmos. I'm returning to my roots as a hardware developer while helping to build the next generation of engineers." This lecture is a part of the George and Helen Long Endowment for Science, Technology and Society.