04/27/2004 5:00 PM Wong Auditorium
Padmasree Warrior, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,; Motorola Incorporated

Description: In a time when the boundaries between home, work, car, and plane are blurring, Motorola is exploring ways to enable people to have seamless transitions from one venue to another. These include applications like being able to continue to hear the news story that you began listening to in your car, and picking it up immediately upon entering your house (your house is "smart" enough to know what you want to hear) to more complex ways to enable your work environment and your personal media to be with you even while attending a conference.

Warrior describes how thousands of Motorola engineers are trying to create a transparent network so that individuals can take their music, video, pictures ---virtually any kind of data with them -- wherever they go. "Mobile devices have become the remote control for life. Let us do things we have not thought about before," says Warrior. For 75 years, Motorola has specialized in what Warrior describes as "preemptive innovation." This means not just enabling new ways to communicate (for example, creating the two-way radio and cell phone), but giving customers new reasons to communicate. Within technological view are cars that can download information about a driver's preferences, from seat height to mirror settings, and homes that can broadcast a favorite radio show from room to room, so the listener misses nothing.

About the Speaker(s): Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board's technology and design steering committee. Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola's energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000. Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India. Warrior served on the Texas Governor's Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the "Women Elevating Science and Technology" award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

Host(s): Vice President Resource Development, Industrial Liaison Program

Tape #: T18602