Paolo Pirjanian, chief technology officer at iRobot, will be the featured speaker for the Ohio Northern University Spotts Lecture in the Freed Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7:30 p.m.

Pirjanian’s speech, “The Disruptive Force of Robots in the Home and Beyond,” is free and open to the public.

As chief technology officer at iRobot, Pirjanian oversees advanced technology development and engineering for product development. Prior to joining iRobot, he served as chief executive officer of Evolution Robotics Inc. for seven years. Before that, Pirjanian was Evolution’s chief technology officer, developing advanced technologies for autonomous navigation and computer vision.

Earlier in his career, Pirjanian worked as a lecturer in the computer science department at the University of Southern California and as a researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he received the Technical Leadership Award. Pirjanian is the former U.S. chairman of the IEEE Robotics Industrial Activities Board and received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Early Career Award in 2004.

Pirjanian has more than 100 issued patents in robotics and related fields and holds a Ph.D. from Aalborg University in Denmark.

The Spotts Lecture series was established by the T.J. Smull College of Engineering in 1986 to bring distinguished speakers to the ONU campus on an annual basis to inform students of the probable professional conditions and challenges that engineers and computer scientists will face in the future.