Tom Hull is the leader of Florida Polytechnic’s Technology Services Department. Hull’s role is to plan for and implement the technology systems at Florida Polytechnic to reflect and enhance the cutting-edge, 21st Century teaching, learning and research environments at the University. The division he oversees provides technology and user services, leadership, consulting and innovative ideas and solutions to support the University and its mission. Hull has served as CIO for several universities in this 30-year career. Most recently he was Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Pace University in New York City. He also was CIO at Virginia Commonwealth University and Siena College in the Albany, New York area. His background includes strategic technology planning for IBM, where he was Executive Director for IBM Global Services.  He held a similar post at the U.S. Defense Department, where he worked on a Strategic Technology Plan for the Pentagon, and he performed a Lucent Bell-Labs divestiture to a new company, Viasystems in the U.S., Mexico and China. 

The speaker will briefly describe in the workshop the nature in 3D technologies, their principal present uses, their future potential and why these technologies are so important and even necessary in some cases for integrating research, education and innovations or real life problem solving. He will show the huge potential of 3D Technologies providing synergic bridges between academy and industry. He will show why 3D Technologies provide a real support for huge educational innovations in Higher Education and pre-college education. He will present the case of the Florida Polytechnic University as an example of this kind of Educational Innovations. He will also highlight the great potential of 3D Technologies for entrepreneurship and innovations in MANY industrial areas and human activities, including art, humanities, design, architecture, engineering, manufacturing, biomedical engineering, health systems, product prototyping, customization, etc. some demonstrations of 3D printing will also be included in this workshop, which will complement the exhibition planned to be organized in the same venue of the workshop and the conference.