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Saturday the 31st of May at 5:23 p.m.

Adrian Bowyer is a senior university lecturer in the beautiful spa town of Bath, South West England. His research projects include geometric computing, the application of computers to manufacturing, biomimetics, and bioengineering applications of chemical ligand binding. Dr Bowyer is one part of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams. Graduating with a first in mechanical engineering and then a PhD in tribology at Imperial College in the early 1970s, his career has seen him as a mathematician, a computer scientist, a writer, a chemist, a biologist and now - inventor!

His main area of research in the Mechanical Engineering Department is currently the RepRap project, which he will feature when he joins the Irish Open Source Technology Conference, June 18 - 20th in Dublin's CineWorld complex.

RepRap is a self-replicating manufacturing machine. Adrian says, "I started RepRap in February 2004 and it is, in essence a machine capable of making the components from which itself is made. I didn't invent the concept of machine self replication (this dates back as far as the 17th century René Descartes and by Samuel Butler in his masterpiece fiction Erewhon two centuries later) but I was the first to realise it was possible to separate the self-copying and self-assembling aspects of artificial self-replication, and that replication was the more important of the two." Adrian was also the first to realise that 3D printing machines were the best bet for making a practical, useful, self-replicating machine.

Bowyer believes that Open Source is re-writing the world. "With virtually every electronic gadget more complicated than a toothbrush running Linux internally, and with virtually the whole of the Earth's information flow being channeled via Linux courtesy of Google." He continued "Open Source is now more important for the human economy than oil."

RepRap is trying to take the open-source idea and move it from software to hardware. It will have many uses, from proto-typing designs to lowering cost of manufacturing. Already the machine can make a wide range of common household goods, and because it can also make itself, if you have one, you can make another and give it to a friend. It can be made very inexpensively meaning this alone has the potential to make a huge difference for third world communities who rely so heavily on the Western world.

Of this potentially disruptive tech, The Guardian said "RepRap has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment."

Adrian says the machine, whose software is mainly written in Java, is available for free under the GNU General Public Licence in keeping with the Open Source culture.

Barry Alistair, from IrishDev.com said at the announcement, "Our committee member Brian Cleland who represents Open Ireland suggested asking Dr Bowyer over. Open Source is most widely connected to software but as we see with the RepRap project, the results of Open Source concepts lead to some of the most practical and innovative products on the market. Members of the Irish manufacturing community have told me that they'll be coming along to the Irish Open Source Technology conference in June and I, like them, certainly look forward to hearing more about the RepRap project."

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