The Annual Boole Lecture was established and is sponsored by the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, the Department of Computer Science, and the School of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics at University College Cork. The series is named in honour of George Boole, the first professor of Mathematics at UCC, whose seminal work on logic in the late 1800s is central to modern digital computing. To mark this great contribution, leaders in the fields of computing and mathematics are invited to talk to the general public on directions in science, on past achievements and on visions for the future.