Dr. Pattie Maes of the MIT Media lab and her doctoral student Pranav Mistry rocked TED this year with their presentation of this game changing sixth sense technology. Check out the talk. Now, this is very cool technology, even better than the stuff in the Minority Report movie that it's being compared to. The elegance of the solution appeals to me - it's systems engineering at its best, using several interconnected subsystems to achieve the intended effect.
What stands out in my mind:
(1) It was built with off-the-shelf components, nothing fancy, costing $350. So, anyone could have built this.
(2) The "device" consists of a phone, marker caps of different colors, a camera, a projector, and a mirror. That's it.
(3) It makes sense of natural gestures.
(4) It's mobile, unlike the minority report technology.
(5) The processing power is from a regular cell phone, no extraordinary parallel processing or computing resources required
(6) Totally fabulous application for someone with a really poor memory for names like me: display person's name when you see them!
I hope to meet Pattie Maes on Thursday after her talk at the Media lab, so either shoot me an email or post a comment with any questions you may have for her.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
A woman in technology that I admire..
A woman in technology I admire greatly is Helen Greiner of iRobot. Helen is the co-founder of iRobot and holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from MIT.
To me, she represents a unique and rare combination of technical skills and business savvy, and is a tremendous role model for women who aspire to be successful engineers and businesswomen. She gave a great speech at last year's Women of Vision awards where she won the 2008 award for innovation. The speech beautifully summarizes the challenges of becoming (and staying) a woman in engineering, and for that, I tip my hat to Helen.
To me, she represents a unique and rare combination of technical skills and business savvy, and is a tremendous role model for women who aspire to be successful engineers and businesswomen. She gave a great speech at last year's Women of Vision awards where she won the 2008 award for innovation. The speech beautifully summarizes the challenges of becoming (and staying) a woman in engineering, and for that, I tip my hat to Helen.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Dear Readers based in the US,
I would be most appreciative if you could spend 30 seconds of your time answering these two poll questions I posted on LinkedIn:
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27232/xoocp
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27234/eqpyt
Many thanks!
I would be most appreciative if you could spend 30 seconds of your time answering these two poll questions I posted on LinkedIn:
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27232/xoocp
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27234/eqpyt
Many thanks!
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