Intelligence, dedicated, leader, innovative, hard-working — they’re all words associated with the 11 women recognized with the Mass High Tech Women to Watch awards this morning. But back at the office we were talking how commonly another word has to be applied to the 2010 honorees and their 60 predecessors.
It’s their humility. It’s so striking. We at Mass High Tech see it over and over again. We contact them in January to tell them they have been selected, and their total surprise is genuine. When we interview them for profiles, they talk about other women who would be more deserving, or how they can’t believe they are in the same ranks with certain women tech leaders that they admire.
These are inventors, heads of huge development teams and CEOs. They’ve earned the right to brag.
Instead, they stand up at a podium and praise other women. They are grateful to their parents and the members of their teams. They talk about how it just makes sense for them to give back, to help and mentor young people.
Bulletflight might take the cake, but Raytheon’s One Force Tracker would certainly be in the running for least likely iPhone app.
The New York Times reports the Waltham-based defense giant is developing two iPhone apps: One for situational awareness in a battlefield, and one for air traffic control. One Force Tracker maps the positions of enemies and friends in real-time, and allows for secure communication including photo and video transmission. The app could also be used by police, firefighters and other first responders.
The air traffic control app would be used to train air traffic conrollers.
MIT’s entry has won the DARPA Network Challenge, which had teams using the Internet to find 10 red balloons placed around the country, from Portland Ore., to Katy, Texas, to Christiana, Del.
The MIT team cleverly outsourced the search to … everyone, more or less, in a convoluted pyramid scheme that paid cash to the finder of a balloon, the person that invited the finder to the competition, the person that invited that person and a charity.
Researchers on the team used the scheme to learn about how social networks spread information.
A first for criminal courts in the commonwealth could open up a new revenue stream for makers of thermal imagers: Massachusetts police departments. Universal Hub reports Boston Municipal Court has convicted a man of gun possession based on thermal imaging evidence.
After a foot chase through Dorchester, cops used a thermal imaging scanner to show a gun found on the chase route had been recently held. During the trial, prosecutors brought in MIT mechanical engineering student Priam Pillai as an expert on thermal imaging.
This is Homer’s second time winning the contest. Homer’s first win in 2007 launched his startup, Flagsuit. Flagsuit is developing pressure suits using the same technology as Homer’s prizewinning gloves — for use as a wearable substitute for hyperbaric chambers used to treat conditions such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, stroke and autism. Down the line, Homer plans to target the the space tourism industry, which Homer sees growing in the next two years.
The game isn’t just some nutty hack, either. The students made it to demonstrate developing for unmanned aerial vehicles. The Pac-Man Roomba is controlled by a player using a joystick — the ghosts are autonomous. The Pac-Man robot eats tape “pellets” along its path, including the special huge pellet that sends the ghost robots running in the other direction; and even acts out the death spiral Pac-Man does when he gets eaten.
This could open up a whole new cottage industry of robots jazzing up old games: PackBot Minesweeper, Predator-drone Space Invaders, Artaic Pictionary, Precision Urban Hopper Q-Bert, crazy robot baseball, Petman marathons, etc. Competitive BigDog/LittleDog racing at Wonderland could bring together animal activists, racing enthuisasts, the gaming industry, the tech community and maybe even the Nascar crowd. I’d like to see that industry networking event.
To mark the Internet’s 40th birthday yesterday, the Guardian traces the history of the Internet with a dense interactive timeline. Popular Science covers the same ground via text and photos.
Last week, Mass High Tech asked Leo Beranek, “the second B in BBN,” to sit down with MassTLC chair Steve O’Leary, in an exclusive dialogue about Beranek’s career in technology and entrepreneurship. The interview took place at the Harvard Club in Back Bay in anticipation of MassTLC giving Beranek its Commonwealth Award. In the clip above, Beranek talks about BBN’s role in developing the ARPANet, the forerunner of the Internet.
Keep an eye out for the more video of the interview and a complete transcript running on MHT soon.
Boston Dynamics, the Waltham-based maker of funny Internet videos starring robots the company incidentally develops, has released footage of its Petman robot. If you, like me, think it’s weird that the robot is wearing sneakers, it’s not. The robot is designed to test chemical protection uniforms for soldiers, so presumably the finished robot will be wearing a full uniform.
And this being a Boston Dynamics video, obviously the robot gets shoved, to little effect.
After the jump, watch the Big Dog take a romantic stroll on a beach in Thailand. Seriously. (more…)
If you thought the BigDog video was disturbing, iRobot’s “chembot” video is flat-out revolting: From the title: “Jamming Skin Enabled Locomotion” (JSEL, with the much more pleasant-sounding pronunciation, “Giselle”), to the animation of the green, shrimp-looking robot rendering, to the use of the term “jammable slurry,” — mmm … jammable slurry — to the pulsating, throbbing, ball of pasty colored I-don’t-know-what straight out of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” video.
Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Co. tested a prototype of its VASIMR VX-200 plasma rocket last week. The rocket, running at 1.8 million degrees, is a larger version of the plasma rocket MIT researcher Oleg Batishchev developed for satellites to position themselves. NASA plans to test the argon gas-powered rocket on the International Space Station in 2013 in anticipation of using it for a mission to Mars.
Ad Astra CEO/former astronaut/MIT alum/father of state senator Sonia Chang-Diaz Franklin Chang-Diaz developed the technology. The rocket would cut down the amount of fuel needed for a mission, and shorten the trip to Mars to 39 days.
After the jump, watch more video of the rocket, plus the plasma rocket Batishchev made out of a Coke bottle and a Coke can.
By James M. Connolly
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