Getting a jump on the year end-lists for 2009, Time has declared its Best Inventions of the Year. Some are impressive, some are scary, and many are things whose inclusion requires an inventive stretch of the definition of the word “invention.”
Before we get to that, only two of the inventions listed have local connections — an electric eye developed at MIT, and an electric microbe developed at UMass Amherst. Does Time know how many things get invented around here? I don’t either, but it’s a lot. I’m not sure how many would make the top 50 for a given year, but I’d imagine more than two. Have these people not seen the Happiness Hat? I was at MIT earlier this year and a robot made me ice cream in 30 seconds. That doesn’t rate?
Meanwhile, among the winners were: a paper airplane, a high-school football offense, and a method to Tweet by thought. All impressive, and they round out a 50-click editorial feature nicely, but cooler than SixthSense? One is a decision not to do something, one is a paper airplane, and one is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
On the downside, the gas mask bra that won at the Ig Nobel awards a few months back was chosen as one of the five worst inventions of the year.
Technology Review takes a look at Charlestown-based Cogito Health, who has developed software to determine whether people are depressed or not based on an analysis of their voices.
The MIT Media Lab spinout is based on the research of Sandy Pentland.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a robot — the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) — to offer “the same kind of guidance as an informed and friendly companion.”
The system features an expressive robotic head, pictured above, that would protrude from the dashboard. Nothing creepy there. Media Lab researcher Cynthia Breazeal, Carlo Ratti, and Assaf Biderman are working with the Media Lab’s SENSEable City Lab and automaker Audi on the product.
The robot would analyze your driving patterns, your route, traffic, the weather and other information to guide you. It would also interact with you via expressions, like a smile or the Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph-we’re-going-to-die exclamation point.
Picower’s name came up as an investor with Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, but he may have made more money than Madoff himself from the scheme. He’d been sued by the lawyer who is liquidating Madoff’s assets, who says Picower himself may have made more than $5 billion in fake profits.
In 2002, the Picower Foundation gave MIT $50 million to establish the Picower Center, which focuses on brain and cognitive research. After Madoff’s arrest in December 2009, the foundation shutdown, saying it had run out of money.
Before President Obama’s speech at MIT on Friday afternoon, he toured some of the school’s labs and met with researchers. Among the “neat stuff” the president saw was the 2005 MHT Woman to Watch Angela Belcher, who’s developing a battery grown from a virus. It was the second time Obama met the battery, which made a trip to Washington D.C. with MIT president Susan Hockfield last spring.
Today’s news of open-source statistics software maker REvolution Computing’s $9 million round of venture funding comes a week before a unique demonstration of its software: The 2009/2010 Houston Rockets season opener.
Morey has used analytics to find players either underrated or cast off by other teams, like Aaron Brooks, Carl Landry and most notably Shane Battier, the Kevin Youkilis of basketball stat-nerdery. According to our sister publication, the Sporting News, Morey’s style is very Kendall Square:
Imagine that the Rockets are stockpiling — nay, engineering — long, athletic players with high IQ who know how to shoot and enjoy pinpoint defense. If this assembly line gets going, we should all be awed and frightened.
Rockets stars Yao Ming is out for the year with a broken foot and Tracy McGrady is also out indefinitely; both were pre-Morey acquisitions. This year will be the first time every player on the floor is a guy drafted, signed or traded for by Morey, based on whatever crazy numbers he and his team are running through R.
Wired talks to Sangbae Kim, of MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab, about his biomimetic robots: The iSprawl, SpinyBot, the StickyBot, and his latest project, the terrifying robotic cheetah pictured above. By mimicking a cheetah, Kim is looking to increase the speed of robots, the fastest of which aren’t that quick on their feet/wheels/paws.
So far, the biomimetic robots pumped out by local researchers have been as fun as anti-landmine technology can be — the Ghost Swimmer, Robofish, RoboLobster, RoboLamprey, RoboClam, even Kim’s StickyBot. I’m still waiting on someone to develop a robot monkey, and we jump all the way to this?
Seriously, this isn’t funny any more, guys. I’m picturing the heavily armed MBTA cops at South Station getting these things to replace their bomb/drug/turnstyle jumper-sniffing dogs. I don’t want that malevolent-looking, 70-mph-running, lightweight carbon-fiber-foam composite piece of death following me down the street at night. Or at noon, either.
Nick Roy and the Robust Robotics Group at MIT CSAIL has developed a helicopter robot called the RANGE (Robust, Aerial, Navigation in GPS-denied Environments) that models its surroundings as it flies, using 3-D cameras and laser scanners.
In what can only be taken as a direct challenge to its landlocked cousin, Boston Dynamics’ kick-resistant Big Dog, the video includes a scene where the robot corrects itself after being poked by a two-by-four.
On the Daily Show, William Kamkwamba talked about building an electricity-generating windmill for his family’s farm in Malawi, using a library book as a guide, at the age of 14. He’s since presented at TEDGlobal 2007 in Tanzania, and wrote a book, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.”
Toward the end of the interview, Kamkwamba explains how he found out about Google, at the TED conference: “I was like, ‘Where was this Google all this time?’”
Use of, registration on, this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement.
Please read our Privacy Policy (updated) A publishing partner with Portfolio
RSS Feeds
