(Really)Creative

A Printer DesigningDesigning The Next for Bionic Greener Silicon Body Parts Buildings Valley Demo p104 Reviews p94 Business Report p84

VOL. NO. | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER | . US (REALLY)CREATIVE

Ben Milne wants to demolish the credit card DESTRUCTION industry and transform how we’ll pay for everything. Meet him and 34 other world-changing innovators under the age of 35.

SO13_cover.indd 1 8/7/13 12:34 PM We didn’t reinvent the wheel, just the way they steer.

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diagnostic tests in the poor world. At Har- not limited to the replacement for the vard, he runs one of the world’s most pro- incandescent lightbulb. He also cre- ductive chemistry and materials science ated the electronic element of the light labs, whose objective is “to fundamentally dimmer switch and the laser diode, change the paradigms of science.” which is used in DVD players and cell The electrical engineer Carver phones. Holonyak, 84, is still a full-time Mead, 79, has been responsible for an researcher at the University of Illinois, implausibly long list of innovations in where he works on quantum-dot lasers, microelectronics, including the first soft- which could be used for a variety of ware compilation of a silicon chip. Half- novel display and medical technologies. way through his career, he switched his The nanotechnologist Mildred research to how animal brains compute, Dresselhaus, 82, was the author of 39 and established the field of neural net- papers in 2012 and most days is in her works. After cofounding more than 20 o¦ce at MIT by 6:30 a.m. Her research companies, he is only notionally retired; involves the physics and properties of today, he is thinking about better ways carbon nanomaterials, including nano- to teach freshman physics at Caltech, tubes and graphene. Among her many where he has worked for more than 40 accomplishments, Dresselhaus was the Seven years, by means of a “reconceptualiza- first scientist to exploit the thermoelec- tion of electrodynamics and gravitation.” tric e§ect at the nanoscale, which could over 70 Barbara Liskov has been awarded allow for devices that harvest energy For over a decade, we’ve celebrated inno- both the Turing Award for her work on from temperature di§erences in materi- vators under the age of 35. We choose to the programming languages and meth- als that conduct electricity. write about the young because we want odology that led to object-oriented pro- Stewart Brand’s contributions to to introduce you to the most promis- gramming and the John von Neumann technology have been as an intellectual ing new technologists, researchers, and Medal for her contributions to program- and founder of organizations, rather entrepreneurs. But I often hear: You ming and distributed computing. At 73, than as an inventor. But Stewart (who is really think older people can’t innovate? she leads MIT’s Programming Method- a friend) has been tremendously influen- Of course they can. We meet extraor- ology Group, which is exploring how to tial: he was the publisher of The Whole dinary older innovators all the time, who build distributed and fault- tolerant sys- Earth Catalog; cofounded the first elec- after a lifetime of creativity are still solv- tems that continue to work even when tronic community, the WELL; and is ing big problems, generating wealth, some of their components don’t. today the president of the Long Now or expanding our conception of what it The physician and biologist Leroy Foundation, which promotes “slower/ means to be human. Below, in reverse Hood helped create the fields of genom- better thinking.” At 74, he is working on alphabetical order, are seven innovators ics and proteomics by inventing the the revival of extinct species. over the age of 70, chosen arbitrarily, protein sequencer, the protein synthe- I’ll conclude this list with an extra because I am attracted to their lives, sizer, the DNA synthesizer, and, most name, from my own profession. Now work, and character, and not according important of all, the automated DNA 83, Robert Silvers has edited the New to the formal nomination and judging sequencer. He later founded the Insti- York Review of Books for more than 40 process that selected the 35 Innovators tute of Systems Biology in Seattle and, years. His is my favorite publication, Under 35 (see page 26). at 74, is still its president; the institute because it is reliably surprising, delight- George Whitesides, 74, is a seeks to understand diseases by con- ful, witty, and humane. When asked why cofounder of more than 12 compa- sidering human biology holistically as a he doesn’t retire, Silvers once joked, “I nies (including Genzyme) whose com- “network of networks.” don’t have a very full sense of time.” He bined value is more than $20 billion, Nick Holonyak invented the first then more seriously added that work and is named on more than 50 patents. practical light-emitting diode in 1962 was an extraordinary opportunity, and Amongst his inventions are cheap paper when he was a researcher at Gen- that “you’d be crazy not to try to make

microﬂuidic chips, which can be used for eral Electric, but his innovations are the most of it.” VITTI GUIDO

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Front SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER Back 2 From the Editor BUSINESS REPORT 8 Feedback 35 84 The Next Silicon Valley Want your region to be the VIEWS next innovation hub? Of 10 Soaring Surveillance Innovators course you do here’s how. The only thing stopping even more snooping is a lack of REVIEWS technology to do it. Under 35 94 Forms That Function Better 12 Climate Diplomacy Enough with the ﬂights of The U.S. blew its chance to fancy. Let’s put architecture lead. Time to try again. software to real use. By Allison Arie 12 Corporate Genetics The Supreme Court has 98 Romancing the Phone banned gene patents. Some Has technology changed the companies say: so what? fundamental nature of love? By C.J. Pascoe

UPFRONT 101 The Paradox of Wearable 15 The Immortal Life of the Technologies Enron E-mails Access to lots of data sounds The company is long gone, but nice. The reality is far messier. its e-mails remain remarkably By Don Norman useful to researchers.

17 The EV Is Here to Stay DEMO Electric cars have been called 104 Cyborg Parts the “next big thing” before. This How to make a bionic ear. time the label might stick. By Susan Young 18 Zeroing In on Cancer A new “liquid” biopsy can YEARS AGO detect cancer in the blood. 108 Who’s Listening In? 20 Bitcoin Millionaires Even in 1980, surveillance Those who got in early are seemed scary and pervasive. enjoying life as Bitcoin royalty.

22 The Avatar Will See You Your next health practitioner may be a computer.

23 Pollution Crackdown ...... 26 An overlooked culprit in global Introduction p warming: diesel soot. Inventors ...... p 28

24 The Promise of 3-D Printing Entrepreneurs ...... p Never mind cute trinkets—the Visionaries ...... p 52 real future is in electronics. ON THE COVER: Humanitarians ...... p 62 Photo by Ryan Donnell for Plus: To Market Pioneers ...... p 72 MIT Technology Review

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Untitled-4 1 7/30/13 4:26 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. | NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM Feedback

Five Most Popular Stories MIT Technology Review Volume 116, Number 4

1 2 3 4 5 How Technology The World as TV Stays in the Thad Starner: The Secret to Is Destroying Jobs Free-Fire Zone Picture Google Glass’s a Video-Game

I’m 49 and work in a car The thrust of Fred Kaplan’s This is a nice info- Mastermind Phenomenon factory . We’re increasingly article “The World as Free- graphic, but it lacks the The privacy angle will My daughter does two becoming automated, and Fire Zone” is ill-conceived thoughtful dynamic of probably give way to the things simultaneously: she I see two consequences: and absurdly biased. online video as a “TV” legal realities of our sue- watches YouTube videos, less need for human work- Would the author rather channel. Increasingly, happy culture. How many and she plays Minecraft ers and fewer consumers we su er the conse- platforms like YouTube high-profi le legal battles in creator mode, design- to buy the products. Those quences of not eliminat- are viable media chan- would have been sorted ing the worlds she sees in consequences will lead to ing key terrorists? Would nels for professionally out in days if a few of the her mind. The YouTube I some type of economic the author volunteer to produced content. And primary people involved could fathom. Minecraft? collapse if they’re not cor- go in and do manned mis- people increasingly view had video recordings of I had to examine that one rected—the magnitude of sions instead? Colin Powell Web-based media via their actions? Already a bit: Minecraft is easy. It’s change is beyond the abil- and many others have their Web-connected TVs. juries are discovering how simple. It’s transparent. ity of our government and said what a majority of Some demographics view terrible eyewitness testi- It’s visually appealing, in fi nancial institutions to sur- Americans would agree more content on mobile mony is. California’s high- a grand, 10,000-foot kind vive. The corporate need with—the U.S. does not devices than they do on est court has ruled the of way. In the end it’s cre- for ever-increasing profi t want a “fair” war. The U.S. their TVs. Figures like num- public now has a right to ativity at its most primitive. will accelerate the use of wants an unfair advantage, ber of channels or num- videotape the police for its While YouTube is a total robotics. I believe this is and if the author or any of ber of TVs are interesting, own records and defense. mind suck, her Minecraft inevitable and unstoppable. his friends or family were but they’re not insightful. The real value in savings playing seems to even out Sounds like a good plot for in harm’s way carrying out Still, the point is valid: TV is of legal costs is going to the time-wasting aspect, some hard-core science missions, they would surely huge—but TV as we know be more compelling than making the two together fi ction. —Geo S. Jones, agree. —Rick Bridges, it is changing dramatically. notions of privacy. rather a time-sink wash. Bennington, Vermont Dublin, California —kevinrfoote —Sanescience —anonymole

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Robots Aren’t the Problem if technology really is the cause of slug- Some will argue that this time it’s The title of David Rotman’s article, gish job growth, productivity growth dierent. As Rotman states, “Technolo- “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” should have been higher after 2008. But gies like the Web, artificial intelligence, sums up the view of many who seek to productivity grew only 1.8 percent per big data … are automating many routine explain lackluster U.S. job growth. But year from 2008 to 2012, compared with tasks.” But this assumes that produc- technology has never destroyed jobs on 2.6 percent per year from 2000 to 2008, tivity growth rates will increase signifi- a net basis and it won’t in the future. when we had close to full employment. cantly, and there’s little evidence for this. The article focuses on MIT scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and McAfee consider A growing share of jobs involve tasks Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who the first-order eects of a machine that are dicult to automate (e.g., in argue that workers are “losing the race replacing the worker. But there is a sec- nursing homes or construction). against the machine, a fact reflected in ond-order eect: the organization using The worries that machines are dis- today’s employment statistics.” the machine saves money, and that flows placing workers are as old as machines They make this claim in part because into the economy through lower prices, themselves. As my coauthor Stephen J. the historical relationship between higher wages, or higher profits. And Ezell and I argue in Innovation Econom- productivity growth and job growth that stimulates demand that other com- ics: The Race for Global Advantage, far diverged after 2000. But there is no log- panies meet by hiring more workers. from being doomed by an excess of tech- ical relationship between job growth and This is why virtually all economic stud- nology, we are actually at risk of being productivity. Two nations with the same ies looking at the relationship between held back by too little technology.

productivity growth can have very dier- productivity and jobs ﬁnd either no or Robert D. Atkinson is the president of the ent job growth depending on factors like positive impacts on total jobs in the Information Technology & Innovation Founda- fertility rates and immigration. Besides, moderate term. tion, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

SO13_feedback.indd 9 8/7/13 3:09 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. |NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM Views

while it’s distributed in nature, the phys- COMPUTING ical infrastructure underlying the World Wide Web relies on key chokepoints that Soaring the government can, and does, monitor. Surveillance The NSA needs to establish relationships with only a few critical companies Technical, not legal, constraints deter- to capture the majority of the market it mine the scope of U.S. government wants to observe. With very little eort surveillance, says Ashkan Soltani. or cost, it can observe hundreds of millions of people communicating over ecent revelations about the extent these services. of surveillance by the U.S. National Each of the NSA programs recently RSecurity Agency come as no sur- disclosed by the media is unique in the Ashkan Soltani prise to those with a technical background type of data it accesses, but all of them in the workings of digital communica- have been made possible by the same tions. Dramatically expanded, highly trend: surveillance techniques have been ecient surveillance programs are pre- exploding in capacity and plummeting dictable given the increased use of digital in cost. One leaked document shows communication and cloud services—and that between 2002 and 2006, it cost the America’s outdated privacy laws. Our NSA only about $140 million to gather national discussion must take into phone records for 300 million Ameri- account the extent to which technology cans, operate a system that collects has made surveillance easier and cheaper e-mails and other content from Internet than ever before. companies such as Google, and develop The American people, maybe new “oensive” surveillance tools for use unknowingly, relied for years on tech- overseas. That’s a minuscule portion of nical and ﬁnancial barriers to protect the NSA’s $10 billion annual budget. them from large-scale surveillance by Spying no longer requires follow- the government. These implicit protec- ing people or planting bugs; rather, it David G. Victor tions have quickly eroded means ﬁlling out forms to in recent years as digital Spying no demand access to an exist- communication technol- ing trove of information. ogy has spread through longer requires The NSA doesn’t bear the society and advances pio- planting bugs. cost of collecting or stor- neered in the technology Ashkan Soltani ing data and no longer has industry have reached to interact with its targets. intelligence agencies. As a result, we The reach of its new programs is vast, now have to replace these “natural” especially when compared with the clos- boundaries and revise the law to protect est equivalent possible just 10 years ago. our privacy. What we have learned about the The majority of our communica- NSA’s capabilities suggests it has tions are now delivered and stored by adopted a style of programmatic, auto- third-party services and cloud providers. mated surveillance previously pre- KERR The bulk of e-mails, documents, phone cluded by the limitations of scale, cost, SAM

calls, and chats go through a handful and computing speed. This is a trend BY

of Internet companies such as Google, with a ﬁrm lower bound. Once the cost ION S Facebook, and Skype or wireless carri- of surveillance reaches zero, we will be RAT UST

Robert Nussbaum ers like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. And left with our outdated laws as the only ILL

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protection. Whatever policy actions are The key question for President Because emissions anywhere aect taken to regulate surveillance in light of Obama is whether his new policy can the whole planet, every plan, whether the recent leaks should recognize that have any impact on other countries. So conceived by the smallest city or the big- technical barriers oer dwindling pro- far, the answer is probably no. U.S. cred- gest nation, should be judged by whether tection from unwarranted government ibility has suered from the perception it advances the global agenda. On that surveillance at home and abroad. that this country is good at criticizing score, Obama’s new climate plan could schemes to cut global emissions, such as signal a fresh start—if it gives the U.S. Ashkan Soltani is an independent the Kyoto Protocol, but not very talented more practical leverage over the actions researcher who previously investigated at creating alternatives that actually work. of other countries as well as our own. online privacy issues as a sta technologist Other countries now understand that with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. political gridlock in Washington makes it David G. Victor is a professor at the School hard for American diplomats to promise of International Relations and Pacific them anything like backing for a global Studies at the University of California, San ENERGY treaty to cut emissions. It is telling that Diego. the new climate plan outlined by Presi- Climate Diplomacy dent Obama relied mainly on regulatory HEALTH President Obama must focus on get- and funding actions he can take alone, ting other nations to cut their emis- rather than new legislation that would Corporate Genetics sions, says David G. Victor. require help from Congress. There are signs that this strategy Even without gene patents, companies n June, President Obama broke sev- might have an eect. In recent months are monopolizing genetic data, says eral years of near silence on how the the Obama administration has created Robert Nussbaum. IUnited States would address climate new programs with China to study and change. That he did so is notable, but test low-emission energy technologies. n June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the new plan is mostly the same as the In June the leaders of the two countries that patents on genes were invalid. Yet old plan, centered on promoting e- agreed to help phase out hydrofluorocar- Icorporate intellectual-property claims ciency and cleaner technologies. Practi- bons, potent global-warming gases used can still harm patients. cally nobody is talking about the most in refrigeration and cooling systems. The court struck down patents held important test for Obama’s climate The United States is now likely to find by Myriad Genetics on two human genes strategy: how it will aect it more eective to work linked to breast and ovarian cancers, the strategies of other Obama’s plan with countries individu- BRCA1 and BRCA2. The decision ended nations. ally or in small groups than the company’s U.S. monopoly on testing In 1990, when global could signal a to focus on large global those two genes for cancer-related muta- warming first rose to fresh start. forums. Smaller forums tions. But Myriad is now using a dierent prominence as an inter- David G. Victor make it easier to achieve tactic that restricts patient choice around national issue, the United action, and to help other genetic testing. The company has con- States could unilaterally set the tone countries find practical ways to coöperate. structed a database of the genetic variants for the world. America was undisputed Closer to home, the debate over the found in people who took its BRCA test. leader of the global economy and the Keystone XL pipeline that would move That unparalleled record of the natural world’s biggest polluter. Since then, the crude from Canadian oil sands through variation in these important genes—col- U.S. share of all gas emissions that cause the United States may provide the first lected from patients—is claimed to be global warming has dropped from 16 definite success for that strategy. The Myriad’s own intellectual property. percent to 13 percent. U.S. emissions pipeline’s fate is in U.S. hands, and Doctors can’t assess the significance are now falling, while those from most although without it, the oil could still of gene variants they find in their patients of the rest of the world, notably China, travel by alternate routes that bypass the without free exchange of the kind of grow rapidly. Today the global problem is U.S., stalling approval could force the information held in Myriad’s database. much harder for the U.S. to manage just Canadians to promise their own more It is as if patients’ radiological images by changing its policies at home. credible program to cut emissions. were all examined by a single company

SO13_views.indd 12 8/6/13 11:42 AM 4,275 mechanical engineers

that didn’t give the medical community a chance to learn from them. Myriad’s database prevents patients from easily getting second opinions when they receive diagnoses based on BRCA tests. Patients need to be able to seek con- firmation that the gene variant they have really does mean what the testing laboratory says it means. That can’t happen if Myriad is the only one with the data. 1,672 have CAD experience Late last year, I launched a grass- roots e ort bringing doctors and patients together to free valuable data from BRCA1 and BRCA2 test reports. Colleagues of mine who see patients at cancer clinics now place copies of these reports—with identifying details 139 have their PhD removed—in an existing public database called ClinVar, which is run by the National Institutes of Health. This project, called Sharing Clinical Reports, has now made more than 6,000 reports acces- sible. E orts to enlist coöperation from 1 speaks Mandarin clinics around the country should free up tens of thousands more reports soon. The medical community has con- demned private databases that limit the dissemination of medical knowledge. The American Medical Association adopted a resolution in 2009 stating: “The use of patents, trade secrets, confidential- ity agreements, or other means to limit The perfect fi t the availability of medical procedures places significant limitation on the dissemination of medical knowledge, and is therefore unethical.” A newer resolution, in June, calls for the release of all information generated by testing for genetic variants, with appropriate privacy protec- tions. We’re still far from seeing that come to pass. The medical community must Take the better route to fi lling prevent intellectual-property claims from your staffi ng needs. With Aerotek, being used to monopolize such vital data. all the time-consuming resume sifting and candidate screening is Robert Nussbaum is chief of the Division of done for you, so you receive the

Genomic Medicine at the University of Cal- one person who’s the perfect ﬁ t. Why not try Aerotek is a member of ASA, ifornia, San Francisco, and worked on the it for yourself? Please call 888-616-4117, scan the American Staffing Association. Aerotek is an equal opportunity employer. legal challenge to Myriad’s gene patents. our QR code, or visit us at MIT.aerotek.com. An Allegis Group Company. ©2013

SO13_views.indd 13 8/5/13 12:36 PM china.indd 1 8/5/13 1:00 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM VOL. | NO. Upfront

ways that the e-mails’ authors and recipi- The Immortal Life of the ents never could have intended. Because it is a rich example of how real people Enron E-mails in a real organization use e-mail—full of mundane lunch plans, boring meet- Years after the company about troubling practices at the energy- ing notes, embarrassing ﬂ irtations that imploded in scandal, its e-mails trading company, is among more than 150 revealed at least one extramarital a air, still help advance data science senior executives whose e-mail boxes were and the damning missives that spelled dumped onto the Internet by the Federal out corruption—it has become the foun- and other fields. Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) dation of hundreds of research studies in in 2003. In the name of serving the pub- ﬁ elds as diverse as machine learning and By Jessica Leber lic’s interest during its investigation of workplace gender studies. the company, the federal agency posted Computer scientists have used the cor- incent Kaminski is a mod- more than 1.6 million e-mails that Enron pus to train systems that automatically est semi-retired business executives sent and received from 2000 prioritize certain messages in an in-box school professor from through 2002. FERC eventually culled and alert users that they may have forgot- Houston who recently the trove to remove the most sensitive and ten about an important message. Other wrote a 960-page book personal data, after receiving complaints. researchers use it to develop systems explainingV the fundamentals of energy Even so, the “Enron e-mail corpus,” as that automatically organize or summa- markets. His most lasting legacy, however, the cleaned-up version is now known, rize messages. Much of today’s software may involve thousands of e-mails he wrote remains the largest public-domain data- for detecting fraud, combating terrorism, more than a decade ago at Enron. base of real e-mails in the world—by far. and mining workplace behavioral patterns Kaminski, a former managing direc- This corpus is valuable to computer over e-mail has been somehow shaped by

DANIEL ZENDER DANIEL tor for research who warned repeatedly scientists and social-network theorists in the data set.

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Metric tons of carbon Metric tons of carbon dioxide that could be Upfront dioxide that will be bur- buried in the U.S. alone, TRILLION3 15 ied in the U.S. this year. according to geologists. MILLION

“It’s like we are studying yeast,” says attachments, and mapping the senders identifying the commitments people make William Cohen, a Carnegie Mellon Uni- and recipients to Enron’s organizational over e-mail. Jafar Adibi, who worked on versity computer scientist who helped put structure. The corpus, at first more than an early map of the Enron social network, the corpus in a database that could be 517,431 e-mails, was whittled down to says he still gets inquiries every month, mined by researchers. “It’s studied and 200,000 by 2004. more and more from researchers outside experimented on because it is a very well A research ecosystem still blooms the United States. understood model organism. [The e-mail around the corpus because there is noth- Researchers who have worked with generated by] Enron is similar. People ing else like it in the public domain. If it the corpus know there won’t be another are going to keep using it for a long time.” didn’t exist, research into business e-mails one like it. FERC released the e-mails The Enron e-mails were given their could be done only by people with access back when the world still had a lot to learn extended life by scientists at MIT, Carn- to big corporate or government serv- about online privacy. The harms to people egie Mellon University, and the nonprofit mentioned—most of whom were inno- research institute SRI International. Ten Researchers who have cent of any wrongdoing at Enron—were years ago, these researchers were collabo- worked with the corpus quickly apparent. Social Security num- rating on the DARPA-funded CALO proj- know there won’t be bers and even bank records were in the ect, which stands for “Cognitive Assistant files. Though much private data has been that Learns and Organizes,” and whose another one like it. removed, browsing hundreds of e-mails in biggest claim to fame is giving rise to Kaminski’s “sent” folder, I found a home Apple’s Siri software. For CALO, the ers. That probably would exclude social phone number, his wife’s name, and an researchers were cobbling together much science, organizational, and linguistics unflattering opinion he held of a former smaller e-mail data sets to analyze. researchers—many of whom have used colleague. At the time the e-mails were NTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY BATTERY DATA,EV STOCK, NISSAN LEAF, HYBRID CARS.COM EV SALES SALES EV CARS.COM HYBRID LEAF, NISSAN STOCK, DATA,EV BATTERY AGENCY ENERGY NTERNATIONAL When the Enron e-mails were posted the corpus to glean valuable insights into first released, Kaminski, the manager of I in 2003, the researchers realized that corporate culture, says Owen Rambow, a about 50 employees at Enron, said he was they could be extremely useful for test- Columbia University professor involved most disturbed to see his back-and-forth ing algorithms that could process written in a research project that used the Enron communications about HR complaints language and form the basis of intelli- corpus and received a $510,000 grant and job candid ates become public.

gent workplace tools. Because FERC had from the National Science Foundation. Today, many people who work in SALES, HYBRID EMISSIONS, , posted the e-mails in an unusable for - Since 2010, about 30 papers a year highly regulated industries like ﬁnance mat, MIT’s Leslie Kaelbling purchased have cited the original paper that pre- avoid putting sensitive information in the raw files from a government con- sented the Enron corpus, Carnegie Mel- their e-mails. Kaminski, who later served tractor for $10,000, and others spent lon’s Cohen estimates. This year, for as a managing director at Citigroup, notes time cleaning up the data—weeding out instance, researchers at HP Labs turned that the acronym “LTOL” became popular duplicates, organizing folders, taking to the corpus to demonstrate an artiﬁcial- e-mail lingo in the years following Enron. . DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY EV ENERGY OF DEPARTMENT .

out the remaining private e-mails and intelligence program for automatically It stands for “Let’s take this o¡ine.” U.S

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GM EV1 1997 2013 NISSAN LEAF LEAD ACID BATTERY CHEMISTRY LITHIUM ION The Electric Car , POUNDS BATTERY PACK WEIGHT POUNDS . KWH BATTERY CAPACITY KWH Is Here to Stay TO MILES APPROXIMATE RANGE MILES INFLATION BEFORE Sales of new-wave electric vehicles in , ADJUSTED PRICE , SUBSIDIES the ﬁrst three years after their introduction in the U.S. exceeded the number of hybrids sold in their ﬁrst three years. Last year, 435,000 hybrids were sold TOP COUNTRIES FOR EVs in the U.S., or 3 percent of the market. These account for nearly 80 percent of the world’s overall stock.

, U.S. JAPAN FRANCE CHINA U.K. , FIRST HALF , , , , , , ‘13 EVs ‘12 ‘11 1897 Electric 1888 German engineer vehicles enter Andreas Flocken builds the New York what is widely considered ‘022 HYBRIDS City taxi ﬂeet. the world’s ﬁrst four- ‘00 ‘01 AVERAGE wheeled electric car. EMISSIONS , , , PER MILE Pounds of CO2

1930s Electric vehicles are made virtually 1912 Worldwide obsolete by cheap .87 CHEAPER BATTERIES electric-vehicle gasoline for cars with INTERNAL stock reaches internal-combustion COMBUSTION Some $8.7 billion in R&D spending by governments 30,000. engines. worldwide has helped to lower the cost of batteries. That means electric cars can cost less or have longer ranges for the same price. .62 PLUGIN HYBRID

1997 Toyota begins 1996 To meet California .57 selling the Prius, emission standards, HYBRID $1,000 $485 the world’s ﬁrst General Motors produces per kWh per kWh commercial hybrid, in and begins leasing the EV1. Japan. .54 ALL ELECTRIC

“HYBRID” refers to vehicles that, like the Toyota Prius, combine an Nissan Global EV Global internal-combustion engine with one or more electric motors but do not draw 2010 2011 2012 releases the stock hits new EV stock electricity from the grid. “Electric vehicle” refers to both plug-in hybrids like all-electric Leaf. peak of 50,000. passes 180,000. the Chevrolet Volt and plug-in vehicles powered solely by a battery, like the Nissan Leaf.

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$3 million: Amount that Russian Internet entrepre- Upfront neur Dmitry Itskov spent to create Global Future 2045, a gathering of so-called transhumanists who hope to download their minds into android bodies.

Johnson & Johnson has partnered A Chip That Zeros In on Cancer with MGH to develop the new chip into a commercial product. Like some other Technologies that can pull tumor This could oer the ability not only to devices in development, it isolates rare cells from patients’ blood are detect cancer earlier but also to monitor cancer cells by discarding all red blood providing an unprecedented look it over time. That’s important because as cells and white blood cells, which typi- a cancer grows and spreads in the body, it cally outnumber circulating tumor cells at the disease. changes, with dierent genetic mutations by the billions. Any cancerous cells would By Susan Young showing up in the cells. then be left in a life-friendly liquid, from Overall, having more precise informa- which they can be grabbed individually n the near future, oncologists may be tion about cancer cells will be increasingly and studied. using a finger-size plastic chip with tiny valuable because pharmaceutical com- Other versions of the technology, Ichannels to extract a dozen or so cancer panies are developing cancer drugs with including the device that Johnson & John- cells from a sample of a patient’s blood. specific molecular targets in mind. These son currently sells, capture the cells on a Those cells, called circulating tumor cells, targeted therapies stand to substantially physical surface, usually through a coat- could then be screened for genetic disrup- improve cancer treatment. The cancer ing of antibodies that recognize proteins tions that an oncologist could target with genomics company Foundation Medicine on the cell membranes of some, but not drugs best suited to attacking the tumor. says that as many as 70 percent of tumors all, cancers. Continued sampling would give doctors a way to monitor whether a treatment is working and decide whether to add or change a drug as the malady evolves. Dozens of companies are vying for When blood flows into this microfluidic chip, it success in this market, which is expected is able to capture tumor to reach $7.9 billion in the next few years. cells that had been One device, sold by a Johnson & Johnson circulating in the body. subsidiary, has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but it can’t detect circulating tumor cells when they’re present only in very small numbers, says Daniel Haber, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. And today’s device cannot capture the full diversity of cells that escape from tumors of dierent types. The next generation of these chips, it analyzes carry genetic signatures that Beyond the potential to improve can- however, appears more promising. can inform treatment. cer treatment, devices that can capture Advances have already been made in labs Although the scientific and medical circulating tumor cells could help biolo- and may be making their way to clinics in community has long known that cancer gists uncover the secrets of cancer’s deadly the next few years. spreads through the bloodstream, there spread. Working with biomedical engineer has been no way to capture the circulat- “The question of how cancer metas- Mehmet Toner and his team at MGH, ing tumor cells. “These are rare cells in tasizes and spreads has never really been Haber is developing a chip that can pull the midst of 100 billion other cells,” says understood because we didn’t have the out any cancer cell that might be floating Toner. The microfluidic chips offer “an tools to study it,” says Haber. “This is the

in the blood and keep it alive so patholo- opportunity to more precisely manipulate ﬁrst time that you are looking at cancer ILINGIROGLU gists can do genomic and molecular tests the blood and see if these cells are there in cells in transit. They aren’t there long, but C ERKIN ERKIN

on it. a useful number.” they are there.” B

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technology are trying, among other things, Rise of the Bitcoin Millionaires to “ensure future returns” on the currency. Bitcoin-related startups are attracting Early investors in the and dierent payment products.” In addi- interest from mainstream venture capital- cryptocurrency are becoming tion to his investment in the bar, Shrem ists as well. That’s an important endorse- its most powerful gatekeepers. founded Bitinstant, which makes it possi- ment for the currency, but it gives pause ble to buy bitcoins at Kmart and 7-Eleven. to Roger Ver, 34, an electronics entrepre- By Tom Simonite Bitcoin originated in 2009, when its neur who has invested more than $1 mil- source code was posted online by persons very time you spend bitcoins to unknown. Despite its mysterious begin- buy a drink at Evr, a swanky bar in nings, the way it works is transparent: the Roger Ver put his life savings into Manhattan, you make its co-owner, currency is produced when people carry E bitcoins. Now he Charlie Shrem, just a little bit richer. out dicult cryptographic operations on invests in startups. That’s not only because a chamo - computers, and then it’s exchanged over mile sour costs $17 (or 0.16 bitcoins). It’s an open-source peer-to-peer network. Bit- because whenever someone new uses bitcoins are immune to counterfeiting and coins, the electronic currency’s value tends don’t rely on any central authority. to increase. Beginning in 2011, Shrem Initially, the bitcoin was mostly a curi- bought thousands of bitcoins for about osity. Among the ﬁrst businesses to accept $20 each. They have since been worth as it were gambling sites, narcotics delivery much as $266. services, and a farm selling alpaca socks. Now Shrem, 23, is a millionaire—and Yet Shrem and others have been think- one of a handful of bitcoin investors who ing strategically, creating companies that are sinking their windfalls back into the comply with the law. They intend to make lion of bitcoin gains in more than a dozen bitcoin economy, starting companies and bitcoins a widely used form of money. startups. Like many enthusiasts, Ver was investing in others. “Infrastructure is what One reason to do so is that the number drawn to the bitcoin because of his liber-

we need,” says Shrem. “We’ve got to build, of bitcoins is limited: there’s a theoretical tarian views. He believes such decentral- NSTRUMENTS I build, build: ﬁnancial software, exchanges, maximum of 21 million, of which 11.4 mil- ized currencies, if they replaced national RECON RECON lion have been “mined” so far. That means ones, could make it impossible for govern- ,

BITCOIN VALUE the more people buy and use bitcoins, the ments to “ﬁnance their wars” by printing ERNARD more they tend to be worth. Anthony money. Mainstream investors, Ver says, B

Gallippi, CEO of Bitpay, a company that may be unaware of the implications. “I OUISE L $107 helps online stores accept payment in bit- don’t think they fully understand how rev-

As of August 1 coins, says early buyers reinvesting in the olutionary Bitcoin will be,” he says. JESSICA

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Maximum employment expected at the New Upfront York City “factory of the future” run by Shape- ways, a company that uses 3-D printing to 50 make custom products.

QUESTIONS

Justin Rattner The head of Intel’s labs wants his company to move faster, even at smaller scales.

Intel has a new approach to get technology to market, called the “lab venture.” Some technologies, like silicon photonics, will be commercialized while they’re still in the labs. Why? The problem, and it’s not unique to Intel, is businesses are busy with their current products and customers. And someone [from labs] comes along and says, “If you just put another $50 million into this, we’ll have this great product”—that rarely happens.

What changes to conventional electronic chips will be needed to keep pace with Moore’s Law? We’re in a period of fairly rapid innovation. The industry built the same transistor for 40 years, and it just got smaller. [Then] at 65 nano- The Avatar Will See You Now meters transistors were leaking a lot, consuming a lot of power when they Medical centers are testing pilot project, Paul Carlisle, the director of weren’t even turned on. So at 45 friendly ways to reduce the rehabilitation services, looks on. But the nanometers we went to high-k metal need for office visits by reaching ultimate goal is for the routine to be done gates [which work better at small from a patient’s home. scales] and literally changed every- into patients’ homes. “It would change our whole model,” thing: the architecture, the materi- By Jessica Leber says Carlisle, whose hospital is looking als, the manufacturing process. Two for creative ways to reduce the pressures generations after that and we’re at ost patients who enter the gym of on its overextended budget and sta . “We 3-D transistors. the San Mateo Medical Center in don’t want to replace therapists. But in MCalifornia are there to work with some ways, it does replace the need to Is it getting harder to keep Moore’s physical therapists. But a few who had have them there all the time.” Law going? knee replacements are being coached by Receiving remote medical care is Things are very small, and the phys- a digital avatar instead. The avatar, called becoming more common as technologies ics is no doubt challenging. We can Molly, interviews them in Spanish or Eng- improve and health records get digitized. see ahead two, maybe three, genera- lish about the levels of pain they feel as Sense.ly, the California startup running tions and we feel pretty good about a video guides them through exercises, the trial, is one of more than 500 compa- that, but beyond that it starts to get a while the 3-D cameras of a Kinect device nies using health-care tools from Nuance

little fuzzy. —Tom Simonite measure their movements. Because it’s a Communications, a company that sells KALTENBORN BENDIK INTEL; OF COURTESY

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speech-recognition and virtual-assistant software. Global Warming Demands a Using Sense.ly’s platform, patients can communicate their condition to Smarter Pollution Crackdown an emotionally reactive avatar through their phone, desktop, or TV. The avatar Cleaning up power plants could e ects on the climate. For example, sul- asks the patient simple questions, and if be counterproductive unless fates that form from coal-plant exhaust programmed by a doctor, it can answer diesel soot is reduced too. reflect sunlight back into space, acting questions too—such as what a diabetes to shade the planet and cool it o . Black- patient with high blood-sugar readings By Kevin Bullis carbon particles from diesel exhaust, on should eat that day. The software also the other hand, absorb sunlight and heat collects data from other medical devices utting our use of fossil fuels has up, warming the atmosphere. “When you that a patient uses, such as a glucose proved a daunting challenge, but add them together, we think that on bal- meter. The reports sent to the doctor Cit might be possible to get relief ance they’re cooling the planet,” says Phil include red-flag notifications that should from the e ects of climate change by more Rasch, a fellow at the Pacific Northwest aggressively reducing pollution from cer- National Laboratory. “If we could get rid “We don’t want to replace tain particulates—the ones that actually of the ones that are warming the planet, serve to warm rather than cool the planet. then that would buy us some more time.” therapists. But … it does A new study from the Scripps Insti- One advantage of going after black replace the need to have tution of Oceanography concludes that if carbon is that these pollutants fall out of them there all the time.” every country were to do what California the atmosphere in a few days or weeks, so has done in the last couple of decades to once emissions stop, the air quickly clears. be acted on right away; charts, graphs, reduce the black carbon soot from diesel Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere and analytics tracing the patient’s prog- emissions, it would slow global warm- for hundreds of years. ress over time; and a transcript of the ing by 15 percent. Reducing similar pol- Of course, it’s ultimately important to voice interaction. lution from sources such as ships and reduce all pollution, since it kills millions “A physician’s time is always limited,” cookstoves—which weren’t included in of people a year. Selectively reducing pol- says Benjamin Kanter, chief medical the study—could help even more. lutants “is an important strategy we can information ocer at Palomar Health Aerosol pollutants such as sulfur think about,” says Lai-yung Ruby Leung, in San Diego. “For a long time, we’ve had dioxide, soot, and ozone are all bad for another fellow at the national lab, “but it the challenge of just getting information human health, but they have different needs to be carefully done.” into the system. Now the system is starting to actually help me.” Reducing soot from One big advance is the avatar itself: vehicles could pay Molly can modulate her tone of voice o more than other and facial expressions, which are impor- pollution-reduction tant in helping both patients and doc- tactics when it comes tors to trust the interactions. Sense.ly to addressing global warming. cofounder Ivana Schnur, a clinical psychologist, says that sometimes patients are more willing to share sensitive information with a nonjudgmental avatar MAGES

I than with a doctor. Eventually, Schnur P A hopes, the system will be able to inter- pret and respond to a patient’s facial expressions, which means it could be MAGINECHINA / / MAGINECHINA I used in even more complex roles.

SO13_upfront.indd 23 8/6/13 1:25 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. |NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM Upfront

This scanning electron neering, the group used tiny nozzles to microscope image precisely deposit the anode and cathode shows a 3-D-printed inks, which contain nanoparticles of lith- lithium-ion battery. Tiny ium titanium oxide and lithium iron phos- nozzles deposit anode and cathode inks in the phate, respectively. The researchers say precise architecture. these millimeter-scale rechargeable batter- The printed product ies could be printed in minutes and used shown here is roughly to power things like small wireless sensors half a millimeter tall. and medical devices. Lewis’s group has developed the materials and custom printer technology needed to print functional components besides batteries, such as electrodes and antennas made from inks contain- ing metallic nanoparticles. The specialized equipment includes a nozzle that can print features as small as one micrometer. The next step is to try to make “integrated electronics,” says Lewis. It may take many years before something as compli- oday’s 3-D printers can generally cated as a smartphone will be printable, AHint of 3-D make things out of only one type but certain printed electronic products Tof material—usually a plastic or, in might not be too far o. Take hearing aids. Printing’s certain expensive machines, a metal. They Companies already print the plastic shell can’t build electronics, optical devices, or that sits in the ear cavity. The electronic Promise objects with any kind of functions that components are assembled separately, and require the integration of multiple materi- the devices use small batteries that must Lab advances suggest how als. But recent advances suggest that this be replaced roughly every seven days. additive manufacturing could might soon change. “Imagine if you could 3-D-print the change the way electronic Harvard researchers recently unveiled entire hearing aid,” says Lewis. what they say is the world’s first 3-D- The new opportunities are not limited devices are made. printed battery, made from two dierent to consumer electronics. For another electrode “inks.” Led by Jennifer Lewis, advance in 3-D printing, see Demo, By Mike Orcutt a professor of biologically inspired engi- page 104.

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SO13_ad.emtech.indd 1 8/5/13 10:19 AM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. |NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM 35 Innovators Under 35 2013

For our 13th annual celebration of people who are driv- This project takes months of effort. It begins with nominations from the public ing the next generation of technological breakthroughs, and MIT Technology Review editors. Peo- we’re presenting the stories in a new way. We’ve grouped ple who have been selected by our publish- ing partners as local Innovators Under 35 them by categories that reﬂect the variety of approaches in several regions worldwide are also con- that people can take to big problems. First we introduce sidered. The editors go through the hundreds of candidates and select fewer than you to Inventors, who are creating new technologies. 100 ﬁnalists, all of whom will be younger Next come Entrepreneurs, who are turning technolo- than 35 on October 1. A panel of judges rates the finalists gies into viable businesses. Then meet the Visionaries, on the original- who are anticipating how technologies can make life bet- ity and impact of their work. Finally, ter, while Humanitarians are concentrating on expand- Next Year the editors take the Suggest candidates judges’ scores into ing opportunities. Finally, the Pioneers are exploring new for the 2014 list at technologyreview account to select frontiers, setting the stage for future innovations. .com/nominate the group.

Judges

KRISTI ANSETH JENNIFER ELISSEEFF UMAR SAIF Professor of Chemical and Biological Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Computer Science at Lahore Engineering, University of Colorado Johns Hopkins University University of Management Sciences, Pakistan DAVID BERRY JAVIER GARCÍAMARTÍNEZ SOPHIE VANDEBROEK Partner, Flagship Ventures Director of Molecular Nanotechnology Chief Technology Ocer, Xerox Lab, University of Alicante, Spain EDWARD BOYDEN BEN ZHAO Professor of Biological Engineering and ERIC HORVITZ Professor of Computer Science, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Managing co-director of Microsoft Research, UC Santa Barbara Redmond YETMING CHIANG DAPHNE ZOHAR Professor of Materials Science and NAVAL RAVIKANT Founder and Managing Partner, Engineering, MIT Founder, AngelList PureTech Ventures JAMES COLLINS JOHN ROGERS KEN ZOLOT Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Senior Lecturer, Boston University Engineering, University of Illinois MIT School of Engineering

Illustration by James Graham

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Q: Where do you get your creativity? MORGAN QUIGLEY I wish I could summon creativity, but it doesn’t come when I call. CHRISTINE FLEMING I wait ... and wait ... and wait … it slows me down, I nearly stall. DAVID FATTAL Then, out of nowhere, creativity appears ... in smiles and tears, VIJAY John Santini was at night when I pray, when I watch my children at play, BALASUBRA an Innovator MANIYAN Under 35 in 2002. when mowing the lawn, taking a shower, or even building a Lego tower ... MATT ROGERS unfortunately, I cannot predict the hour. HAO LI KIRA RADINSKY But when creativity does ﬁnally arrive, full of thankfulness I let out a sigh. MARKUS There is no further need to fear, for I know that a solution to the problem is near. PERSSON ENT M MANAGE x DT O OURTESY O F OURTESY C

Illustration by James Graham

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Open- source software Three decades ago, the availability of many versions of DOS helped spark the boom in personal computers. Today, Robot Operating System, or ROS, is is making poised to do the same for robots. Morgan Quigley programmed the first iteration of what grew into ROS as a graduate student in 2006, and today his open- it nearly source code is redefining the practical limits of robotics. Since version 1.0 was as easy to released in 2010, ROS has become the de facto standard in robotics software. To visit Quigley’s office at the program a Open Source Robotics Founda- space is littered with tion in Mountain View, California, dozens of mechani- robot as it the organization he cofounded cal fingers—modules that form a robotic last summer to steward ROS, is 159,000 is to write hand. “The hands Number of industrial to step into a future of robotics themselves can talk robots sold in 2012 an app. where hardware is cheap, and it’s ROS,” Quigley says. quick and easy to snap together His T-shirt is emblazoned with a program- MORGAN QUIGLEY, ming joke: shirtcount++;. preëxisting pieces to create Unlike more conventional robotic tech- new machines. Quigley’s work- nology, Quigley’s four-fingered hand is not controlled by a central processor. Its fingers and palm distribute computing chores among 14 low-cost, low-power processors dedicated to controlling each joint directly. That greatly simplifies the internal communication and coördination required to execute a task such as picking up a pencil. Both the software and electronics are open source. Any robot builder can take Quig- ley’s design and use or improve upon it. Ultimately, Quigley hopes, these innovations will lead to more agile, more capable robots that can perform a variety of jobs and don’t cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And no longer will

Photographs by Timothy Archibald

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Morgan Quigley is working on a robotic hand that is controlled using ROS.

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1. The robotic fingers 3., 4. ROS makes engineers have to start from scratch to When he arrived at Stanford for grad- Quigley is working on various projects pos- design the functions that go into a robot— uate study in machine learning, Quigley have their own pro- sible, as is evident they’ll have an open-source base of code joined Andrew Ng’s lab, where the stu- cessors that sepa- from Quigley’s clut- rately control each of tered desk; among and hardware. Already, engineers using dents were collaborating on the Stanford the joints. the machines relying ROS are working on robots that do every- Artificial Intelligence Robot, or STAIR. on ROS is Rethink thing from folding laundry to repetitive Typical industrial robots execute a single 2. The Turtlebot, Robotics’ Baxter. operations in advanced manufacturing. tightly defined task in a controlled envi- shown here in Quig- “It will allow applications we couldn’t ronment, like an advanced automobile ley’s workspace, is an 5. Some of the circuit open-source robot boards used in the dream of before,” Quigley says. factory. Ng, however, envisioned a general- that uses ROS. robotic hand. purpose robot that could execute diverse Masterstroke tasks in an uncontrolled environment. The Unlike many children of the 1980s and signature STAIR challenge was getting 1990s, Quigley wasn’t enthralled by Star the robot to respond productively to the BOTICS

Wars’ C-3PO or Star Trek: The Next Gen- request “Fetch me a stapler.” To bring back RO eration. Rather, he was mesmerized by the stapler, STAIR needed to understand the far more mundane but real Apple II the request, navigate hallways and eleva- computer at his elementary school. In tors to an oce, open the door, make its class, he typed commands in the Logo lan- way to the desk, identify a stapler among guage to move an animated turtle around other items of roughly the same size, pick the screen—the ancestor of ROS’s turtle it up, bring it back, and hand it o. mascot. But it wasn’t until 1998, when As Ng’s teaching assistant, Quigley he entered Brigham Young University in realized that the class needed a software FROM THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION O F FEDERATION INTERNATIONAL THE FROM

Provo, Utah, that he encountered robots. framework that could integrate contribu- AT A D He was hooked. “Robots are the meeting tions from a few dozen students working : place between electronics, software, and asynchronously without bringing down the REA D the real world,” he says. “They’re the way robot when one of their programs crashed. REVIOUS S P REVIOUS

software experiences the world.” ROS was his solution: a distributed peer- P

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to-peer system designed to connect all the Any number of independent modules or cheap, academic or commercial, net- resources—technological and human— can run at a given time. Modules can be worked or stand-alone. required to make a robot work. connected for testing, disconnected for Adapting ROS for low-cost processors In 2007, he began collaborating with debugging, and reinstated without desta- is critical if the software is to play a key role Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley company bilizing the network as a whole. In this in next-generation designs. Cheap proces- that works on robots and open-source way, ROS allows a robot to be controlled sors are becoming more capable, opening software. For the next two years, Quig- by any number of computers running any an opportunity to bring the intelligence ley oversaw the ROS architecture while number of programs—a laptop focusing that has been concentrated in desktop- Willow Garage’s programmers extended on navigation, a server performing image class processors to the CPUs that manage his initial work. Released in 2010, ROS recognition, an Android phone issuing robotic wheels, joints, and cameras. Where quickly became the dominant software high-level instructions. It all happens in image recognition was once a function of a framework for robotics. real time as the robot wanders about. rack of servers, soon it might be managed Despite its name, ROS isn’t really an The masterstroke in Quigley’s design within the camera. operating system. It’s a framework that is not strictly technical but social. Mem- Quigley also wants ROS, which was enhances conventional operating systems bers of the community who produce a fin- designed to control one robot at a time, to (theoretically, any OS; in practice, Linux). ished release can distribute it themselves, move into environments that use multiple It provides software modules for perform- rather than having to house it on central robots. Settings such as warehouses or facing common robotics functions such as servers. “That’s a big deal in terms of giv- tory floors would benefit from squadrons motion planning, object recognition, and ing people the credit they deserve and of them operating in a coördinated way. physical manipulation. So if you want a allowing them to control their contribu- Beyond that, it’s not hard to imagine robot robot to map its surroundings, you don’t tions,” Quigley says. “Their code isn’t lost fleets managed in the cloud: users could have to write that code; you can simply in this beast called ROS.” send ROS commands to a data center and plug in the ROS software module. As an from there to an automaton. “ROS might open-source product that can be freely Grand Plan tie into an online knowledge base,” Quigley modified, it attracts a community of users Quigley’s ambition is to make ROS a says, “so if someone says, ‘Get the stapler o who are constantly improving and extend- productive starting point for any kind of my desk,’ it might retrieve a CAD model of ing its capabilities. robotic system—large or small, expensive a stapler from the cloud.” —Ted Greenwald

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resonance imaging, or MRI. But today OCT has limited cardiac application— OLLIN S

usually to search the arteries for plaques. R . Fleming, an electrical engineer who

joined the faculty at Columbia Univer- NDRE W M A sity this year, has designed a new type of V ANDV

catheter capable of imaging heart muscle. CLINIC CLEVELAND THE FROM AT A D FIMO E One of the primary uses of the tech- . R

nology will be to locate, and monitor GOR I ; treatment for, irregular heart rhythms that are typically caused by disruption of the heart’s regular tissue structure. In

patients with arrhythmias, which can lead . , JUNE , to heart failure, surgeons often burn away T. RIPPLINGER ; BRYAN WEBB BRYAN ; RIPPLINGER .

the aected tissue with targeted radio- M frequency energy. Currently they perform TAL CRYS HY,” J. BIOMED. OP BIOMED. J. HY,” the procedure somewhat blind, using ; their sense of touch to determine when LEMING F they have come in contact with the muscle .

wall. “Since the physi- P TINE HRI S C

cian doesn’t have a , view of the heart wall, P TOMOGRA COHERENCE TICAL P

sometimes the energy NGINEER S O E ING 325,000 is not actually being S Number of sudden delivered to the mus- cardiac deaths each cle,” says Fleming, who year in the U.S. adds that the procedure can last for hours. U ORIENTATION ER Fleming has shown in animal tests that Images of the Christine Fleming is trying to give her catheter, which uses a novel forward- cardiologists a powerful new tool: high- facing lens, can successfully monitor the beating heart could resolution movies of the living, beating ablation in real time. Algorithms that help heart, available in real time during car- distinguish untreated from treated tissue make it easier to FI B CARDIAC OF ANTIFICATION “QU diac procedures. Such technology might oer further guidance. INSTRUMENTATION PHOTOOPTICAL OF SOCIETY © detect and treat also one day help physicians pinpoint heart disease. the source of dangerous irregular heart rhythms without invasive biopsies. It CHRISTINE FLEMING, could even help monitor treatment. Her invention uses optical coherence Abnormal orienta- raphy, show the ori- tomography (OCT), a technique that cap- tion of cells in the entation of a rabbit’s heart wall is a clue to heart-muscle cells. tures three-dimensional images of biolog- arrhythmias, which Christine Fleming’s ical tissue. A specialized catheter with a can be fatal. The approach to diagnos- laser and small lens near its tip is threaded images at right, cre- ing arrhythmias could through the arteries. When the laser light ated using optical be an alternative to reﬂects o the heart tissue, it is picked coherence tomog- invasive biopsies. up and analyzed to create an image. OCT has a higher resolution than ultrasound and captures images faster than magnetic

Photograph by Beth Perkins

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Fleming is also developing algorithms to help improve the detection A revolutionary of arrhythmias by precisely measuring type of 3-D display the three-dimensional organization could provide of heart muscle. The technique works best when the tissue has been chemi- a new look to cally treated to make it clearer, and moving images. thus easier to image. But her team at Columbia is now improving the algo- DAVID FATTAL, rithms so that the method works without this treatment. She hopes that in David Fattal, a French- nanoscale features etched glass. Fattal has also used time the technology could supply an born quantum physicist or imprinted on the sur- a modified liquid crystal alternative to invasive biopsies, which who is now a researcher face—what Fattal calls display to produce simple are sometimes used to diagnose unex- at HP Labs, is a master “directional pixels.” Com- moving images. plained arrhythmias or to monitor of nanoscale light tricks, posed of grooves smaller Since the setup cre- heart health after transplants. and the feat he unveiled than the wavelength of the ates realistic, hologram- Fleming’s arrival at Columbia this year is his most light, the pixels allow like 3-D images without earlier this year was something of a impressive yet. It’s for precise control the need for bulky opti- homecoming. As a high-school stu- a new kind of dis- over the direction cal equipment, it could be dent in New York City, she interned play that can pro- in which individual attractive for use in smart- at the NASA Goddard Institute for ject colorful moving rays are scattered, phones, tablets, smart Space Studies, which is down the images, viewable shooting the dierent watches, and other mobile street from her current lab. But in in three dimensions from colors of light in specific devices. the intervening years her engineer- multiple angles without directions. The result is Projecting high-qual- ing interests have increasingly become any special glasses. colorful images that “seem ity images, however, will tied to medicine; her inspiration for Fattal’s invention, to come from nowhere,” require much larger and studying the electrical properties which he calls a “multidi- says Fattal. more complicated pixel of the heart came when she studied rectional backlight,” con- In a paper published arrays and advanced electrical engineering and computer sists of a thin piece of in Nature in March, Fattal mechanisms for handling science as an undergraduate at MIT. glass (or plastic) with light- and colleagues presented a huge number of data- Working with physicians is especially emitting diodes mounted prototypes capable of rich images quickly. And exciting, she says, because “you get the on its edge. Thanks to its projecting static and mov- creating 3-D content that sense that one day your technology particular design, which ing images viewable from can be enjoyed from all will be used.” —Emily Singer governs the angle at 200 angles. They per- the many vantage points which the light is propa- formed the trick by over- accommodated by this gated, the device takes laying their novel backlight technology will be no small advantage of total internal with an ink-printed mask task either. But in his inge- reflection—the same opti- that blocked certain col- nious use of nanotechnol- cal phenomenon used in ors and allowed others ogy, Fattal has given us fiber optics. through. One of the first the possibility of seeing Light from the LEDs images they produced images and videos in a doesn’t escape from was that of a turtle hover- whole new light. the material until it hits ing immediately above the —Mike Orcutt

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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The cofounder of Nest, which invented a thermostat that learns people’s preferences, explains what’s next.

MATT ROGERS,

You and Tony Fadell, one push a button 15 times to change it to of the creators of the Tuesday and change the temperature iPhone and iPod, started there. Part of it is that the product was Nest after both of you designed to be sold to a contractor and left Apple. Wasn’t being not designed for a user. in charge of iPod and iPhone software development your dream job? In contrast, the Nest is a lot like the I had a Mac Plus when I was three years iPhone—it’s easy to figure out how to use. old, and I loved Apple as a company. I The product that we built is basically a Determining the flew out to California [from Gainesville, smartphone on the wall. origin of a phone Florida] with my grandparents on my 13th birthday to go out to Cupertino. And there’s nothing I have to push 15 call cuts fraud, And I told my grandparents then, “Yeah, times. There aren’t even any buttons— including identity I’m going to work at Apple, for sure.” you just turn the entire metallic case. That’s very Apple-like. theft. Then why leave at just 26 years old? When we were building Nest, we were VIJAY BALASUBRAMANIYAN, Basically, I pushed as hard as I could, going to build it like any great product worked incredibly hard, built tons of and design company. You’d have great PROBLEM: Fraud over the tele- ! phone costs banks and retail- stu, built teams, built products, and industrial design, great hardware engi- ers more than $1.8 billion a year. loved it. But somewhere around my neering, great software engineering, Criminals who call customer service four-and-a-half-year anniversary at great services, great consumer market- lines pretend to be legitimate custom- Apple, we were working on another gen- ing—all those things. ers and often dupe the operators into eration of iPods and another genera- approving a transfer or divulging sensitive account information. tion of iPhones and starting work on One way the Nest saves energy is by the third generation of iPads, and I was detecting when no one’s home. But SOLUTION: Vijay Balasubra- ready for something new. there’s got to be much more you can do √ maniyan can detect where a on the back end, to make plans based on call is coming from by analyz- Going from smartphones to smart ther- weather forecasts and other data. ing its audio quality and the noise on the line. If a call purportedly from one mostats isn’t an obvious jump. There’s always more. Since we’ve place has the audio signature of a call Tony and I had lunch back in October of launched the product, we’ve done some- from the other side of the world, his 2009. I told Tony, “I’m thinking about thing like 21 software updates, of which technology can sound an alert. The leaving Apple; I’m thinking about start- I’d say five or six have included major company he founded, Pindrop Secu- rity, counts several banks and an online ing my own company, and I’m looking energy-saving algorithm improvements, brokerage firm as customers. at smart-home stu.” And he stops me and we’re always finding more. The The audio quality of a phone call right there. He goes, “You know what? A more detail we have, the more users we is aected in subtle ways by many fac- smart home is for geeks. No one wants a work with, the more homes we’re in, the tors, including the networks and cables smart home—it’s a stupid idea. Focus on more we’re learning. It’s a very long tail it travels through. Pindrop makes hundreds of phone calls per hour to build doing one thing and doing it really well.” of things we could be doing. You can see a database of what, for example, a cell multiple products. phone on a particular network in India Programmable thermostats existed sounds like. The service can then com- before the Nest, but they were awful. Which brings us back to your original T pare those files with the audio patterns The programming was tough. They were ideas about a smart home. The Nest in calls to customer service centers NES could become a hub for controlling many to determine whether a call is coming like the early ’80s VCRs, where you’d from where it says it is. things, not just heating and cooling. OURTESY O F OURTESY

—Conor Myhrvold It could be, yes. C

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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But yet you guys say only geeks want smart homes— Wait, wait. I don’t believe in networking connectivity just for the sake of having things connected. There’s got to be a really good reason why you’d want to do it. You don’t want to put networking in your microwave oven. What would it do?

So what does make sense? What might a home in the future do dierently? Today when you arrive home, the Nest sensor sees you and starts cooling your home so you’re comfortable. And if you extrapolate to the future, you’re driving home from work; your phone knows that you’re driving home, or your car itself knows you’re driving home, and lets Nest know, “Matt will be home in 15 minutes; we’ll start prepar- ing the home for his arrival.” And then, as you get closer to the door, things might change— it might turn the song list on and play my favorite music, or turn the lights on—or, when I leave, do the opposite.

That sounds like a geek dream to me— less about reducing energy than increasing comfort. These things go hand in hand, actually. Part of the promise of Nest is that we’re going to keep your home comfortable, and may actually even make you more comfortable, while also helping you save. —Brian Bergstein Nest’s thermostat uses an interface that’s simple and easy to understand.

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Hao Li’s algorithm creates several digital versions of his face.

Smarter animation bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds.

HAO LI,

Hao Li remembers or tags that are placed on an actor’s face ambitions, and the possibilities of his soft- watching Jurassic Park and body to track movement. The data ware. His algorithm is already in use in as a kid: “That moment capturing the motion of those markers is some medical radiation scanners, where of seeing something that then converted into a digital file that can it keeps track of the precise location of a didn’t exist in reality, but be manipulated. But markers are distract- tumor as a patient breathes. In another it looked so real—that was definitely the ing and uncomfortable for actors, and project, the software has been used to one that made me think about doing this,” they’re not very good at capturing subtle create a digital model of a beating heart. he says. Li tells me the story one afternoon changes in facial expression. Li’s break- Ask him if his technology can be used to while we dine at the cafeteria of Indus- through involved depth sensors, the same read human emotions or if he’ll find some trial Light & Magic, the famed San Fran- technology used in motion gaming sys- other far-o possibility, and he’s likely to cisco visual-eects studio where he has tems like the Xbox Kinect. When a camera say, “I’m working on that, too.” been working on a way to digitally capture with depth sensors is aimed at an actor’s When I ask if he speaks German, Li actors’ facial expressions for the upcoming face, Li’s software analyzes the digital data smiles and says he does—“French, Ger- Star Wars movies. When Jurassic Park in order to figure out how the facial shapes man, Chinese, and English.” This fall, came out, Li was 12 years old and living morph between one frame and the next. he will begin working in Los Angeles as in what he calls the “boonie” town of Saar- As the actor’s lips curl into a smile, the an assistant professor in a University of bucken, Germany, where his Taiwanese algorithm keeps track of the expanding Southern California computer graphics parents had moved while his father com- and contracting lines and shadows, essen- lab. But Hollywood movies are not the pleted a PhD in chemistry. Now, 20 years tially “identifying” the actor’s lips. Then end game. “Visual eects are a nice sand- later, if all goes to plan, Li’s innovation the software maps the actor’s face onto box for proof of concepts, but it’s not the will radically alter how eects-laden mov- a digital version. Li’s work improves the ultimate goal,” Li says. Rather, he sees his ies are made, blurring the line between authenticity of digital performances while eorts in data capture and real-time sim- human and digital actors. speeding up production. ulation as just a step on the way to teach- Visual-eects artists typically capture Li is amiably brash, unembarrassed ing computers to better recognize what’s

human performances through small balls about proclaiming his achievements, his going on around them. —Farhad Manjoo LI HAO OF COURTESY

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doesn’t require the latest computer to run, it places its player in the middle of a pastoral landscape that represents a unique and randomly generated world. Trees, sand, gravel, and rocks Markus Persson— are each represented by a different better known as type of block, and these can be har- Notch to his millions vested and subsequently “crafted” into of followers—is an dierent objects and tools. One mouse unlikely technology button is used to harvest the blocks, megastar. A quiet, unassuming Swede, the other to place them. In this way he looks like the typical video-game players are able to shape the game’s programmer, with thinning hair and a world to suit their whims. The blocks How good can thickening torso; his defining features can be rearranged to create structures computers get at are twin dimples when he smiles and and settlements as elaborate as the a jet-black fedora, an accessory he is player’s imagination permits. predicting events? rarely seen without. But Minecraft, an Persson believes his success is a KIRA RADINSKY, independent video game he created once-in-a-lifetime event, a freakish hit and released on the Internet in May of the sort that strikes some creative In 2012, when extremely useful in 2009, has sold 30 million copies, mak- people with unrepeatable fortune. Cuba suered automating many ing him rich and famous. Minecraft’s popularity has brought its first outbreak kinds of services. Persson is now a hero to a genera- unfamiliar attention to the designer, of cholera in 130 Radinsky was tion of young game players, who hang whose every idea is now pored over by years, the govern- born in Ukraine and ment and medical immigrated to Israel on his every tweet. Last year he earned a watching world. Regardless of the experts there were with her parents more than $100 million from Minecraft scrutiny and accompanying creative shocked. But soft- as a preschooler. and its associated merchandise. But jitters, Persson con- ware created by She developed the the programmer appears largely tinues to be a pro- Kira Radinsky had software with Eric unchanged by the money. While he lific and ambitious predicted it months Horvitz, co- director earlier. Radinsky’s at Microsoft routinely travels by private jet and is game inventor. His software had Research in Red- well-known for hosting lavish par- next project is a essentially read mond, Washington, ties in Minecraft’s name, his main $21 billion resource-trading 150 years of news where she spent material indulgence is ensuring he Global sales of online game set in space. reports and huge three months as an always has the latest computer. video games in 2012 —Simon Parkin amounts of data intern. from sources such Radinsky then Though Persson might be as Wikipedia, and started SalesPre- little changed by success, Minecraft spotted a pat- dict, to advise has transformed video games. A tern in poor coun- salespeople on rudimentary-looking Java game that tries: floods that how to identify and occurred about a handle promis- year after a drought ing leads. “My true in the same area passion,” she says, After hitting the often led to cholera “is arming human- outbreaks. ity with scientific video-game The predictions capabilities to auto- jackpot, an made by Radinsky’ s matically antici- software are about pate, and ultimately independent as accurate as aect, future out- those made by comes based on game developer humans. That digi- lessons from the reflects on his tal prognostication past.” —Matthew

LANETMINECRAFT.COM; LANETMINECRAFT.COM; ability would be Kalman success. P

MARKUS PERSSON, DIVICI/ Y OF S A FROM DFC INTELLIGENCE DFC FROM AT A D COURTE

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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Q: What makes an unifying characteristics are all be. So it’s the continuous ability BEN MILNE the same: drive, inability to play to suspend your own disbelief, entrepreneur great? LEAH BUSQUE well with others, decisiveness, basically. —Max Levchin, a DMITRY I don’t think general indierence to reason on founder of several companies, GRISHIN entrepreneurship occasion. Entrepreneurship is including PayPal, who was an can be taught. I don’t this weird process of constantly Innovator Under 35 in 2002. BRIGHT A: SIMONS think it’s like, “Do flying blind, by the seat of your these five things and you’ll be an pants, and also of constantly BALAJI SRINIVASAN entrepreneur.” And by extension, projecting this extreme I don’t think it’s “Do these five confidence that everything is DMITRI ALPEROVITCH things better and you’ll be a going to be just fine. And the better entrepreneur.” Everyone only way you can do it is you ANTHONY GOLDBLOOM I know has their own style. The have to believe that it really will AS IA/PICTURE ALLIANCE/JAN HA ALLIANCE/JAN IA/PICTURE D A ME COURTESY OF HUBERT BUR D HUBERT OF COURTESY

Illustration by James Graham

SO13_entrepreneurs.indd 40 8/6/13 4:53 PM MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY YOUR DOOR TO MIT EXPERTISE & KNOWLEDGE TRAINING & EDUCATION FOR PROFESSIONALS

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Digital payment systems dreamed up in the Web era still piggyback on credit card networks. There ought to be a faster and cheaper way. The Internet can move data from one person to another in a BEN MILNE, fraction of a second. Why can’t it do the same for money? Ben Milne asked himself that question, and the answer led him to found Dwolla, a digital payment network that could make it that led to Internet faster, easier, and safer for money to change hands. glory, Milne discusses Dwolla is on track to process over $1 billion for 250,000 con- the complex world of sumers and businesses in 2013. It has amassed $22.5 million payments with confidence and liberal in venture capital and emerged as a threat not only to the likes use of the phrase “the of PayPal but also to venerable institutions such as Visa. Yet reality is.” Milne is not a ﬁnancier or a university-educated wunderkind. “The reality is, He sports the shaved head and full beard of a San Francisco the way we exchange money makes money hipster, but he’s an Iowan who is building worth less,” he says. If his company in Des Moines. you sell something for Seated in a conference room at the $100 with a $10 mar- Silicon Valley oces of his latest investor, $66.5 billion gin, your proﬁt would be $7.50 or less if the Andreessen Horowitz, where the founders Fees paid by U.S. merchants on card customer paid with a of Facebook, Twitter, and Skype got funding transactions in 2012 credit card. “You can’t drive down the fees with regulation, because that’s the technical cost,” he says. “To remove it, you need a better mechanism for exchanging value. That’s Dwolla.” Milne grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where he passed the time playing soccer and repairing broken appliances his grandmother collected. When he was in middle school, his father, a dentist, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease but was determined to do as much as possible

while he still could: he built a public soccer REPORT NILSON THE FROM DATA

Photographs by Ryan Donnell

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ing for deals worth less than that. Compare that with the 2 to 3 percent plus 30 cents per transaction typical of credit cards and gateways to credit networks. For consumers, the system is simple: they can send money to an e-mail address, phone number, Twitter handle, or Facebook friend; the recipient will get a message prompting him or her to sign up with Dwolla to accept the money. And banks benefit because Dwolla can move money in real time, a capabil- ity no other network has. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, the bank-to-bank transfer system that credit and debit cards depend on, theoretically settles in 24 hours. But in practice it can take up to five days, creating a risk that payers will turn out not to have the money they thought or claimed they had at the moment of a transaction. FiSync also adds layers of security. Among other things, money is transferred stadium and golf course. Those actions meet three months later, and he would by means of digital tokens that confer held an important lesson for Milne. “I have done them and have a new set of authorization to execute specific transac- remember thinking, he didn’t know any- impossible things.” tions; account details themselves are not thing about that, but he figured it out and Dwolla launched nationally in Decem- transmitted. Consequently, Dwolla claims did it,” he says. “I realized that all you need ber 2010 and was moving $1 million a day fraud rates an order of magnitude smaller to do, a lot of the time, is decide what you in July 2011. By the end of last year it was than other transaction systems do. want to do and just get it done.” doing nearly three times that volume. “It Technically, FiSync is simple. Logisti- Milne started his first company, which was not a beautiful, predictable, calcu- cally, it requires that Dwolla ink deals with made audio speakers, with $1,200 in sav- lated process,” Milne says. “It was ‘Don’t every bank in the country. That’s because ings in 2001, while he was a senior in high go broke and don’t stop.’” each bank maintains its own database of school. He dropped out of the University of In a market overflowing with mobile accounts. A given institution can transfer Northern Iowa to build the business, and payment services and digital cash schemes, funds electronically within its own walls by 2008 he was racking up $1.5 million Milne’s service is unique. Nearly all elec- instantly and freely, but to go outside, it in sales annually. But he was troubled by tronic payment systems, including PayPal, needs to use the ACH or wire networks. costs. “We were spending $55,000 a year are built on the four financial networks FiSync would replace those by connecting in credit card fees,” he recalls. “I thought, that carry noncash transactions. Dwolla to every bank’s database directly. that’s insane. I’m making the sales, and (as in “dollar” plus “Web”) can avoid all of Milne has signed up only 16 financial I just sent these people’s kids to college.” them. It has built its own network, known institutions but says he is on the verge of Milne became convinced that no solu- as FiSync, that connects to banks directly. dramatically expanding that number. It tion existed and that the only way to get So Dwolla doesn’t need to pay fees to any- will take a lot of legwork, but he is ready one was to build it himself. Over the next one. It can be used in just about any sce- to proceed bank by bank. “In Silicon Val- two years, he figured out how to do it. “He nario: at a cash register, from a phone or ley, people are looking for a silver bullet,” would commit himself to doing seemingly a desktop PC, person to person, business he says. “I look at it like a Midwesterner: impossible things,” recalls Matt Harris to business, bank to bank. I have an ax and I’m going to cut down a of Bain Capital Ventures, who funded Merchants get the most obvious ben- tree. You close the first customer, then the Dwolla during this period as a managing efit: the recipient of a Dwolla transfer pays second, then the third. It’s hard work, but partner at Village Ventures. “Then we’d 25 cents per transaction over $10, but noth- that’s the way you do it.” —Ted Greenwald

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In the jobless economic recovery, When Leah Busque worked as a software engineer for IBM’s Lotus group, an online labor marketplace thrives. her favorite part of the job was attending an annual conference at Disney World, LEAH BUSQUE, because it was the only time developers in her division got to meet customers. It made her realize she wanted to start a business of her own. So in 2008, just before the financial crisis hit, she quit IBM to work on an idea she had: that people should be able to go online and easily hire their neighbors to do quick errands and other odd jobs. She later called it TaskRabbit. She assumed that the jobs would mainly attract college students who needed extra cash. But the interest turned out to be much wider. Today, 13,000 TaskRabbits bid for jobs in 14 U.S. 14% cities. Three-quarters The U.S. unemploy- of them hold bach- ment rate if you include part-timers elor’s degrees; 5 per- and other “marginally cent have PhDs. These attached” workers “micro-entrepreneurs,” as Busque calls them, include retirees, mothers, the unemployed, and the underpaid. They do everything from delivering lunches and fixing toilets to dressing up as a hot dog for a surprise birthday party (true story). Pay might be as low as $10 per task, but some skilled jobs fetch hundreds, especially for TaskRabbits with high reputation rankings on the site. The employer pays a 20 percent commission to TaskRabbit. Busque says TaskRabbit has just scratched the surface of what it can do. It recently expanded to help small businesses or event planners find temp workers without going through expensive placement OR STATISTICS OR

agencies or the wilds of Craigslist. B “Our vision is huge: to revolutionize OF LA

the way people work,” she says. “It’s about AU RE U

oering people more choice on how they . B S work, what their schedules are like, how much they get paid, [and the choice of]

being their own bosses.” —Jessica Leber DATA FROM U.

Photograph by Timothy Archibald

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When the Internet was getting big in Russia, he was in the right place at the right time. Now he hopes to do it again with personal robotics.

Then came the end of the Mail.ru, an e-mail service, he net firms can maintain their DMITRY GRISHIN, Soviet Union and the tarnish- bought cheap servers from separate fiefdom. Facebook Dmitry Grishin ing of its glories. Grishin left China and used software to has started to become very was born on home for Moscow State Tech- create redundancies. “We popular. Grishin’s response a missile base nical University with a few played a lot of tricks to create has been to try to expand in the Soviet rubles. But he had a knack for a big technology,” he says. Mail.ru outside of Russia, or Union. He programming and for man- By 2001, Molotok and “to go on the attack,” as he grew up around technical peo- aging others. By the time he other struggling Web projects says. In 2012, Mail.ru launched ple working on secret projects; was 20, he was overseeing were swept together by Yuri a Twitter rival that it built in his father designed radar sys- programmers in Florida for a Milner, the Russian financier a month; it oered big pic- tems for the MiG-29 jet fighter. computer-aided design com- who later made a killing on tures and video (which Twitter In Russia, every boy pany from his student hostel in Facebook shares. Milner made now oers too). It didn’t suc- wanted to be a spaceman. But Moscow. Grishin CEO of the combined ceed, but Grishin has invested Grishin was taken by robotics. Those were the early company, which is now called heavily in massive multiplayer He remembers seeing his first days of the Russian-language Mail.ru Group. Was it typical in games that may yet find an Western VCR when he was Internet, known as Runet. Russia to be picked as CEO international market. about 12 and being fascinated The goal was to copy U.S. at just 24? “There’s not that What has most raised by the mechanical move- ideas, much as eBay was much typical stu in Russia,” Grishin’s profile outside Rus- ment that drew the tape into copied by Molotok.ru, an auc- Grishin deadpans. sia was his launch in 2012 of the player. There were Rus- tion site Grishin joined in To be sure, Mail.ru is Rus- Grishin Robotics, a venture sian robots to admire as well, 2000. To stretch Molotok’s sia’s Yahoo, not its Google. firm dedicated to what he like Lunokhod 2, a remote- limited resources, Grishin It’s the site with cat pictures calls “personal robotics,” in controlled lander that had set hunted online for equip- and tacky come-ons. It owns which he invested $25 mil- down on the moon in 1973. ment being sold o by failed chat services, e-mail, and a lion, or about 15 percent of “That you can sit on Earth and U.S. dot-coms, scooping up social network, Odnoklassniki his net worth, he said in a drive the device—I thought it $100,000 networking devices (“classmates”), that attracts 2012 interview. His fund has was so cool,” he says. for $5,000. Later, to expand a lower-tech crowd. Even so, invested up to half a million when Mail.ru staged the first dollars each in companies like large IPO by a Russian Inter- DoubleRobotics, maker of a net firm, in 2010, it raised $912 $2,500 telepresence robot, million. Grishin has managed and RobotAppstore, a site to to steadily increase the profits download games or instruc- from ads and online games. “If tions into toy robots. you watch the performance There’s something child- of the company, then you’d like about Grishin’s interest in say he’s an innovative vision- robotics. He likes to imagine ary who built well on the busi- automated chairs that would ness model,” says investment swoop to wherever someone banker Terry Schallich of wants to sit. Or drones that Pacific Crest Securities, which fly over a wedding to snap helped manage Mail.ru’s IPO. pictures. The holdup to these Russia’s non-Roman alpha- visions has been technology. bet made foreign services Now, with inexpensive sen- GRISHIN Y slow to enter the country. But sors and software, he thinks

MITR now that Russia has more robots—like e-mail in Russia OF D

Y Internet users than any other a decade ago—are ready for

RTES country in Europe, it’s not clear mass consumer markets.

CO U how long the domestic Inter- —Antonio Regalado

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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I grew up in Ghana, where we’d inherited the Brit- ish boarding school system. At Presbyterian Boys High School, many upperclassmen were abusive toward the younger students. Once, I was made to stay awake all night in a kneeling position outside. But in my final year at school I became student council president and led eorts to reduce abuses. That experience opened my eyes to a whole new world of fight- ing the system—of being an activist. And this led directly to my becoming a technology innovator. A few years later, while at Durham University in the U.K., I transferred that instinct to try to help African farmers. They grow food organically by default, because they don’t have money for chemicals. But they also don’t have money for the organic certification process that would let them get better prices. So in 2005, I led a team of PhD students to try to implement a solution using mobile technology. The idea was that at the point of sale there’d be a code on the product. You’d enter that in a mobile device, and up will pop the history and even pictures of the 30% farm. But we realized of medicine sold in a big flaw: farmers some countries is have to be trained to bogus do the coding. This was not practical. But picking up a fruit and wanting The mPedigree Network, based to know if it is organically grown is simi- in Ghana, lets people determine lar to picking up a pack of medicine and seeing if it was properly tested and certi- with a text message whether their fied. About 2,000 people die every day medicine is legitimate. from counterfeit medicine. So we shifted the idea to pharmaceuticals. ORGANIZATION ALTH BRIGHT SIMONS, In 2007 we set up a nonprofit orga- ORL D HE nization in Ghana and rolled out a pilot, W and the next year Nigerian health o-

cials invited us to replicate the concept DATA FROM

Photograph by Nana Koﬁ Acquah

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Screening prospective parents

there. But we wanted to get to a point for recessive where a big company like Sanofi- diseases could be Aventis would use us. We learned that most companies won’t do busi- the first big hit in ness with an NGO, so in 2009 we launched mPedigree as a business. clinical genomics. You can send a free text message and get a reply in a few seconds veri- BALAJI SRINIVASAN, fying [that a medicine] is authentic. In addition, distributors and other No company performs tes. But Srinivasan didn’t parents carry a damaged middlemen can check the codes to more genomic screens for want to get mired in the copy, there is a 25 percent verify that the supply has not been medical use than Counsyl, uncertainty over the com- chance that their child will compromised. This helped reveal to a a startup cofounded by plex ways genetics plays have the disease. major Indian company that there was Balaji Srinivasan. It scans out in those kinds of dis- For around $99 (after pilfering at a depot. Genuine antima- the DNA of parents in 3 eases. With genome anal- insurance coverage), larial medicines would be replaced percent of all births in the ysis only just beginning a couple’s doctor can by counterfeits. The shady characters United States. And yet its march from research order a test from Coun- cannot get away with this anymore. If when Srinivasan founded labs into doctors’ oces syl, which will extract DNA we had not stopped these leakages in the company in 2007 and other clinical settings, from the parents’ saliva the supply chain, they could have put with friends from gradu- Srinivasan figured a suc- or blood and sequence thousands of patients at risk. ate school and his brother cessful company would more than 100 dierent The system is used in Ghana, Ramji, a mathematician need to start with a more genes linked to reces- Nigeria, Kenya, and India, with who was pursuing an straightforward problem. sively inherited diseases. If pilots in Uganda, Tanzania, South MBA, just about everyone That’s why Counsyl began prospective parents both Africa, and Bangladesh. We’ve got a was advising against it. by testing only for reces- carry a broken copy of the relationship with many of the major Their father didn’t want sive genetic diseases that same gene, then they can regional—and a growing number of them to go into medicine— are extremely well under- decide what to do: try to multinational—pharmas, including which is somewhat surpris- stood. “Anything that is a conceive naturally despite Sanofi-Aventis. In Nigeria our codes ing given that both of their research question is pre- the risk, avoid conceiving, are on 50 million packs of antima- parents are physicians. mature for a business,” he or use in vitro fertilization larial drugs alone, and we have just “He thought we should go says. “Running a business to conceive and have doc- signed up two Chinese drug makers. into computer science,” is hard enough. Your fun- tors screen out embryos We are now expanding to seeds, Balaji Srinivasan says. And damental science has to that carry the double dose cosmetics, and other businesses. And colleagues at Stanford, be rock solid.” of defective genes. Coun- new applications are emerging that where he teaches compu- Every year, three out syl is now screening the we hadn’t expected, in the areas of tational biology and sta- of every 1,000 children parents in about 120,000 logistics, supply chain management, tistics, said that if he was are born with a genetic births each year. and marketing. If you send an SMS going to found a company disease, such as cystic “Diagnostics is going to check authenticity, you’ve also doing genetic analysis, fibrosis, that did not aict to be completely rein- given good information about exactly it should test for genes the parents—who most vented by genomics,” where and when a drug was sold—as that might be implicated likely unknowingly car- Srinivasan says. “And we well as provided a potential market- in common illnesses like ried a defective copy of are one of the first to get ing opportunity to dispense cou- heart disease and diabe- a particular gene. If both out there.” —Susan Young pons. We have built a major platform for supply chains in the developing world. But back at my school, of course, they still remember me as the activist.” —as told to David Talbot

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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We use data from many The cofounder of the security sources to detect traces of company CrowdStrike wants to help adversaries and uncover cyberattack victims strike back. everything we possibly can about them. Our custom- DMITRI ALPEROVITCH, ers can find out who is tar- geting them and how. We’ve After the investi- The online criminal prob- and block cyber attacks, and showed how we could see the gation of Opera- lem was and is a big issue, that doesn’t work against Chinese navy crafting spear- tion Aurora, the but it pales in comparison to an actor that’s really deter- phishing e-mails so we could cyberattack on what nation-state attacks are mined. China’s army is not warn targets before they even Google from within China doing to this country and our going to give up and say, received one. that was revealed in 2010, allies. Google has one of the ‘Well, we’re out of the cyber- We call this new strategy I realized a completely new best security teams on the espionage business.’ What ‘active defense.’ We respect type of security strategy and planet, better than most gov- you really want is for a cyber- the law, but we’re in discus- technology was needed. I was ernment organizations, but attack to be very costly and sions with Congress about leading research at McAfee they and many other compa- risky, so it is used only rarely making changes because and had been involved in nies with very good security and only against really high- most relevant laws were investigations of crimi- practices were still getting value targets. written in 1986. We should nal activity online, working hit. The problem was not the Today security compa- enable the private sector to closely with law enforcement. security widgets and technol- nies look for malware and engage in self-defense in Aurora put us up against a ogy they were using; it was software exploits, but they the cyber world, like we do nation-state, not a criminal. I the strategy. That’s why I left change constantly. And in the physical world. Mall was briefing the State Depart- McAfee to start CrowdStrike. new ones are launched by cops protect property the ment as they crafted state- The industry and the gov- the hundreds of thousands government doesn’t have ments for Hillary Clinton to ernment were using a passive each day. At CrowdStrike we the resources to protect. A make publicly about the issue. strategy of trying to detect look for traces of the adver- cyber-world equivalent could sary and try to find out who be allowing some licensed the adversary is, what they cybersecurity companies are after, and what their or individuals to take cer- tradecraft is. We also dis- tain actions in defense of a seminate that information network. That should not to enable collective action. It involve retaliations; hack- doesn’t have to just be every ing back to destroy the other company for themselves— guy’s machine has no useful they can band together and purpose and should be ille- maybe join with government gal. But if you see your data to put pressure on the enemy. going to some other network, We’re starting to see that why can’t you go into that with some of the public dis- network for the purpose of closures about China, includ- getting your data back, or ing ones I’ve done, leading take data o that machine to the U.S. administration to mitigate the damage? Allow- start talking openly about the ing the private sector to do problem. That helped lead to things like that can help com- Obama raising the issue at panies make themselves a his summit with the Chinese much less attractive target.”

president. —as told to Tom Simonite ALPEROVITCH DMITRI OF COURTESY

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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about predictive modeling, he spoke to people at large companies who told him how hard it was for them to make sense of data they had collected. Many companies didn’t even have anyone who could do it. That gave Goldbloom the idea: he would create a website where data scientists could compete to win cash in their spare time by solving such problems for companies. He didn’t know much about programming, so he taught himself to code and built the website in his bedroom in Melbourne, Australia. The site launched in 2010 with a contest that Goldbloom conceived and spon- sored himself: $1,000 to the person who could determine most accurately how countries would vote in the annual Euro- vision Song Contest. The BBC picked up the story, as did the tech news site Slash- dot, which helped Goldbloom get the attention of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and NASA. The insurance company Allstate oered $6,000 to whoever could come up with an algorithm for predicting the bodily- injury liability payments that result from accidents involving particular kinds of $110,000 cars. An actuarial con- Common entry-level sultant in Australia salary for a data sci- took that prize. entist in Silicon Valley As more and more companies began put- Anthony Goldbloom had been a ting forward challenges, more and more data analyst when he founded Kaggle, a data geeks joined Kaggle to vie for the A startup called startup that helps companies outsource opportunities. Now the user base exceeds thorny problems to scientists like him. 100,000, large enough to give the com- Kaggle tries Yet when he was launching Kaggle, he pany another revenue stream: for a fee, to bring smart relied on no data at all. He just ﬁgured it it will match up companies with speciﬁc people to knotty would work. top performers. SCIENCE Back in 2008, Goldbloom was tak- “If you look around in the professional ATA

D problems. ing a break from his job as an analyst at world, I can’t think of another labor mar- the Australian Treasury. He had a report- ket that’s truly meritocratic,” Goldbloom NSIGHT

I ANTHONY GOLDBLOOM, ing internship at The Economist in Lon- says. “That’s what we’re trying to create: don—a position he snagged by winning the better you are, the more you earn, the A FROMA T

DA an essay contest. While working on a story more work you get.” —Rachel Metz

Photograph by Winni Wintermeyer

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Q: How do you know whether a technology JULIE KIENTZ will stimulate connections between people? ERIC MIGICOVSKY It is not the inherent around them. Design is about STEVE properties of a tech- blending vision, technology, and RAMIREZ nology that deter- beauty together to create tools A: YU ZHENG mine its success. that inspire passionate people to The key is to make sure that realize novel experiences. LAURA SCHEWEL a particular technology meets —Danah Boyd, a social- the needs of those who wish to networking researcher for Micro- LINA NILSSON connect and that they ﬁnd the soft who was an Innovator PER OLA technology so beneﬁcial that Under 35 in 2010. KRISTENSSON they share it with the people D BOY DANAH OF COURTESY

Illustration by James Graham

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If you want to use technology to make life better for people with autism and their families, the trick is to make the technology secondary.

JULIE KIENTZ,

Julie Kientz is an expert in human-computer interaction. But unlike many other computer scientists, she spends much of her time far away from a computer screen, figuring out the human side of the equation. With her people-first perspective on technology, the University of Wash- ington professor is at the forefront of an emerging idea: using relatively simple and common computing tools to improve human health. Kientz has created novel ways of helping people with sleep disorders and families with autistic children, such as a program that uses Twitter to help track key developmental milestones. “I think a lot of people in our area are like, ‘I have a hammer, let’s find a nail,’” says A. J. Brush, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “She’s really thinking hard about what’s the challenge, how to address it, how do I understand it.”

Kientz’s methods were formed in By working as therapist and invisible to the child. But graduate school at Georgia Tech. Her doc- a therapist and notes and chart inputs made their way toral advisor, Gregory Abowd, an expert talking to others, 1 in 88 automatically into a database and were in interactive computing and its use in Kientz identified Proportion of U.S. synched with video recordings of each ses- health care, happens to have two sons with problems with children diagnosed sion. This meant therapists could project autism. His dedication to them inspired the paper-based with autism progress graphs at meetings and pinpoint Kientz to investigate technology that method. One was moments when a child didn’t perform as could improve their care. But she didn’t that multiple therapists might need to well as expected. They could immediately begin with the technology. She trained review a child’s records, but there was only access video from that moment in a ther- to be a therapist for autistic children and one copy of the binder ﬁlled with hand- apy session; in one instance, therapists worked as one for a year and a half. marked charts and notes. And with data reviewed the video and agreed that they During sessions with an autistic child, points trapped on paper, there wasn’t a each had dierent standards for a “right” a therapist might ask the child to point good way to visualize broader trends or response. As a result, the child was given to a speciﬁc item, like an apple, from an review negative blips in a child’s otherwise credit for mastering a skill and could array of objects; to imitate a word or ges- positive progress. move on to new challenges. ture; or to copy the therapist’s arrange- Kientz’s solution was for therapists To Kientz, this human-centered use of ment of blocks. Therapists use pen and to use a digital recording pen and spe- computing was an antidote to frustrating paper to chart the child’s ability to per- cial paper that could digitize their writ- internships she had held as an undergrad- form such tasks over time. ing. The change was unobtrusive to the uate at the University of Toledo, including

Photographs by Michael Hanson

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one at Compaq in which she wrote debugging programs for a microchip. “It was really hard for me to see that connection between what I thought was the really impactful work and what I was doing on a day-to-day basis,” she says, speaking in an oce littered with geek ephemera such as a software engineer Barbie doll. (Kientz is married to Washington professor Shwetak Patel, an Innovator Under 35 in 2009.) Through her work with autistic children, Kientz learned that federal health ocials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were looking for ways to spot signs of autism and developmental delays earlier in children’s lives. When she dove in, interviewing parents and doctors, she realized that many families were already recording information the government was looking for, but their formats— snapshots, video, baby books—were hard to integrate with the conventional track- ing data gathered by health professionals. Kientz wondered if there was a way to combine the two kinds of data gathering. That led her to build a computer program called Baby Steps while she was still in grad school. It combined traditional baby- book functions (asking parents to post pictures of sentimental moments like a child’s first trip to the zoo or to Grandma’s house) with ways to record specific developmental milestones (is the baby making eye contact?). Baby Steps has been tested by a handful of families, and Kientz has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore whether the program could scale up to track milestones for any child in Washington state whose parents want to take part. In this project, too, Kientz is deciding how to develop the technology only after first understanding how people might use it. She found that many Hispanic families in Washington don’t have home PCs and are more likely to go online using phones. So she added phone-friendly features such as the ability to respond to

SO13_visionaries.indd 55 8/6/13 5:52 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW How VOL. |NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMhe INNOVATORS: THE VISIONARIES prompts from text messages or Twit- ter. For example, parents can follow a Twitter account that corresponds to invented the month their child was born. They might get a prompt that includes an the age-appropriate milestone and a code so that their reply will get ﬁled in the smart database. They might see:

@BabySteps_Nov2012: Does watch. your baby turn his/her head in the ERIC MIGICOVSKY, direction of a loud noise? #baby68

And then they could respond:

@juliekientz: #Yes #Maya turns her head in the direction of a loud noise #baby68

For another project, Kientz is trying to make it much easier for people with sleep disorders to figure out what’s wrong. Typically, they might have to go to a lab and get loaded up with electrodes for the night; later, they might sit in front of specialized equipment to test things like how their reaction time suers when they’re experiencing a sleep deficit. Kientz wanted to help people do all this themselves, at home. So she and collaborators from UW’s medical and nursing programs built a prototype called Lullaby. It’s a box with light, temperature, and motion sensors sticking out, wired to a computer and a touch-screen tablet. Patients wear an unobtrusive commercial gadget such as the Fitbit, which tracks exercise by day and sleep patterns by night. They don’t have to fill out sleep logs, which are notoriously inaccurate. And to replace the lab exams measuring reaction times, Kientz’s group developed a smartphone app that lets people test It’s 2008. Eric Migicovsky is rack- ping the handlebars while veering through themselves. ing up kilometers every day on his sturdy tra£c between those picturesque canals. Getting inspiration from actual blue opafiets—the no-nonsense bicycle “I read a survey that said the average human problems is leading Kientz beloved by Netherlanders. He’s wheeling person pulls out their cell phone 120 times and her graduate students in sur - to classes at Delft University of Technol- a day,” he says. “It occurred to me, ‘Hey, SOCIETY prising directions—such as software ogy and other points in a city famous for what if I could just

they recently developed to help visu- its canals and blue-and-white pottery. do it on my wrist?’” M AUTIS M ally impaired people do yoga. “I feel Life’s great for the young Canadian Back in his dorm AT A FRO

like there’s two routes you can go in engineer on a year abroad from Ontario’s room, Migicovsky D :

research in my field,” she says. “You University of Waterloo. Except for one started ﬁddling with BBLE REA D can help a lot of people in a little way. constant irritant. His cell phone never 275,000 an electronic bread- Or you can help a few people in a big stops chiming, chirping, or vibrating. And Number of Pebble board, an Arduino AT A FROM PE REVIOUS S P REVIOUS P way.” —Jessica Mintz prudence requires two hands ﬁrmly grip- watches sold microcontroller, D

Photograph by Winni Wintermeyer

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My parents as complicated as mem- light and reactivate plea- came here ory works. When you are surable memories, such from El Sal- thinking of a memory, as a male mouse’s mem- vador in the only a subset of brain cells ory of a female mouse. late ’70s to escape from are active, and those cells In my second project, civil war. They worked are specifi cally repre- we tried to get a mouse to and bits scavenged from a Nokia 3310. 100-hour weeks to give senting that memory. believe that it expe- The mishmash became a precursor to a me and my brother and We can genetically rienced something prototype—a “smart” wristwatch wire- sister the opportunity of a modify neurons to that it didn’t. We lessly tethered to a cell phone so that it better life. Years later, we produce a sensor called it Project could display e-mails, texts, and other have all these opportuni- that detects when Inception. First, we basic notifi cations. “Plus tell time,” he ties that we couldn’t have brain cells are active label the brain cells adds. “That still seemed a useful func- dreamed of in El Salva- and then installs an on- that are involved in the tion for a watch.” dor. I can’t think of any o switch in them. The memory of a chamber— He eventually transformed his toy better motivator. switch is a protein that environment A—where into one of this year’s most infl uential The fi rst seeds of allows us to control the nothing bad happens. new technologies—the Pebble smart my interest in the brain activity of a cell with light. The next day we put the watch. Today Migicovsky runs a com- were planted between So now we can emit mouse in environment B, pany in Palo Alto that has 31 employ- junior high and high light and reactivate cells where it gets foot shocks, ees and sells watches in Best Buy for school, when my cousin and see whether a mouse and we simultaneously $150 apiece. went into labor. While exhibits behaviors that shine a light to reactivate Copycats have sprung up, and under anesthesia dur- show whether it is recall- the memory of environ- Apple looms as a likely competitor. ing a C-section, she went ing a certain memory. We ment A. Then, when you Migicovsky is already responding by into a coma that she’s place the animal in a box put the mouse back in rethinking how people might use the been in ever since. The where it gets mild foot environment A, it dis- Pebble. It could become less of a noti- parts of her brain that shocks from the fl oor. plays freezing behavior. fication display and more of an app are involved in producing Naturally, if we later put It is recalling falsely that platform in its own right. Migicovsky consciousness and wake- the mouse back in the it was shocked in envi- recently released a software develop- fulness were probably box, it runs to a corner ronment A even though ers’ kit intended to help other innova- atrophied because they in fear—it sits there and nothing happened there. tors devise applications solely for the didn’t get enough oxygen freezes, crouching and We are pushing this watch—tra c trackers, weather pre- for just a short period of monitoring. Next, we technology as far as pos- dictors, exercise monitors, and games. time. It instantly hit me: put the mouse in a com- sible. Perhaps we can Getting here wasn’t easy. Back at all it takes are these little pletely di erent box—dif- alleviate post-traumatic Waterloo, Migicovsky worked with lumps of tissue in your ferent smells, sights, fl oor stress disorder by erasing a few pals on an early version of the brain to atrophy, and now texture. In this new box the underlying traumatic watch—the fi rst generation was called everything that makes the mouse has no reason memory. Or perhaps we “inPulse”—in the garage of their you you is evaporated. to be afraid. But when we can treat certain types rented house. In 2011, the project was Because the seemingly shine a light to reactivate of depression by updat- accepted into Y Combinator, which ephemeral stu of cogni- the cells involved in making negative memories provides modest seed money, advice, tion is based on the physi- ing that fear memory, the with positive emotions. and critical contacts for technologists. cal stu of the brain, we animal immediately goes Science fi ction can often That brought Migicovsky to Califor- can go in and manipulate into that defensive pos- inform reality.” —as told nia. “If I had to pick someone who it and see how something ture. We can also shine to Susan Young will be the next Steve Jobs, it would be Eric,” says Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. STEVE RAMIREZ, But big investments remained elu- sive. As a long shot, Migicovsky posted Pebble on the fund-raising site Kick- An MIT grad student starter. He thought he might reel in can fi nd and even $100,000. “In 30 days, we raised $10.2 million,” he says. “The smart-watch rev- change memories in a

COURTESY OF STEVE RAMIREZ STEVE OF COURTESY olution had begun.” —Colin Nickerson mouse’s brain.

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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YU ZHENG,

Commuting through ple figure out, say, Beijing’s apocalyptic when and where to congestion and pol- go jogging—or when lution can test any- they should shut the one’s patience. But it window or put on a has inspired big ideas mask. from Yu Zheng, lead In an earlier proj- researcher for Micro- ect, Zheng and his soft Research Asia. team showed that Take pollution. online mapping ser- Most air-quality moni- vices could recom- toring systems in mend much better China give a reading driving directions for an entire city. But by taking gridlock air quality can vary into account rather greatly within cities than just finding the depending on tra c, shortest routes. The building density, and trick was to learn weather conditions. from Beijing taxi driv- Zheng is taking that ers, who are forced into account with a to find the smart- new project, U-Air. It est routes every day. analyzes current and Zheng’s group ana- past data from moni- lyzed GPS data from toring networks and 33,000 Beijing cab- many other sources bies and figured out to infer air quality at how to teach their any given point in the subtle methods to a city. Eventually Zheng mapping program. expects the system “When I see a to predict air qual- problem,” he says, “I ity one or even five feel passionate about Schewel atop a hill near her hours in advance. trying to solve it.” o ce in San Francisco. That could help peo- —Michael Standaert Left: Zheng in hazy Beijing.

Photograph by Noah Sheldon Photograph by Jake Stangel

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engineered to reveal any given individual’s LAURA SCHEWEL, movements.) The information is appealing to cus- When Laura Schewel worked for tomers far beyond the transportation- an energy think tank and then the Fed- policy world. A medical office, an auto eral Energy Regulatory Commission, she repair shop, and a small restaurant chain wanted to develop policies that would have been using StreetLight’s software stimulate sales of electric cars. The trou- to help them decide where to open new ble was, there wasn’t comprehensive and locations and place billboards. And the reliable data about where and when peo- nonprofit Oakland Business Develop- ple drive. ment Corporation is using the software Typically, transportation experts con- to demonstrate that people with dispos- struct predictive models to describe trac able income often spend time in Oakland patterns, or they conduct expensive sur- even if they don’t live nearby. The data, veys. Neither is particularly easy to do. the group hopes, will encourage small “We have no idea what’s happening on the businesses and national chains to con- roads. Just none,” Schewel says. “When you sider opening up shop in the city’s strug- compare that to what we know about what gling downtown, which has 400 vacant people watch on TV, it’s absurd.” storefronts and office buildings in one While in a PhD program at the Uni- square mile. versity of California, Berkeley, she real- Schewel still believes she can make ized that people actually were revealing transportation more ecient. But rather where they drive—to their cell-phone than trying to persuade people to be green, companies and GPS navigation she is focused on help- services. She thought: what if I ing businesses—which could get access to that data? It have become “the most took a year to persuade companies 25 billion powerful behavioral- to sell this valuable and sensitive Number of devices change force in Amer- that are expected to information to a small startup she be connected to the ica”—make it easy for formed, StreetLight Data. The com- Internet worldwide people to do greener pany, which aggregates and ana- in 2015 things. For example, if lyzes the signals from cell phones suburbanites can do and dashboard GPS navigation systems, some shopping near their oces in down- makes it easy for just about anyone to town Oakland on their commutes home, do what Schewel had long envisioned— that might reduce the mileage they would see detailed maps of where, when, otherwise have to drive. Naturally, Schewel and how people travel through cities. backs up that idea with data: 30 percent of With software that she and her team all miles driven in the U.S. are related to developed, Schewel can type in an address shopping. —Jessica Leber and ﬁnd the demographics of the people who drive by or stop near that location. The system shows when they drive by, how frequently, and even what neighborhoods they’re coming from. (Impor- tantly, Schewel’s algorithms analyze the movements of groups of these devices, rather than individual units. That means StreetLight’s analytics can’t be reverse- DATA FROM CISCO SYSTEMS CISCO FROM DATA

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from a modified kitchen blender. A thermal cycler for amplifying DNA requires only light bulbs and thermometers. In the hands of scientists who historically have lacked access to equipment, such tools can be powerful engines of innovation—generally, Nilsson says, at about one-tenth the price of high-end commercial equipment. “Great ideas are everywhere, but opportunity is not,” she says. “My goal is to enable people to collaborate to solve global challenges.” Along with her work at Tekla Labs, she serves as innovation director at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, where she devises programs that bring together NGOs, scientists, engi- The UC Berkeley bioengineering neers, and local organizations worldwide. lab where Lina Nilsson worked as a post- Nilsson was an outstanding, if unin- doc is filled with the kind of expensive spired, PhD candidate at the University equipment necessary for advanced bio- of Washington in 2007 when, on a whim, logical research. But many labs around she applied for a Bonderman Travel Fel- Lowering the the world don’t have UC-level funding; lowship, an open-ended program that cost of basic they rely on hand-me-downs from well- gives students eight months to “come to heeled labs or simply do without. That know the world in new ways.” She trav- biological research. makes it hard for them to find solutions eled to Asia and South America, where LINA NILSSON, to local problems such as the spread of she visited local biology labs. “It com- malaria, never mind participating in the pletely changed everything about how I broader scientific enterprise. see the world,” she says. “The discordance Above left: A rotator Above right: A mag- Nilsson oers another option: DIY. As between the engagement of the scientists built by a member of netic stirrer was cofounder of Tekla Labs, an engineering and their empty labs was jarring, and the the Tekla Labs team designed by a Tekla collective on the Berkeley campus, she’s vision for Tekla Labs started to emerge.” is designed to gen- Labs contributor in tly agitate biological New Zealand. curating and distributing open-source, The challenge now is to make sure samples. do-it-yourself designs for the gamut of Tekla Labs’ designs consistently yield common lab gear. A shaker for separating devices precise and durable enough for excess dye from stained cells, for instance, serious research. After all, scientists can be made from a discarded record everywhere need equipment they can rely turntable. A centrifuge can be fashioned on. —Ted Greenwald

Photographs by Winni Wintermeyer

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has always sought to fuse Kristensson came up with an disparate fields of inquiry. alternative: ask people who Growing up in Sweden, he are not disabled to imagine bucked an educational system what they would say if they designed to channel students had to communicate by this into narrow specializations. He method. He used Amazon’s was drawn to computer sci- Mechanical Turk to crowd- ence but couldn’t bear spend- source imagined communica- ing four years studying nothing tions—“Who will drive me to else. So he opted for cognitive the doctor tomorrow?” and science, which enabled him to “I need to make a shopping study not only computer sci- list.” Then he combed through New computing ence but also linguistics, phi- Twitter, blogs, and Usenet for losophy, and psychology. That phrases that were statisti- devices are combination launched him on cally similar to the ones gen- the path to creating user inter- erated by Mechanical Turk. inspiring new ways faces that are fundamentally After several iterations, he had changing the way we interact the tens of millions of phrases with computers. he needed to build a useful to input text. His work on tools for dis- model. PER OLA KRISTENSSON, abled people illustrates his These days, Kristensson approach to problem solv- is working on technology ing. Many people who can’t that supports super-fast typ- speak and have very limited ing: a gargantuan statistical Per Ola Kristensson is mak- The software then stores the manual dexterity communicate language model that accu- ing it easy, fast, and intuitive to squiggle or shape that you by slowly typing words and rately interprets typed input input text on mobile devices. make when you touch those prompting a computer to pro- despite large numbers of mis- He helped invent the popular letters as a stand-in for the nounce them. Their communi- takes. He’s also working on gestural text-entry method word itself. The shapes for cation speed averages one or new ways to enter text in the known as ShapeWriter, but common words are easy to two words per minute. In such absence of a touch screen or that’s just the beginning. recall; any time you want to a laborious process, predict- keyboard. Such technology Kristensson, a lecturer in com- enter such a word, you can ing the speaker’s intent can will be necessary to make the puter science at St. Andrews quickly reproduce its shape greatly accelerate the task. most of wearable computing University in Scotland, thinks instead of pecking at the let- This requires what is known as devices such as Google Glass, gestures could be combined ters again. Practiced users a statistical language model. but it will have to work nearly with speech recognition and can gesture-type in excess of “I was amazed to find that in perfectly to be of any benefit, even gaze recognition in a 30 words per minute—blinding 30 years of development of given how frustrating a bad text-entry system that makes speed on the typical mobile this kind of technology, no speech-to-text system can it easier to correct mistakes device. The ShapeWriter app one had produced a good sta- be. “In a few years, we’ll have and enter unpronounceable was downloaded more than a tistical model for the things amazing sensors that will help information like passwords. million times from Apple’s App these people need to say,” us generate contextual infor- “I’m interested in optimizing Store before it was bought by Kristensson explains. mation to create truly intelli- the flow of information from Nuance Communications in The main problem is the gent, adaptive interfaces,” he your brain into the computer,” 2010. Now the technology is dearth of data from which says. —Ted Greenwald he says. built into Android, where it’s to derive statistical relation- ShapeWriter lets you called “gesture typing.” ships. You can’t wiretap the enter text by dragging a fin- Kristensson, who has a computers used by large num- ger over the letters in a word. quick smile and an easy laugh, bers of disabled people. So

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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Q: How do you and they come up with richer and —Ethan Zuckerman, selected EVANS measure success? more nuanced solutions than I as an Innovator Under 35 in WADONGO can on my own. By this metric, 2002 for founding Geekcorps, REBECA I consider a project Global Voices [which aggregates a network of IT volunteers who HWANG a success when I no the work of citizen-media helped ﬂedgling businesses in CAROLINE A: longer have to work bloggers in several countries] poor countries. BUCKEE on it. I need to launch is one of the most successful ENRIQUE projects and ﬁnd other people things I’ve worked on. If I was LOMNITZ who are as excited about them as hit by a bus, the project would AMOS WINTER I am to nurture them. The results thrive without me. Geekcorps, are vastly better than if I worked by contrast, didn’t survive very on a project by myself—good long after my departure, which problems attract smart people, saddens me to this day. OF JOI ITO JOI OF SY COU RTE

Illustration by James Graham

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Growing up in Kenya, he strained to read by the dim light of a kerosene lantern. Now he’s making solar-charged lanterns and using them to spur economic development.

EVANS WADONGO,

Kenya’s unreliable electric grid doesn’t reach Chumvi, As a student at the a village about two hours southeast of Nairobi, where Jomo Kenyatta Uni- versity of Agriculture many of the 500 residents live in mud-walled, grass- and Technology, he roofed homes and eke out a living raising goats and happened to see holi- growing kale, maize, and other crops. Yet an economic day lights made from transformation is taking place, driven by an unlikely LEDs and thought about what it would source—solar-charged LED lanterns. It can be traced take to bring LEDs to to the vision of Evans Wadongo, 27, who grew up in a small villages for gen- village much like this one. eral lighting. After As a child, Wadongo struggled to study by the dim, taking a leadership training course from smoky light of a kerosene lantern that he shared with a nonproﬁt group, he his four older brothers. His eyes were irritated, and he designed a manufac- often was unable to ﬁnish his home- turing system for por- work. “Many students fail to com- table LED lamps that could be recharged plete their education and remain by sunlight. While poor partly because they don’t 1.3 billion many such lamps are have good light,” says Wadongo, Number of people already for sale com- worldwide without mercially—and are who speaks slowly and softly. access to electricity increasingly making their way into villages in poor countries—Wadongo decided that his lanterns would be made in local work- shops with scrap metal and o -the-shelf photovoltaic panels, batteries, and LEDs. Wadongo feared that the technology would be less likely to take hold if the lamps were simply given to people

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Wadongo (right) checks on the production of LED lamp housings in a workshop on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Photograph by David Talbot

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tomatoes. “Personally, I saved and got a sheep who has now given birth.” She also got started in a business making orna- ments and curios. As profits rolled in from new enterprises like these, the women who got the original 30 lamps gradually bought new batches; according to Wadongo, they now have 150. “Their economic situation is improving, and this is really what keeps me going,” he says, adding that some people are even making enough to build better houses. “The impact of what we do,” he says, “is not in the number of lamps we distribute but how many lives we can change.” Wadongo is also changing lives with the manufacturing jobs he is creating. In an industrial area of Nairobi, banging and clanking sounds fill a dirt-floored shack as two men hammer orange and green scraps of sheet metal into the bases of the next batch of lamps (soon to be spray-painted silver). Each base is also stamped with the Top left: In Chumvi, Above: A worker who had no financial stake in them. But name of the lamp—Mwanga Bora (Swa- Kenya, Irene Peter hammers scrap metal the lanterns normally each cost 2,000 hili for “Good Light”). The three men in helps her son with to form a lantern Kenyan shillings (about $23), which is out the workshop can make 100 lamp hous- English homework housing. of many villagers’ reach. So he uses dona- ings a week and are paid $4 for each one. by LED light, which is cleaner and less Bottom right: tions (including proceeds from a recent Subtracting rent for the manufacturing expensive than Christine Mbithi, a exhibition of his lamps at a Manhattan art space, each man clears $110 per week—far kerosene. mother of four in gallery, at which donors gave $275 apiece) above the Kenyan minimum wage. Chumvi, chops spin- to provide initial batches of lamps to vil- Some of the lamps are completed in Bottom left: Each ach by LED lamplight. lages. Residents are generally quick to see the kitchen of a rented house in Nairobi. lamp is stamped “Mwanga Bora,” the value in the LED lamps because of the Three LED elements are pushed through which means “Good money they save on kerosene. Wadongo a cardboard tube so they stand up inside Light” in Swahili. then encourages them to put the resulting the lantern’s glass shade. The LED ele- savings into local enterprises. ments, photovoltaic panel, and batteries The transformation in Chumvi began are sourced from major electronics com- two years ago, when a woman named panies. Overall, the devices are rugged; Eunice Muthengi, who had grown up the steel in the housing of the lantern is a there and went on to study in the United heavy gauge. If a housing breaks, it can be States, bought 30 lanterns and donated serviced locally—and the electronic parts Y

NC them to women in the village. Given that are easily swapped out. E

AG the fuel for one $6 kerosene lamp can Wadongo now heads Sustainable GY ORKSHOP

W cost $1 a week, the donation not only gave Development for All, the NGO that gave people in the town a better, cleaner light him his leadership training, and he is source but freed up more than $1,500 focusing it on expanding the lamp produc- ALBOT LAMP, ALBOT

T a year. With this money, local women tion program. It has made and distributed

AVID launched a village microlending service 32,000 lamps and is poised to increase D , OM INTERNATIONAL ENER INTERNATIONAL OM R and built businesses making bead crafts that number dramatically by opening MBITHI

, and handbags. “We’re now able to save 10 20 manufacturing centers in Kenya and DATA F

AD: to 20 shillings [11 to 23 cents] a day, and Malawi. Wadongo says that teams in those PETER

AI in a month that amounts to something centers will independently manufacture H worthwhile,” says Irene Peter, a 43-year- not only the lamps but “any creative thing MAT REVIOUS SPRE REVIOUS JO E P old mother of two who raises maize and they want to make.” —David Talbot

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Many

innovations is still among the biggest infectious-disease killers of can’t happen children. In 2006, during a without research trip to Kenya, it occurred to her that work the right her husband, Nathan Eagle (himself an Inno- connections. vator Under 35 in 2009), REBECA HWANG, was doing with data about cell-phone use might be Rebeca Hwang It’s one of many employed in the service of thinks the insular- ways Hwang, who malaria prevention. What ity of Silicon Valley was born in South stifles innovation. Korea and raised in if, Buckee wondered, loca- To fix this, she’s Argentina, has tried tion data from cell phones become what to link far-flung were used to intuit a she calls a mega- people or ideas. malaria outbreak’s point of connector, trying As an MIT under- origin? Locals might then to make it easier grad she studied for entrepreneurs chemical engineer- be warned via text messages anywhere to find ing; at Stanford to avoid the area or use bed opportunities. she cofounded the netting. Health officials Hwang has Cleantech Open could know where to con- spent the past few business accel- centrate their mosquito- years as CEO of erator and pursued San Francisco– a PhD in social- Cell phones can spray eorts. based YouNoo- network theory become a weapon Indeed, when Buckee dle, which helps before joining pored over data from 15 million Kenyan run competitions YouNoodle. against disease. cell phones, telltale patterns emerged. among technolo- “I could have People who had made calls or sent mes- gists and entre- chosen to just CAROLINE BUCKEE, preneurs. For go the academic sages through a certain phone tower were example, the Intel route; I could have In her work as an epidemiologist, extremely likely to later visit a region near Foundation used just done entre- Caroline Buckee thinks a lot about Lake Victoria where malaria wound up YouNoodle’s online preneurialism,” she malaria—but the same could have been erupting in force. The area near that tower service Podium to says. “But I think said when she was six years old. was probably the origi- run business-plan I excelled most at competitions in the intersection— “There’s a story my dad tells about nal hot spot—and thus Latin America and bringing all these my dinnertime conversation when I where health officials Europe. The gov- parties together was little,” she says. “I often used to should focus. ernment of Chile and coming up say things like, ‘What’s your favorite Buckee and her used it to solicit with solutions 655,000 disease?’ And it turns out my favorite colleagues are still fig- requests for fund- that have several Estimated deaths ing from entre- p e r s p e c t i v e s . ” was malaria.” from malaria world- uring out the best way preneurs. —Rachel Metz The obsession never quite waned, wide in 2010 to use this data (which because malaria is caused by “a fas- was one of MIT Tech-

cinating organism,” says Buckee, now an nology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Tech- GANIZATION R O assistant professor at the Harvard School nologies of 2013). But the results so far H ALT

of Public Health. “It’s really a shape- give her confidence that she’s found a HE

shifter. It evolves very quickly to anything crucial tool for her work in epidemiol- LD we throw at it. It’s a clever parasite.” And ogy. “The ubiquity of cell phones is really WOR OM most disturbing, she says, even though changing how we think of diseases,” she R

it is treatable and preventable, malaria says. —Timothy Maher DATA F

Portrait by Brett Affrunti • Photograph by Adam DeTour

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When I was table drops something like the city of Puebla [which has the street from her and we at the Rhode a meter a year—it’s super 1.5 million people], and it started putting rainwater Island School stressed. The actual ground takes up a major portion of harvesting systems in the of Design, my of the city sank more than the city’s budget. But by har- neighborhood, building this friend and I worked on a 10 meters in the 20th cen- vesting rainwater, you could concept. Our rainwater sys- project to develop sustain- tury due to extraction of achieve a massive systemic tems hook up to cisterns, able housing for low-income water. About 30 percent of shift. Even with small cis- pumps, and the header tanks sectors of Mexico City. We the water is pumped 1,000 terns, people could go for six on roofs that feed water by realized that access to water meters uphill from 150 kilo- months of the year just with gravity into a house. was getting worse, whereas meters or so away, which is rainwater, which is abundant We’ve installed close to telephones, pavement, secu- just insane. They say it con- during the rainy season. 1,300 systems in four years, rity—all the other infrastruc- sumes as much electricity as Our initial challenge was but we’ve been through many ture—was improving. We to make a relatively low-cost iterations, and it’s not some- became convinced that the system, which gives water thing I ever see ending. We city needed to develop an 10 million of a certain quality using a sell the systems; we’re start- alternative way to get water. simple filtration system, that ing to be able to oer philan- Number of people About 70 percent of Mex- in Mexico who lack you can retrofit onto exist- thropic microloans, we have ico City’s water comes from access to clean ing houses. We interviewed government funding, and we the aquifer, and the water water this one woman who lives in get donations, mostly corpo- one of these mountainside rate donations. We need to neighborhoods on the south- fish in a lot of ponds.” —as A design ern periphery of the city. My told to Martin LaMonica student friend and I put one system with a cistern up at her returned to house using about $1,000 his native out of our own pockets. Then Mexico City I moved pretty much across after college in the United States to help the megalopolis overcome its water crisis.

ENRIQUE LOMNITZ, EXICO M COURTESY OF ISLA URBANA ISLA OF COURTESY OF COMMISSION WATER NATIONAL FROM DATA

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$50,000 advanced prosthetics. “A lot of it just comes down to ‘Let’s make something that performs as good as the rich- world technology, for a small fraction of the price,’” he says. That typically means cheaper materials, but it’s not quite as “It bugs me sometimes the way people simple as that. Those new materials need think about technology for the developing to be readily available in the country Some world,” says Amos Winter. “People think where the product will be made. They are you can cobble it together from scrap likely to weigh less, or more, and behave problems parts, and undergrads can make it in a differently under stress—producing a semester, and you can give it away for whole new set of engineering challenges. aren’t free. And none of that is necessarily true.” Winter describes, with great enthusi- Winter is lately renowned for having asm, the massive amount of calculation created a wheelchair specially tuned to required to get the torque of the knee just apparent until the needs of people in poor countries: right at every point in the walker’s stride. sturdy enough for uneven terrain, nim- He’s more than a year away from a you ask. ble enough to negotiate the indoors. The working prototype, but he has already idea emerged when he was an MIT grad asked potential users in India what they AMOS WINTER, student visiting Tanzania in 2005; within might hope to do if they had a better leg. three years he’d worked up a prototype “The highest-ranked thing was to be able to take back for a test run. That’s when to sit cross-legged,” he says. “With exist- his real education began. The chair was ing prostheses, you just don’t get the too heavy, users complained. It was too rotational twist you need. And I never unwieldy to use inside. It wasn’t stable would have guessed that. This is why it’s enough on hills. so important to get there on the ground.” Winter learned an important lesson: Winter’s lab has the feel of a club- “We can’t just sit in this lab and make house; his students cheerfully mill about, something on the lab bench and bring it and models and prototypes litter every to Tanzania and think it’s going to work,” tabletop. At the back end is a machine he says. “It never works that way.” shop strewn with aluminum chips. You Now a professor of mechanical engi- wouldn’t gather, at a glance, that these pro- neering at MIT, Winter applies that les- totypes might touch anyone outside this son to other projects. In a cluttered back room, but Winter talks about the “monu- room of his lab, he holds aloft a pros- mental potential for impact.” He gestures thetic leg and points to a locked metal toward a mockup featuring a couple of coupling, which is, he says, the most plastic bins and some tubing: an experi- commonly used knee joint in poor coun- mental model of a drip irrigation system. tries. “When you walk with this, you To compensate for the walk with a peg leg,” he says. “In most often spotty power developing countries there’s a stigma grids in poor countries, Top left: Winter, with Top right: A knocko associated with disability, and walk- Winter’s version would welding torch, builds of the popular Jaipur ing around with this is a clear sign use only a tenth of the prototypes by himself prosthetic foot. Win- and with graduate ter is trying to design that you’re disabled.” pressure required by 800 million students. a better foot. Winter’s goal is to make a low- Subsistence farmers conventional systems cost leg that copies the natural gait of worldwide and thus consume Bottom left: The Bottom right: The much less electricity. single-axis, exoskel- speed control of the His system relies on an engineering trick etal prosthetic knee lathe in Winter’s lab. forces those who use involving plastic tubing that mimics the it to walk with a peg- Opposite page: action of bronchia in lungs. leg gait. Winter wants Winter and the Lever- “If we crack this, and I think we’re to make a low-cost aged Freedom Chair, going to, this is a billion-person problem,” leg that aords a developed for people he says. “Megafarms in Iowa can use this more natural stride. in poor countries. technology as well.” —Timothy Maher

Photographs by Christopher Churchill

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Q: What is the greatest unknown in science? JOHN DABIRI FENG ZHANG The greatest — Stephen Quake, an KUNIHARU unknown today is Innovator Under 35 in 1999, TAKEI the physical basis who has played a leading role A: ROOZBEH for life. Biology is in the creation of microﬂuidics. GHAFFARI transforming from a descrip- LIANGFANG tive science to an information ZHANG science, and it is yet to be deter- LESLIE DEWAN mined whether it will become a true physical science. BOWEN ZHAO XIAOLIN ZHENG COURTESY OF DOC SEARLS/FLICKR DOC OF COURTESY

Illustration by James Graham

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about a wind turbine that has a 100-meter diameter, then you’re talking about as How is a much as a mile between wind turbines. That’s a lot of space that could be used to wind farm generate electricity, but can’t be because of these turbulent interactions.” like a school Caltech professor John Dabiri uses his Dabiri thought of a solution while researching how fish form engineering expertise to try to understand schools to minimize drag as they of fish? how animals move in their natural environ- move about. “Fish can reduce the JOHN DABIRI, ments. While researching the swimming amount of energy that they use patterns of fish, he recently came to a sur- if they swim in certain coördi- nated arrangements as opposed prising insight: the way we’re thinking about to swimming alone,” he explains. wind power—specifically, the design of “In fact, fish in large schools To maximize that performance, wind farms—is wrong. form precise, repeating patterns Dabiri would use vertical wind turbines, Conventional wind farms are designed that allow them to move most which have been around for years but efficiently. There’s some basic are much less common than the familiar to minimize the turbulence caused by inter- fluid-mechanics theory that horizontal- axis turbines. Vertical turbines actions between turbines. That creates an you can use to explain why that can perform better when they are packed obvious problem, says Dabiri: “You space might be the case. Jotting down together—at least if they are arranged in them out as far as possible. If you’re talking the math for urban wind-turbine the optimal pattern Dabiri discovered. analysis, there was sort of a That raises the possi- eureka moment where I real- bility of redesigning ized that the equations were exactly wind farms to increase the same equations that explain fish the amount of power schooling. 60,000 they produce and “Why not use how fish form Megawatts of wind- lower the cost. Dabiri schools as a starting point for under- power capacity in the says the turbines could standing how to design wind farms?” United States be squeezed into exist- asks Dabiri. “We began to use the ing wind farms so that same tools that were used to determine they produce more power without tak- the optimal configuration for fish schools ing up any more land. It’s a solution to optimize the wind farm. We looked at that could greatly reduce the drag on an an arrangement that’s been identified as industry that often seems to be swimming optimal for fish, and we found that if we, upstream. —Kevin Bullis in our computer models, arranged our wind turbines exactly in the same kind of diamond pattern that fish form, you get significant benefits in the performance of a wind farm.”

Photograph by Misha Gravenor

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“There have been a lot of But truly understanding Zhang has been inter- taboos about psychiat- the genetics of mental ill- ested in ways to “repair” ric diseases,” says Feng nesses will mean identifying diseases since he was in Zhang. “People would the mutations causing the high school in Iowa, when think depressed people abnormal behavior. After he spent every afternoon are not mentally strong getting his PhD, Zhang working with a medical enough. But that’s not invented two new ways to researcher at the Human true. In this and the next “edit” animal genomes that Gene Therapy Research decade, we will learn much were far cheaper and more Institute, a part of Meth- more about the mecha- eective than the existing odist Hospital in Des nisms that lead to these technology. One method in Moines. Though the gene neurological problems. particular, called CRISPR, therapies available at the And that will change our promises to change how time turned out to be too way of interacting with genomic engineering is risky for widespread use these people, and it will done. It allows researchers in humans, Zhang never Genomic also change how we can to precisely snip out a short gave up hope of finding treat them.” sequence of DNA so that ways to directly fix the Zhang is an assis- they can substitute other genetic mutations behind research tant professor at MIT and genetic material or simply many diseases, using the one of only 11 core faculty delete the sequence. increasing capabilities may finally members at the Broad By inserting genetic of genomic engineering. Institute, a leading center mutations that others These days, bolstered by help of genomic research. He’s have linked to autism and the success of his editing spent much of his brief but schizophrenia into human tools and other genomic dispel the impressive career devel- stem cells that mature advances, he is working oping tools to understand into neurons, Zhang is to translate the technol- ignorance how the brain functions, able to create brain cells ogy into actual human including what goes wrong with the specific genetic therapies and exploring shrouding in people with mental ill- errors linked to those opportunities to start a nesses. As a graduate conditions. This makes company. student at Stanford, he it possible to study the —David Rotman many played a key role in devel- abnormal cells directly: oping optogenetics, which Do the neurons look dif- types of uses light to aect the ferent? Are there bio- behavior of living animals chemical clues to what is mental by controlling specific going wrong? He has also neurons; he then used the engineered mice with the GY NER illness. technique in mice to pin- mutations to study how E point brain cells that play the changes aect behav- FENG ZHANG, a role in depression. ior. Such research could EPARTMENT OF OF EPARTMENT

not only help identify the D .

causes of the disorders U.S but suggest ways to identify and test drugs to treat them—and his genome- editing tools may even one day provide a way to

“ﬁx” the mutations. FROM DATA SPREAD: PREVIOUS

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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as fast and 10 times as energy ecient as silicon transistors. Takei’s goal is to build circuits and sensor networks that simultaneously exploit the properties of several materials, each chosen because it oers a speciﬁc advantage. Nanoma- terials made of compound semiconductors could be used to add high-speed radio-frequency components and e- cient light emitters to silicon chips. But there is not yet a way to cheaply and reliably add such nanoscale components. Existing strategies involve highly specialized procedures for growing these materials on silicon or attaching them to silicon wafers; such methods are expensive and may not be practical for manufacturing. Printing processes like Takei’s could be an attractive alternative.

Methods: In the process he uses to print compound- semiconductor nanomaterials, Takei grows thin ﬁlms of the chosen material on a suitable substrate, uses a lithography technique to create strips in the material, and releases the patterns from the substrate with a chemical etchant. He can then transfer the nanomaterial to a range of new surfaces, including silicon wafers and bendable plastics, by using a silicone rubber stamp that picks up the mate- A novel fabrication Innovation: Kuniharu rial and prints it. Takei, a professor at step for nano- Japan’s Osaka Pre- Next steps: Takei’s materials could fecture University, printing methods lead to fast, energy- has led the develop- could be used to ment of cheap and produce electronic ecient ﬂexible robust methods for devices that exploit electronics. “printing” uniform, the properties of ultrathin patterns of dierent types multiple materials. For example, he KUNIHARU TAKEI, of nanoelectronics on a wide range says, organic light-emitting diodes of surfaces. could be combined with transistors Kuniharu Takei An early prototype made of inorganic nanomaterials to is exploring new of electronic skin Why it matters: Nanoscale components make low-power, bendable displays. ways of printing uses a plastic sub- made of materials other than silicon He’s now working on a smart ban- dierent kinds of strate and carbon could lead to more versatile, less expen- dage that would be able to sense and nano devices. nanotubes. sive electronic devices. Transistors made respond to things like glucose level from so-called compound semiconduc- and skin temperature. tors, for instance, could be up to twice —Mike Orcutt

Photographs by Keith Tsuji/Getty

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After taking a Harvard Business Inspired by the School class focusing on commercializ- courage of his ing science, and meeting venture capi- younger brother, talist Carmichael Roberts and postdocs in the lab of Harvard chemist George MC10’s cofounder Whitesides, Ghaffari helped develop a is ﬁnding ways business plan for a company called Diag- excessive oxygen exposure in the neona- nostics for All, which is commercializ- to create novel tal intensive care ward. “What I found ing paper-based diagnostics invented in electronic devices was that my goals were all driven by him,” Whitesides’s lab. that improve he says. “I wanted to work on the retinal Next, with Roberts and Whitesides implant project at MIT, right from year serving as the matchmakers, Ghaari met human health. one as an undergraduate.” John Rogers, a materials scientist at the

ROOZBEH GHAFFARI, He didn’t succeed at finding funding University of Illinois. Rogers was fabricat- for that daunting challenge. But as a grad- ing stretchable electronic devices using uate student in the Harvard-MIT Divi- polymers and ultrathin semiconductors, sion of Health Sciences and Technology, such as silicon. But the technology was When Roozbeh Ghaffari was five he shifted to another critical problem, looking for an important problem to solve. years old, his only sibling—a brother this time inspired by his brother’s sharp So in 2008 Ghaari was brought on as named Soran—was born three months hearing rather than his deficient eyesight. cofounder of MC10. The founders con- prematurely. A few things would even- Ghaari’s goal was to unravel the myster- sidered what kinds of flexible or stretch- tually emerge about Soran: he was blind ies of the cochlea—that “biological black able products they might enhance with and mildly intellectually impaired, he box with thousands of moving parts in a electronics (they even considered contact had remarkably acute hearing (and per- fluid” that transforms vibrations in the lenses), but within a couple of months fect pitch), and he was his older brother’s inner ear into nerve signals. “How do we they had settled on balloon catheters and best friend, superfan, and inspiration. hear with such remarkable sensitivity?” he health-monitoring skin patches. As the elder Ghaari became an expert asks. “How can we process both the roar- Today, the devices under develop- in the science and technology of body- ing sound of jet engines and the sound of ment add electronics and sensors to bal- machine interfaces and devices that can pins dropping?” loon catheters. Existing versions of these be integrated into the body (he now leads Focusing on a cochlear structure devices are snaked into coronary arteries advanced technology development at called the tectorial membrane, he man- and inflated to compress accumulated MC10, a startup in Cambridge, Massa- aged to build a system that could measure plaques that can block blood flow. The chusetts), Soran remained physically at what the structure was actually doing. “It new versions can, among other things, home in Los Angeles but frequently at supports a traveling wave of energy that sense misfiring cardiac tissue that causes his brother’s virtual side, standing by for can propagate along the cochlea. That irregular heartbeats called arrhythmias. nightly telephone updates and reading up hadn’t been known before,” he says. And They can even ablate tiny patches of such on his work using text-to-speech software. this could help explain how the human tissue without harming the healthy tissue Indeed, while Roozbeh Ghaari’s life- ear can detect both very loud and very nearby. As always, Soran is eager to hear long interest in the merger of biology and soft sounds, as well as a wide range of all about it. “He’ll go look up ‘ventricular engineering was shaped partly by his par- pitches. tachycardia’ and grill me night and day: ents—his mother is a microbiologist and ‘What is this disorder? What are you guys his father an architect—it was inspired doing?’” Ghaari says. mainly by his brother, whose blind- Someday Ghaari may yet build what ness was caused by retinal damage from his brother needs: a bionic replacement for his damaged retina. In the meantime, he is finding new ways to create other devices that promise to help others. While its catheters still need regulatory approval, MC10

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2. 1. Roozbeh Ghaari holds cardiac balloon catheters that use arrays of electronics.

2. Ultraviolet light is used to ax the sensors to the catheters.

3. The stretchable sensors and actua- 3. tors embedded in the balloon catheters help diagnose and treat problems.

4. A chip with electrodes and temperature sensors can be laminated on a heart.

has launched a thin $150 cap that athletes, such as football or hockey players, can wear inside their helmets to indicate the severity of blows to the head. By lighting up red, yellow, or green LEDs on the cap, the technology could indicate whether the wearer might have suered a worrisome head impact. When Soran comes to Boston, Ghaffari brings him to the MC10 lab and lets him hold and feel the electronic skullcaps and the instrumented catheters, with their intricate patterns of ultrathin, stretchable sensors. But even when Soran is home in Los Angeles, Ghaari says, the following question he inspires is in the back of his mind every day: “How can we turn technology into something useful that integrates with the human body?” And every evening, Soran is on the other end of the line, helping him answer that question. —David Talbot

Photographs by Christopher Churchill

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A nanoengineering scheme to make drugs LESLIE DEWAN, more eective by fooling the immune system. What if we LIANGFANG ZHANG, could build PROBLEM: Scientists have SOLUTION: Why not cloak ! worked for years to increase √ therapeutics in natural mem- a nuclear the longevity of targeted branes? That’s the idea of drugs, which promise to deliver treat- Liangfang Zhang, a nanoengineering reactor that ment to a speciﬁc tissue within the professor at UC San Diego. body. These targeted treatments Zhang derives red-blood-cell costs half require new drug carriers such as membranes from blood samples and polymers that are designed to evade uses them to coat polymer nano- as much, the immune system. But too often, particles. Because these particles these carriers are destroyed before look like red blood cells on the sur- consumes the drug can eectively target tumors face, they can fool the immune sys- and other localized sites of disease. tem; loaded with drugs, they serve as Though the body’s own cells are robust and long-lived drug carriers. nuclear protected from the immune system An unexpected bonus: they can also by their protein-studded outer mem- act like nanoscale sponges to suck up waste, and brane, it’s not possible to re-create toxic proteins produced by infectious this complex matrix for synthetic bacteria or introduced by snake or will never particles used in drug delivery. insect venom. If the particles ﬂood the bloodstream, they will divert most of melt down? the toxin away from actual cells. Born in Wuwei County, 45 minutes by plane from Shanghai, Zhang The nuclear power left home for the prestigious Tsinghua industry has a reputa- University in Beijing when he was tion for resisting inno- just 15. By the time he was 20 years vative changes. But old, he could have opened a factory Leslie Dewan and a col- to produce exceptionally tough rub- league have dared to invent a new type of ber materials he’d helped invent as nuclear reactor. “We were feeling on top a student. But Zhang says he “didn’t of the world. We just passed our qualifying want to run a rubber factory all my exams for our PhDs. We thought, ‘We’re life.” And he knew if he started a factory, some other young upstart would come up with a better technology and he might not be able to compete. So he decided to pursue an advanced graduate degree in engineering in the United States. Despite his accom- LIE DEWAN LIE plishments as a scientist, however, S

he has never lost his desire to turn OF LE

laboratory advances into practical TESY OUR

breakthroughs. —Katherine Bourzac C

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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the smartest we’ve been in our lives. We keeps the salt molten. A plug at the bot- The reactor also makes more e cient can do anything. Let’s change the world tom of the reaction vessel is made of the use of the energy in nuclear fuel. It can with nuclear.’” Two years later, she’d same salt, kept solid by cooling it; if the consume about one ton of nuclear waste designed a reactor that solves the main plant’s electricity supply is lost, the plug a year, leaving just four kilograms behind. problems facing nuclear power. To com- warms up and liquefi es, allowing the con- Dewan’s name for the technology: the mercialize it, she’d cofounded a startup, tents of the reactor to drain into a large Waste-Annihilating Molten-Salt Reactor. Transatomic Power. containment tub and spread out so that So far, the design exists as a 180-page For decades the nuclear industry has the nuclear chain reactions come to an document, computer simulations, and pat- built one type of reactor, called a light- almost complete stop. The nuclear mate- ent fi lings. Dewan has designed fi ve experi- water reactor, almost exclusively. There rial and molten salt then cool down and ments, each of which will cost about $1 are signifi cant problems with that tech- turn into a contained solid that poses no million, to prove key aspects of the design. nology, which uses ordinary water to cool danger of a meltdown. If those go well, she’ll still face a decade the fuel rods in which the nuclear reac- The technology had one glaring prob- or more of further tests and U.S. federal tion takes place. It requires expensive lem, though: the reactors were large and, certifi cations that could cost hundreds of safeguards against a radiation-releasing thus, expensive for the amount of power millions of dollars. And she suggests that meltdown if the fuel rods overheat; it they produced. Dewan found a solution. the future for new nuclear-power tech- produces waste products that are dan- “We realized that with some relatively nology might not be in the United States. gerous for 100,000 years. Dewan and a modest changes to molten-salt reactors She points in particular to China, which is fellow graduate student, Mark Massie, we could make them much more power spending far more on new reactor designs designed an alternative based on molten- dense and therefore a lot cheaper,” she and on the construc- salt reactors that were originally pro- says. She introduced new materials tion of nuclear plants. posed in the 1950s as a way to power and a new shape that allowed her to But though it will aircraft. Though nuclear planes never increase power output by 30 times. 437 be a long and uncer- became a reality, the reactor design has As a result, the reactor is now so com- Number of nuclear tain route to com- several key advantages. For one thing, pact that a version large enough for reactors operating mercialization of the it can be readily modifi ed so that rather a power plant can be built in a fac- around the world technology, Dewan is than producing large amounts of waste, tory and shipped by rail to a plant site, driven by what is at it reuses much of the spent nuclear mate- which is potentially cheaper than the cur- stake. She’s part of a new generation of rial as fuel. rent practice of building nuclear reactors young researchers who see nuclear energy It is also far safer than the light-water on site. as one of the best hopes for averting disas- reactors, which require a constant source trous climate change. Dewan originally of electricity to pump in cool water and looked to solar and wind power as ways prevent the runaway nuclear reactions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but that lead to meltdowns. Molten salt serves “then I looked at the numbers,” she says. as the coolant; it’s mixed with the nuclear “I realized that nuclear power is the best materials, so the reactions take place right low-carbon energy source that’s available in the liquid. The heat of those reactions and scalable.” —Kevin Bullis DATA FROM EUROPEAN NUCLEAR SOCIETY NUCLEAR EUROPEAN FROM DATA

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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Bowen Zhao dropped out of trillion DNA bases. This is Beijing’s top high school to not the ﬁrst attempt to map take a job at BGI-Shenzhen, the biological roots of human the world’s largest DNA- intelligence. But now, Zhao sequencing organization. Soon points out, DNA sequencing after joining the company, technology is so advanced he became involved in a new that it’s possible to sequence research eort: investigating and compare thousands of the genetic basis of human minute variations in extremely cognitive abilities, includ- large samples. ing intelligence. “We want to Zhao is keenly aware that know the genetic basis of IQ,” research into the genetic basis he says. Zhao thinks human of intelligence is controversial intelligence is from 40 to 80 and fraught with ethical dan- percent inheritable, and he gers. But he says that for the wants to know which genes foreseeable future, if you want may inﬂuence the trait he calls to measure someone’s intelli- “high cognitive ability.” gence, it will be far easier and Zhao’s team is sequenc- more accurate to conduct a ing the DNA of more than standard IQ test than to give 2,000 people with high IQs. a genetic-based one. Zhao is not looking for an IQ —Christina Larson gene; rather, he expects to pinpoint multiple small variations in thousands of genes that shape the inheritable What do aspect of intelligence. Perhaps uniquely in the world, BGI has both the massive comput- your genes ing power and the manpower to handle a data-int ensive say about approach to combing through the genetic clues. “We’re data how smart driven, not hypothesis driven,” says Zhao. you are? The project involves sequencing more than six BOWEN ZHAO,

Portrait by Brett Arunti

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Stanford professor Xiaolin Zheng often works in the esoteric fringes of nanoscience, but she also likes to find simple ways to fabricate complex materials that can be put to use in practical applications like solar-fuel systems, solar cells, and batteries. Last year she created solar cells in the form of flexible stickers—only a 10th as thick as plastic wrap—that can be applied to a window, a piece of paper, the back of a mobile phone, or anything else you want. These solar cells produce just as much electricity as rigid ones made of the same materials. Zheng got the inspi- XIAOLIN ZHENG, ration for this invention from her father. One day An ingenious when they were talking on the phone—he solar sticker in China, she in Cali- made with fornia—he said that it should be possible to put techniques solar cells on the walls drawn from of buildings, not just the roof. And Zheng’s nanotechnology daughter, like many could turn almost kids, loves stickers. any surface into a All this was in the back of Zheng’s mind source of power. when she read a research paper about graphene, a novel type of nanomaterial. The researchers grew the material on a layer of nickel on top of a silicon wafer. When they put the whole thing in water, the nickel separated from the surface, taking the graphene with it. “I couldn’t believe that soaking in water would do this,” she says. Zheng has demonstrated this water- soaking approach as a way to peel of f thin-film silicon solar cells grown on a rigid substrate. It turns out the phenomenon—called water-assisted subcritical debonding—had been known since the 1960s, but no one before had tried using it to make flexible electronics. She hopes the technology will be scaled up beyond the one-square-centimeter devices she’s made so far, so that the sides of buildings can one day be papered with solar cells as her father suggested. —Katherine Bourzac

Photograph by Timothy Archibald

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Regions Seek Critical Mass A BUSINESS EPOT ON Silicon Valley Can’t Be Copied

Beijing’s Great Leap Forward

World Innovation Clusters

Israel’s Military-Entrepreneurial Complex Owns Big Data The Next The Bell Labs of Quantum Computing

Read all 10 stories in this report at Silicon Valley technologyreview.com/business Additional stories include “It's Up to You, Every region dreams of becoming the cradle of tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs,” “Silicon Valley Fights For Immigrant Talent,” “The Internet’s technology. Here’s how history, luck, and sheer population size Innovation Hub,” and “Zappos CEO Bets shape competitive advantage. $350 Million on Las Vegas Startup Scene.”

The Big Question In Innovation Quest, Regions Seek Critical Mass

What’s the secret to becoming the next technology hot spot?

● There is a place in Cambridge, Massachu- setts, just off the MIT campus in Kendall Square, that is home to the densest concentration of startups anywhere in the world. There, founders of 450 companies crowd into nine floors, many in common rooms where the rule is “Grab any seat you can.” On a heat map of innovation, the place is glowing red. Sharing the same elevator banks are venture capital ﬁrms that collectively manage $8.7 billion. Fifteen years ago, the local tech scene was ane- mic and there were few investors. Now Kendall is a beacon that’s drawing more and more technology companies. Amazon moved its mobile development team to the area, Google is expanding, and drug

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Kendall has become what economists buildings,” he says. “They just switch floors.” says, but they should limit themselves call a cluster, a concentration of intercon- The big questions in this MIT Technol- mostly to “setting the table”: create laws nected companies that both compete and ogy Review Business Report are why tech- that don’t penalize failed entrepreneurs, collaborate. There’s economic value in that, nology clusters arise and what ingredients lower taxes, and spend heavily on R&D. as the price of oce space attests: rents can create one. Unhappily for regions that Then get out of the way. have spiked to $70 per square foot from have spent billions to become the next Sili- Despite the diculties, ever more cit- $35 a decade ago, similar to what you’d con Valley, the answers are still in debate. ies now aspire to become technology hubs. pay in midtown Manhattan. “Rents don’t “Clusters exist—it’s empirically proven,” One reason is that the Internet has spread lie,” says Tim Rowe, head of the Cambridge says Yasuyuki Motoyama, a senior scholar both the ideology of startup culture (you, Innovation Center, the shared oce space at the Kauffman Foundation. “But that too, can be Mark Zuckerberg) and the where most of the startups are located. doesn’t mean governments can create one.” means of participating through apps and There’s value to the region as well. Cit- Web software. Every place from Chile to ies used to try to win jobs by “smokestack Iceland seems to have created a startup chasing,” or luring big industries. But large accelerator in an eort to jump-start its existing firms tend to shed jobs. At least $2.5 billion own tech scene without expensive labo- in the United States, nearly all job growth Planned Russian investment in the ratories or even a top university. comes from startups, especially the kind Skolkovo innovation city One proponent of this idea is Brad that explode from a few employees to sev- Feld, a partner at Foundry Group, creator eral thousand. In technology, those winners of the technology incubator Techstars, who have a way of producing more winners. The What’s certain is that they are trying. developed what he calls the “Boulder The- process reaches critical mass in the web of The largest such eort we know of is the sis” based on his experiences in Colorado. intertwined companies, resources, advan- Skolkovo complex now rising outside Mos- It is a four-point plan for how entrepre- tages, ideas, talent, opportunity, and ser- cow, where $2.5 billion is being invested in neurs—not governments or universities— endipity that defines a technology cluster. a university, a technology park, and a foun- can organize and create “entrepreneurial It’s clear that what’s essential is proxim- dation. Another, in Waterloo, Ontario, aims communities” in any city. Feld says the ity to human talent. Jean-François Formela, at gaining a lead in a particular advanced startup movement is now an “enormous a venture capitalist at Atlas Venture who technology, quantum computing. The price global community with ... hundreds of invests in early-stage biotechnology start- tag there: more than $750 million. thousands of people around the world.” ups, says he visits Boston-area academic The problem for governments is that But can entrepreneurs succeed in cre- labs several times a week, trying to find the they often try to define where and when ating clusters where governments have next invention that he can license and turn innovation will occur. Some attempt to had so much diculty? “The conflict now into a company. And because there are so pick and fund winning companies. Such is between two logics on how to create an many PhDs and MDs in the area, he can eorts have rarely worked well, says Josh ecosystem,” says Fiona Murray, a profes- start a company and build a team remark- Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business sor at MIT’s Sloan School, who consults as ably fast. “People don’t even have to change School. Governments can play a role, he a kind of therapist to clusters, including London’s Tech City. One is “a government Winner Take All logic that says it’s too important to leave Venture capital investments in top hot spots, 2012 to entrepreneurs, and that you that need specialized inputs, like a technology park.” $12 billion The other is “purely focused on people and Top 5 regions their networks.” represent There is one finding economists tend 52% of $42.3 to agree on. Centers of innovation do billion in global venture capital move, sometimes rapidly, and they tend investments to go where the latest mousetrap was invented. Boston gave up its lead in computing to Silicon Valley in the 1980s, after the personal computer was developed. But who knows? One of those 450 startups in Kendall might just hit upon something big. That’s a reason any place can RNST & YOUNG & RNST

still hope—with a few decades of eort, E and plenty of luck—to become a Silicon OURCE: OURCE:

Valley too. —Antonio Regalado S ISRAEL BEIJING FRANCE CANADA ILLINOIS NY METRO GERMANY SHANGHAI D.C. AREA BANGALORE S. CALIFORNIA SWITZERLAND SILICON VALLEYNEW ENGLAND UNITED KINGDOM

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because there was no prestigious engi- military research in aerospace and elec- Case Studies neering university in the area, its com- tronics that had created Silicon Valley: it panies had to recruit from outside, and was the people and the relationships that they feared losing their talent and their Terman had so carefully fostered among Silicon Valley best technologies to other regions. (Even Stanford faculty and industry leaders. though Princeton was nearby, its faculty AnnaLee Saxenian, a University of Can’t Be Copied generally shunned applied research and California, Berkeley, professor, under- anything that smelled of industry.) stood the importance of people, culture, For 50 years, the experts have tried to New Jersey’s business and govern- and connections. Her 1994 book Regional figure out what makes Silicon Valley tick. ment leaders, led by Bell Labs, decided Advantage: Culture and Competition in The answer is people. that the solution was to build a university Silicon Valley compared the evolution of much like Stanford. And that is what they Silicon Valley with that of Route 128—the hoped Terman would do. ring around Boston—to explain why no ● By 1960, Silicon Valley had already cap- Terman drafted a plan, but he could region has been able to replicate the Cali- tured the attention of the world as a teem- not get it o the ground, largely because fornia success. ing technology center. It had spawned the industry would not collaborate. This history Saxenian noted that until the 1970s, microwave electronics industry and set a was documented by Stuart W. Le slie and Boston was far ahead of Silicon Valley in pattern for industry-academic partner- Robert H. Kargon in a 1996 paper, “Sell- startup activity and venture capital invest- ships. French president Charles de Gaulle ing Silicon Valley.” They report that RCA ments. It had a huge advantage because paid a visit and marveled at its sprawl- would not sign up for a partnership with of its proximity to East Coast industrial ing research parks set amid farms and Bell Labs, and that Merck and other drug centers. By the 1980s, Silicon Valley and orchards south of San Francisco. firms wanted to keep their research dollars Route 128 looked alike: a mix of large and Stanford University, which is at the in house. Despite common needs, compa- small tech firms, world-class universities, heart of Silicon Valley, had given birth nies would not work with competitors. venture capitalists, and military funding. to leading companies such as Hewlett- Terman would later try again in Dal- And then Silicon Valley raced ahead and Packard, Varian Associates, and Applied las. But he failed for similar reasons. left Route 128 in the dust. Technologies. These companies were push- In 1990, Harvard Business School ing the frontiers of technology. There was professor Michael Porter proposed a new clearly something unusual happening method of creating regional innovation here—in innovation and entrepreneurship. centers—this time around an existing 52% Soon enough, other regions were trying research university. He observed that geo- Proportion of Silicon Valley firms with at least one foreign-born founder to copy the magic. The first serious attempt graphic concentrations of interconnected to re-create Silicon Valley was conceived companies and specialized suppliers gave by a consortium of high-tech companies certain industries productivity and cost in New Jersey in the mid-1960s. They advantages. Porter postulated that by The reasons were, at their root, cul- recruited Frederick Terman, who was retir- bringing these ingredients together into tural. It was Silicon Valley’s high rates of ing from Stanford after having served as a cluster, regions could artificially ferment job-hopping and company formation, its provost, professor, and engineering dean. innovation. professional networks and easy informa- Terman, sometimes called the “father Porter and legions of consultants fol- tion exchange, that lent the advantage. of Silicon Valley,” had turned Stanford’s lowing his methodology prescribed top- Valley firms understood that collaborat- fledgling engineering school into an inno- down clusters to governments all over the ing and competing at the same time led vation engine. By encouraging science and world. The formula: select a hot industry, to success—an idea even reflected in Cali- engineering departments to work together, build a science park next to a research fornia’s unusual rule barring noncompete linking them to local firms, and focusing university, provide subsidies and incen- agreements. The ecosystem supported research on the needs of industry, he cre- tives for chosen industries to locate there, experimenting, taking risks, and shar- ated a culture of coöperation and informa- and create a pool of venture capital. ing the lessons of success and failure. In tion exchange that still defines the region. Sadly, the magic never happened— other words, Silicon Valley was an open That was the mixture New Jersey anywhere. Hundreds of regions worldwide system—a giant, real-world social net- wanted to replicate. It was already a lead- collectively spent tens of billions of dollars work that existed long before Facebook. ing high-tech center—home to the labora- trying to build their versions of Silicon Val- It also doesn’t hurt that Silicon Valley tories of 725 companies, including RCA, ley. I don’t know of a single success. has excellent weather, is close to moun- Merck, and the inventor of the transis- What Porter and Terman failed to rec- tains and the ocean, and has a myriad of tor, Bell Labs. Its science and engineer- ognize is that it wasn’t academia, industry, state-park hiking trails. These help foster a ing workforce numbered 50,000. But or even the U.S. government’s funding for culture of optimism and openness.

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From 1995 to 2005, 52 percent of dynamic technology center. More recently, Silicon Valley startups had one or more Leaders Lee founded Innovation Works, a Beijing- people born outside the U.S. as founders, based incubator and venture capital firm twice the rate in the U.S. as a whole. Immi- dedicated to nurturing Chinese startups. grants like me were able to learn the rules Beijing’s Great Beijing now is not just competent of engagement, create our own networks, in software and gadgets. It has its own and participate as equals. These days, the Leap Forward brands that are bound to lead in their campuses of companies such as Google own directions. “I’ve seen startup clusters resemble the United Nations. Their caf- Kai-Fu Lee trained an army of Chinese all over the world,” says Steve Blank, an eterias don’t serve hot dogs; they serve engineers. Now they’re turning Beijing entrepreneur and business school profes- Chinese dishes, and curries from both into a technology powerhouse. sor who recently returned from a visit to northern and southern India. China. “But Beijing blew me away. They’ve This is the diversity—a kind of free- built an ecosystem on a scale that puts dom, really—in which innovation thrives. ● Cities all over the world have tried to Boston or Seattle to shame. Beijing com- The understanding of global markets that duplicate Silicon Valley. But only one has pressed 30 years of startup learning into immigrants bring with them and the links emerged as a serious contender: Beijing. five years.” to their home countries have given the China’s political, financial, and cul- Lee, who is 51, was born in Taiwan and Valley an unassailable advantage as it’s tural capital has been on a startup tear moved with his family to the U.S. in 1973. evolved from radios and computer chips in recent years. In 2011, Chinese venture As a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon, to search engines, social media, medical capital firms invested $13 billion, half in Pittsburgh, he was struck by the tech- devices, and energy technology. as much as their U.S. counterparts—30 nological gap between the U.S. and China. The Valley is a meritocracy that’s percent of it in Beijing. (The total invest- While he wrote and debugged his code at far from perfect, however. Some of its ment dipped sharply in 2012 in the face of a computer, a classmate from the People’s flaws tear at the very fabric that makes it a national economic slowdown.) Beijing Republic executed those tasks on paper. unique. Women and minorities are largely hosts rare concentrations of wealth and “That opened my eyes about the back- absent from the ranks of company found- some 70 institutions of higher learning, wardness of Chinese computing in gen- ers and boards. Venture capitalists tend including China’s best computer science eral, not to mention innovation,” he says. to fund startups that produce short-term departments. Like New York, it’s a magnet At that time, China’s government had results—leading to a preponderance of for ambitious young people. Like Washing- set in motion ambitious plans to break social-media and photo-sharing apps. ton, D.C., it’s the center of the national gov- into high-tech and electronics manufac- Real-estate prices are so high that most ernment. Beijing produces what few other turing. In the 1980s it opened the Zhong- Americans can’t aord to relocate there. places can—giant, fast-growing tech com- guancun technology hub in Beijing (now All these things slow the Valley down, panies, like Baidu (now worth $31 billion), home to Lenovo), the first of 54 similar but they won’t stop it. The only serious Lenovo, and smartphone maker Xiaomi, science and innovation parks that took challenge I see to Silicon Valley is, ironi- which sold $2 billion in handsets last year. Silicon Valley as their inspiration. cally, from the same government that once catalyzed its development. Silicon Valley is starved for talent. Restrictions on work “The pace is faster here. Companies iterate, visas prevent foreigners from filling its openings. There are more than one mil- build things, and grow faster than their U.S. lion foreign workers on temporary work counterparts." permits now waiting to become perma- —Kai-Fu Lee nent residents. The visa shortage means some will have to leave, and others are getting frustrated and returning home. Among the city’s 20 million residents, Lee’s chance to play a role came in This brain drain could bleed the life probably none can take more credit for 1997, after Bill Gates visited China and out of Silicon Valley’s companies. Then Beijing’s trajectory from backwater to decided to gain a stronger Asian foothold we will have real competitors emerging in startup factory than Kai-Fu Lee. As the for Microsoft’s products. The following places like New Delhi and Shanghai. But founder of Microsoft Research Asia and year, Gates sent Lee to Beijing to launch it won’t be because they discovered some Google China, the U.S.-educated computer what became Microsoft Research Asia. recipe for innovation clusters that finally scientist not only became one of China’s Already a veteran of Silicon Graphics works. It will be because we exported the first tech celebrities but personally trained and Apple, Lee quickly realized that given magic ingredient: smart people. a generation of engineers whose busi- the lack of experienced managers and the —Vivek Wadhwa ness ventures have turned Beijing into a authoritarian bent of Chinese society, he

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needed to organize teams of “soldiers” directed by a “general” rather than follow the every-man-for-himself approach typical of U.S. labs. “I had one general leading 10 soldiers, and the soldiers BEIJING were so grateful and dedicated, they’d work nights and weekends,” he recalls. City population: 20 million Under Lee, Microsoft’s platoons CHINA Economic output: $247 billion per year learned how to focus on an engineering Colleges/universities: more than 70 problem and produce a creative solution, China-style. And by the time Google Venture capital raised: $1.4 billion* recruited him in 2005 to establish Google Internet penetration: 72% China, government programs to promote Web pages hosted: 38 billion technology education were bearing fruit. “I saw a dramatic improvement from programming on paper to dozens of hirable engineers to thousands,” he says. else can you try something like that?” asks Xu represents a new generation for Many of Lee’s generals, trained in pro- David Lin, Microsoft Ventures’ director whom experience abroad is proving less ducing software for big companies, took for greater China. “The market scale can important than direct experience serving their experience to up-and-coming Bei- aord this kind of rapid experimentation, Chinese customers. “A mainland engineer jing firms such as e-commerce specialist and the best prevail.” who spends too much time in the U.S. LightInTheBox and smartphone maker The urge to replicate existing prod- can lose touch with how Chinese users Xiaomi, whose cofounder Lin Bin had ucts is also receding as Chinese startups behave,” says Hans Tung, managing part- followed Lee from Microsoft to Google. learn how to home in on customer needs ner at Qiming Venture Partners. “The skill These firms had a clear view of the Chi- and, in many cases, adopt what are known set is transferable, but we’re dealing with nese market and could navigate policies dramatically dierent user behavior.” that have made it dicult for some U.S. The innovations coming out of Bei- firms to do business (Google moved its jing are still limited in scope. They don’t search engine to Hong Kong in 2010). 560 million threaten Silicon Valley’s monopoly on Meanwhile, Chinese society has begun The number of Internet users in China products so fresh and powerful that few another shift. Before Microsoft and customers would think to ask for them— Google arrived, being a startup founder items like the personal computer and was not a socially acceptable career path. in Silicon Valley as “lean startup” princi- Google Glass. Lee doubts Chinese entre- Parents pushed young people to find a ples. In Lee’s view, these tenets—proactive preneurs are likely to produce things like job with an established company (and market research, minimal features, rigor- that anytime soon. For one thing, they to a large extent still do). But these days, ous measurement, rapid iteration—are have their hands full serving the Chinese there’s also a popular reality TV show on perfectly suited to the Chinese character. Internet market. Moreover, it will be some which entrepreneurs pitch angel inves- “The lean-startup model,” he says, “takes time before they’re consistently able to * , tors for seed funding. “I can’t overstate full advantage of the traits of Chinese peo- crack markets where Chinese isn’t the

CNNIC the importance of that,” says William ple: hardworking, dedicated, focused, led dominant language. “It’s not just China,” , Bao Bean, managing director at SingTel by one person with a strong direction.” he notes. “It’s not clear that any country Innov8, a venture capital ﬁrm. “The entre- At Innovation Works, his current other than the U.S. can come out with so preneurs are driven, they want to start up. venture, Lee is using those principles to many disruptive innovations at scale.” ENTURESOURCE V

S But the people around them needed that provide what is, in China, a rare degree But things change quickly in Beijing. of support for experimentation and fail- So quickly, in fact, that Lee thinks his JONE education.” W China’s Internet successes have been ure. And he’s aiming speciﬁcally to nur- adopted city might eventually challenge viewed as clones of foreign products. ture entrepreneurs who haven’t set foot California as an innovation leader. “The Tencent openly copied the ICQ chat cli- outside China. The $500 million invest- pace is faster here,” he says. “Companies ent. Baidu imitated Google. Yet each tri- ment fund has among its higher-proﬁle iterate, build things, and grow faster than

TISTICS BUREAU, DO BUREAU, TA TISTICS umphed in what is now the world’s largest investments the “light blogging” platform their U.S. counterparts. So it’s possible S Internet market, with some 560 million DianDian and the photo-sharing network that new ideas will arise in China and be users. By Kai-Fu Lee’s count, for instance, PaPa. Both companies were started by Xu ready for the world before any U.S. com- Groupon spawned 6,500 Chinese imita- “Jack” Chaojun, a mainland entrepreneur pany is even doing that thing. It’s an excit-

SOURCES: BEIJING BEIJING SOURCES: tors, of which only a few survive. “Where who’s never worked or studied overseas. ing opportunity.” —Ted Greenwald

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World Innovation Clusters KEY STRONG IP PROTECTION Innovation clusters are places with dense webs of interconnected technology companies, customers, and suppliers. Improving a cluster’s chance of fl ourishing GOOD WEATHER are factors such as liberal immigration laws and venture capital fi nancing, research LIBERAL IMMIGRATION LAWS has shown. In the map below, we rate fi ve of the largest regional technology clusters ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE as well as three newer, government-supported e orts to fuel innovation in Russia, FLAG = GOVERNMENT CLUSTER France, and the United Kingdom.

SILICON VALLEY BOSTON TECH CITY LONDON PARISSACLAY Venture capital: $11.2 billion* Venture capital: $3.6 billion Venture capital: $161 million Government funding: $3.25 billion

Top companies: Google, Apple Top companies: Akamai, Genzyme Top companies: Techstars, Last.fm Top companies: EADS, Siemens

Key facts: Key facts: Key facts: Key facts: 64% foreign workers Most U.S. biomedical funding Startup initiative created in 2010 Construction began in 2013 17 IPOs in 2012 85 colleges and universities 140 technology companies Two-square-kilometer campus Tax breaks for private investors Merging six engineering schools

ISRAEL SKOLKOVO INNOVATION CITY BANGALORE BEIJING Venture capital: $1 billion Government funding: $2.5 billion Venture capital: $300 million Venture capital: $1.4 billion

Top companies: Waze, Teva Top companies: IBM, Rusnano Top companies: Infosys, Wipro Top companies: Baidu, Lenovo

Key facts: Key facts: Key facts: Key facts: 230,000 high-tech workers Founded in 2010 Internet users up 26% per year 70 colleges and universities Compulsory military training 900-acre innovation center $3,876 per capita income (India) 30% of China's venture funding $25 billion in technology exports University designed by MIT Over 10,000 local millionaires 14.5 million Internet users SOURCES: ERNST & YOUNG, BLS, SKOLKOVO FOUNDATION, PARISSACLAY DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY, MASSBIO, KPCB, WORLD BANK, THE GUARDIAN, TECH CITY INVESTMENT ORGANIZATION, UKFUNDERS, SILICON VALLEY VALLEY SILICON UKFUNDERS, ORGANIZATION, INVESTMENT CITY TECH GUARDIAN, THE BANK, WORLD KPCB, MASSBIO, AUTHORITY, DEVELOPMENT PARISSACLAY FOUNDATION, REGION. METROPOLITAN SKOLKOVO BLS, GREATER THE INCLUDE YOUNG, & FIGURES ERNST BOSTON AND SOURCES: AREA, BAY THE INCLUDES VALLEY SILICON . FOR ARE FIGURES CAPITAL *VENTURE NATIONS. UNITED COLLEGE, IMPERIAL WESSING, TAYLOR INDEX, REPORTS COMPANY SOURCE:

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country that attracts more venture capi- tration in Israel of big-data engineers and Emerged Technologies tal investment per person than anywhere analysts anywhere in the world.” else in the world and exports $25 billion a That explains why IBM, Google, Micro- year in high-tech goods and services. The soft, EMC, Intel, eBay, Cisco, and other Israel’s Military- result, according to the 2009 book Start- giants all have major research centers in Up Nation, is an “economic miracle.” Israel, where more than 230,000 people Entrepreneurial Israel’s military-entrepreneurial com- are employed in high-tech fields. In the plex has lent it a particular edge in analytics past two years, Israeli companies special- Complex Owns and big data. “Their main expertise was to izing in mobile computing, cybersecurity, extract intent from messages that are being and data storage have been snapped up Big Data sent across different communications for ever-increasing sums, culminating in channels,” says Any.Do CEO Omer Perchik Google’s acquisition of the mapping app Technology to track enemies powers of his team. What they’re building, he Waze for more than $1 billion in June. Israel’s move into commercial prediction says, is a “kind of action engine” that Israelis’ shared cultural iden- software. can “extract the user’s intent” from a tity also plays a role in the coun- list of tasks and appointments. try’s startup success. Eric Schmidt, Military service in Israel is gen- chairman of Google, said after vis- ● Two years ago, a half-dozen program- erally compulsory, lasting two or more iting Tel Aviv last summer that Israeli mers started working together in a Tel Aviv years. Many would-be entrepreneurs apply entrepreneurs possessed a distinctive “live basement to create one of Israel’s 5,000 to the IDF’s computer training academy, for today” attitude toward taking risks. high-tech companies. It was a stealth com- known as Mamram. Located at a base out- Sometimes the military connection to pany, but these 20-somethings were used side Tel Aviv, it acts a bit like a school for startups is obvious: the pill-sized diagnos- to secrecy. Most had served together in startups, teaching programming and proj- tic camera developed by Given Imaging is a military intelligence unit of the Israel ect management to cadets in olive-green based on the equipment in the nose of a Defense Forces. uniforms. Young hackers with proven skills military drone. Other connections are more In the army, they worked on algo- get recruited by specialized intelligence obscure. Some aspects of Israeli expertise rithms that could predict the behavior of units such as Matzov, the army’s cyberse- in mobile communication networks, for Israel’s enemies by plucking patterns from curity division, or units involved in signals example, were developed as part of a defen- intercepted signals. Their new company, intelligence and eavesdropping. sive measure against terror attacks by Pal- Any.Do, was based on much the same “What happens in the military is we estinians. The details are still top secret. idea—but aimed instead to guess the pref- take these really bright young 18-year- Another factor boosting Israel’s erences of consumers. By this year, Any.Do’s olds and say: Here’s a data center the startup scene is the low cost of college, productivity app for smartphones was one size of Google and Facebook combined. about $3,000 a year. Students typically of the most popular downloads worldwide. Go do something mission critical,” says emerge from military service and uni- Each year, Israel’s military puts thou- Michael Eisenberg, a general partner at versity with no debt, which allows many sands of teenagers through technical the venture capital ﬁrm Benchmark Capi- to take a year o to pursue their dreams. courses, melds them into ready-made tal. “Now they are spilling out of the army, Sometimes those dreams come true. teams, and then graduates them into a and we have the highest and best concen- The success of Waze has roiled an already bubbling market. Just as Any.Do is based on predictive analysis of large amounts of Startup Nation data, Waze applies the same techniques to How much was paid for Israeli startups in 2013 crowdsource accurate trac information and maps in real time. Waze’s cofounder Uri Levine also got his start as a military NAME Waze Intucell ScaleIO dbMotion software developer. “Big data was not a brand 10 years PRODUCT Crowdsourced Mobile net- Data center Electronic ago, but it was already there in intelli- maps app work software storage medical records gence organizations,” says Elik Ber, a former army ocer with Meidata, a research

REPORTS company. “Now when a consumer com- ACQUIRED BY Google Cisco EMC Allscripts pany wants to know who bought their product everywhere in the world, they’re PRICE $1 billion $475 million $250 million $235 million facing the same kind of challenge.” Y COMPAN OURCE:

S —Matthew Kalman

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ogy,” says Rolf Horn, a postdoc at the insti- Quantum Effects, Big Costs Emerged Technologies tute, who’s trying to start a company to sell Costs to build a quantum computing cluster in a device that can produce photons that Waterloo, Canada (in millions) exhibit quantum eects. Quantum computers should have The Bell Labs Mike Lazaridis ...... $270 the ability to quickly solve problems that of Quantum today’s computers cannot touch, such Canada ...... $215 as breaking very difficult cryptographic Ontario ...... $161 Computing ciphers. What’s more, fast progress in conventional computing—described by University of Waterloo ...... $100 Moore’s Law—is nearing the physical Mike Lazaridis invented the BlackBerry. Foundations ...... $9 Now he wants to create an industry limits of materials like silicon. You “don’t BMO Financial ...... $4 around quantum computing. have to know a lot about physics” to realize there’s money to be made pushing past those limits, Lazaridis says. Total commitments $759 million ● Raymond Laflamme can’t yet sell you It is still very early days for quantum a quantum computer. But he’ll sell you a computers. At the Institute for Quan- altruistic, very much philanthropy,” says $13,000 logic board for measuring entan- tum Computing, also funded heavily by Lazaridis. “But some of the researchers gled photons. Canada’s government, the most complex came to us and said, you know, this quan- It’s a start. quantum computer operates with just 12 tum computer—some of the technology Laflamme is head of the Institute for qubits. A qubit is the quantum equiva- we’re working on has spinos.” Quantum Computing at the University lent of a bit. Thanks to quantum mechan- Laflamme has gadgets reflecting a few of Waterloo, a research center that’s part ics, each qubit can be in multiple states of those ideas spread out on a coee table of a quixotic, grandiose effort by Mike simultaneously (imagine a bit that could in his oce, including a simple two-qubit Lazaridis, cofounder of the smartphone be a 0, a 1, or both at once). That permits processor with the solder still visible, and maker BlackBerry, to invent a quantum faster calculations for some problems, but a metal box the size of a router that’s use- computer and turn this city 70 miles from keeping qubits stable has proved dicult. ful for measuring photon sources. That Toronto into a “Quantum Valley.” Lazaridis has used his wealth to bring box is the basis of his small startup com- Since 1999, Lazaridis has put $270 top scientists to Waterloo, starting with pany, Universal Quantum Devices. million into his vision, paying to recruit a $100 million gift in 2000 to create the Laflamme calls the company an some of the world’s best theoretical phys- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Phys- “experiment” in how to commercialize icists. While he thinks a true quantum ics. But the eort may not be able to rely basic aspects of quantum technology. If it computer is still 10 years away, he believes on his largesse forever. His wealth, at least seems like small stu, recall that the first products of Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Val- ley’s original computing giant, were fre- Quantum computers could quickly solve problems quency counters and a simple oscillator for measuring sound. that today's computers cannot touch, like breaking Other commercialization efforts dicult cryptographic ciphers. include a satellite that could use quantum properties of light to send encrypted communications. A prototype was tested initial discoveries can be commercialized on paper, has plummeted by more than this summer by putting it on a flatbed now, turning Waterloo into a thriving $2 billion along with BlackBerry’s stock truck and running it around Waterloo’s industrial cluster built around quantum price as its phones have lost popularity. In wheat fields, to see if it tracked with an information science. a 2012 shakeup, Lazaridis stepped down optics receiver on the roof of the institute’s

The University of Waterloo has one as BlackBerry’s co-CEO. research buildings. IS of world’s best computer science depart- Quantum Valley also won’t become a Lazaridis’s new venture fund has not ments. The city is also corporate home to real industry cluster if all it does is recruit yet invested in any of these ideas. Still, BlackBerry and an increasingly rich eco- the world’s best academic research- Laﬂamme says things are going better than LAZARI D MIKE OO, system of startups. But quantum mechan- ers. That is one reason why in March, he expected. “In 2001, people would say, TER L

ics is not exactly an easy elevator pitch. “As Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, BlackBerry’s ‘When are you going to have spinos com- WA F O much as the region is a mecca for entrepre- other founder, launched a $100 million ing out?’ and I would say 20 years, think- Y

neurship, it’s a much dierent challenge investment fund, Quantum Valley Invest- ing, ‘I’ll be safe with that,’” he says. “Now ERSIT NI V

to commercialize pure quantum technol- ments. “We built all this and it was very I can see it coming.” —Michael Fitzgerald U

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Visionary stories of the Available: near future inspired by online ...... September , today’s new technologies newsstands ...... September , ______The second science ﬁction ___ anthology from the editors of Learn more: MIT Technology Review TechnologyReview.com/12Tomorrows

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SO13_reviews.indd 94 8/2/13 5:16 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM VOL. |NO. eviews New Forms That Function Better Design software helps architects create museums, arenas, and other grand projects with fanciful, otherworldly forms. It’s time to put the technology to better use: optimizing everyday buildings for energy eciency and the way people actually live and work. By Allison Arie

ince the unveiling of since the 1980s. That software essentially Frank Gehry’s titanium- works like a digital pencil; it requires a skinned Guggenheim person to move a mouse around to manip- Museum Bilbao in 1997, ulate the lines on an architectural draw- we’ve grown accustomed ing. Today’s parametric technology is more to eye-popping architec- than just a drafting tool. Not only can it Stural statements, whether in the complex model a building and many of its attributes geometry of Herzog & de Meuron’s Bei- in 3-D, but it can revise a model instantly. jing National Stadium (also known as the If an architect wants to alter the pitch of “Bird’s Nest”) or in the precarious cantile- a roof, for example, the walls then follow vering of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI National the revised roofline automatically. As Hao Museum in Rome. If it seems Ko, a design director at the there’s some immensely com- architectural firm Gensler, plicated system being used Ecotect Analysis explains, “The designer is set- and Revit to engineer these gravity- made by Autodesk ting the rules and parameters, defying arcs, ramps, and with the computer doing the curves, that’s because there is. Rhino iterations. This gives design- made by McNeel But that technology, known ers more flexibility to explore as parametric modeling, can Grasshopper designs, and we can make do much more than facili- a plug-in for Rhino changes faster.” It also means tate the fantastic creations of that architects are more will- Gehry, Hadid, and their ilk. Increasingly, ing to make changes that can ultimately parametric design is being used not just to make a project better. make buildings more visually compelling As the technology has improved, para- but to precisely tune nearly every aspect metric models have been able to accept of their performance, from acoustics to more and more inputs. Architects can use energy eciency. It’s not as sexy an appli- the software to investigate what a build- cation, but it will become far more valu- ing could be made of or how its natural able to architecture and the way we live lighting could be maximized. Or they can and work. virtualize window dimensions and ceil- Parametric design software auto- ing heights and the way a structure is Parametric matically figures out how changing any heated and cooled. “In any project, there technology helped parameter of a structure will aect other are a million possibilities,” says architect architects design the signature twisted physical aspects. It’s more complex than Matthew Pierce of Perkins + Will. form of the 128-story the computer- aided design (CAD) soft- Phil Bernstein, an architect and vice Shanghai Tower. ware that has been the industry standard president at the software maker Autodesk,

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Natural lighting was one of the elements that architects tried to maximize in the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

believes parametric technology will help and air-conditioning systems can apply the model until you get the results you’re make new buildings more environmen- for LEED certiﬁcation. looking for. TON tally sustainable. (This is crucial, given But critics of this approach point out That was the case with Perkins + Will’s that buildings account for 40 percent of that it’s hard to measure the outcomes. design for the Bigelow Laboratory for OUIS VUIT OUIS the world’s energy use and one-third of all Parametric technology might provide Ocean Sciences, in East Boothbay, Maine. L ON I

carbon dioxide emissions.) The current more precise metrics. How much energy The firm used software called Ecotect AT industry standard for energy efficiency will a building actually need? Or how Analysis (now owned by Autodesk) to is LEED—Leadership in Energy and much might it generate? How much model everything from thermal perfor- Environmental Design. Architects who water will it use? These things can be mance to daylighting—the practice of use green features like drought- tolerant determined during the design process placing windows or other openings in plants and ecient heating, ventilation, and rapidly optimized—you can adjust such a way that natural light can reliably D FOUN OF COURTESY BARNES; HRISTOPHER C

Some of the most dramatic forms designed with parametric technology have come from Frank OF COURTESY WANG; LAWRENCE OF COURTESY : Gehry, whose Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation is soon SPREAD OUS

to open in Paris. PREV I

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illuminate the interior. As the architects Ko explains, “If you have a tall tower like are not enough. Accordingly, the building tinkered with the design in a computer, it that, you’re studying the dierent degrees industry is becoming more knowledgeable calculated and analyzed such properties of rotation. It would be tedious if you had about improving a structure’s function. as the building’s floor area, its volume, to do it manually. Using rotation as one Architecture graduates arrive at firms and the required quantities of mate- of the parameters, you can run through armed with expertise in parametric tools rials. They could simulate the thermal the various iterations to get to the ﬁnal such as Revit, Grasshopper, and Rhino; performance of dierent wall, roof, and situation.” they may never have designed without the window assemblies—and evaluate the help of computers, and parametric model- performance against the cost. They could Idiosyncratic subdivisions ing is familiar to them. Among builders, study how dierent types of glass would For now, the most familiar built expres- engineers, and architects, the adoption of perform—not just in general but on the sions of parametric design remain extreme advanced digital tools for what’s known northeast wall at the building’s exact loca- projects like those created by Zaha Hadid as building information modeling surged tion, under conditions suggested by long- Architects, a ﬁrm that is known for avoid- from 28 percent in 2007 to 49 percent in term weather data. ing corners, right angles, and familiar 2009 and 71 percent in 2012.

The signature curves in Beijing’s Olympic stadium arose from a complex geometry that demanded computer modeling.

The benefits of parametric technol- typologies. We see a similar avoidance And while such technology is useful ogy can similarly be seen in Gensler’s of corners in the astounding 19,000 for formally complex buildings, even sim- soon-to-be-completed Shanghai Tower, molded glass-reinforced concrete pieces pler forms should benefit from it. Archi- which at 630 meters will be the second- and 3,500 custom curved glass panels tects Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly tallest tower in the world and the tall- that make up Frank Gehry’s design for the Johnson of Future Cities Lab believe para- est in China. Its twisting, curved form Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, a metric design can change how we think MAGES I was an aesthetic choice, to be sure, but by $100-million-plus museum scheduled to about floor plans of houses or grid pat- plugging that geometry into a modeling open in Paris next year. terns of planned communities. “Do these tool known as Grasshopper, the design- Even so, many architects (and their houses all have to be the same?” Gattegno ers were able to tweak the shape to mini- clients) are increasingly asserting that asks. Parametric modeling “could open up

SEAN CAFFREY/GETTY CAFFREY/GETTY SEAN mize the force of winds on the façade. As gesture and complexity for their own sake all kinds of possibilities of what a house

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could be.” Mass-produced housing might become less cookie-cutter, more idiosyncratic, and more economical and energy ecient. Similarly, the technology could reshape urban planning. Just as it can create a detailed representation of a wall, it can model an entire neighborhood to determine the optimal size and shape of the various structures in it, says Autodesk’s Bernstein. Awk- wardly scaled McMansions might be rethought to make more ecient use of lots, building materials, and energy. Parametric modeling can even take human proportions and movement into account. A company called AnyBody Technology, for example, does full-body physical simulations for the design of cockpits or work - spaces. The company has begun collaborating on R&D with architects so that a parametric model can be used to simulate a body walking through a given space. Eventually, architects could design, say, a nursing home in a way that optimized walking distances or ergonomics. Of course, models are still mere simulations. And one thing that this modeling can’t automatically account for—yet, anyway—is human behavior. Bernstein told me that when Autodesk built its LEED-certiﬁed headquarters, its designers “energy-modeled the hell out of it” in parametric software only to ﬁnd out that the building used 30 per- Romancing the Phone cent more energy than they had antici- pated. Why? Among other things, after Love and sex in the age of social media and mobile communication. the lights automatically went off at 6:30 p.m., cleaning crews turned them By C. J. Pascoe back on and didn’t shut them o again. oy meets girl; they grow up and self-published romance novel Dreams Allison Arie is a content strategist for fall in love. But technology inter- and Misunderstandings. Two childhood SPUR, an urban planning and policy Bferes and threatens to destroy sweethearts, Rick and Jessie, use text think tank in San Francisco, and a their blissful coupledom. The destruc- messages, phone calls, and e-mail to man- I ANYA contributing columnist at the New York tive potential of communication technol- age the distance between them as Jessie B STVAN Times. ogies is at the heart of Stephanie Jones’s attends college on the East Coast of the I

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United States and Rick moves between The Internet, sociologists Michael gerated public anxiety over a perceived Great Britain and the American West. Rosenfeld and Reuben Thomas ha ve threat to social order. Shortly before a summer reunion, their found, is now the third most common technological ties fail when Jessie is hos- way to find a partner, after meeting oral panic is an appropri- pitalized after a traumatic through friends or in bars, ate description for the fears attack. During her recovery, restaurants, and other public expressed by Jones, Turkle, Dreams and M she loses access to her mobile places. Twenty-two percent and Freitas about the role of technology in Misunderstandings phone, computer, and e-mail Stephanie Jones of heterosexual couples now romantic relationships. Rather than driv- account. As a result, the lov- AuthorHouse UK, meet online. In many ways, ing people apart, technology- mediated ers do not reunite and spend 2012 the Internet has replaced communication is likely to have a “hyper-

years apart, both thinking Alone Together: Why families, churches, schools, personal e ect,” communications profes- they have been deserted. We Expect More of neighborhoods, civic groups, sor Joseph Walther has found. That is, it Jones blames digital Technology and Less and workplaces as a venue allows people to be more intimate with innovations for the misun- from Each Other for finding romance. It has one another—sometimes more intimate Sherry Turkle derstandings that prevent become especially important than would be sustainable face to face. Basic Books, 2011 Rick and Jessie’s reunion. for those who have a “thin “John,” a college freshman in Chicago It’s no surprise this theme The End of Sex: How market” of potential roman- whom I interviewed for research that I Hookup Culture Is runs through a romance tic partners—middle-aged published in a 2009 book, Hanging Out, Leaving a Generation novel: it reflects a wider cul- Unhappy, Sexually straight people, gays and les- Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids tural fear that these tech- Unfulfilled, and bians of all ages, the elderly, Living and Learning with New Media, nologies impede rather than Confused About and the geographically iso- highlights this paradox. He asks, “What strengthen human connec- Intimacy lated. But even for those who happens after you’ve had a great online Donna Freitas tion. One of the Internet’s are not isolated from cur- flirtatious chat … and then the conversa- Basic Books, 2013 earliest boosters, MIT pro- rent or potential partners, tion sucks in person?” fessor Sherry Turkle, makes cell phones, social-network In the initial getting-to-know-you similar claims in her most recent book, sites, and similar forms of communica- phase of a relationship, the asynchronous Alone Together: Why We Expect More of tion now often play a central role in the nature of written communication—texts, Technology and Less from Each Other. She formation, maintenance, and dissolution e-mails, and messages or comments on argues that despite their potential, com- of intimate relationships. munication technologies are threatening While these developments are signif- human relationships, especially intimate icant, fears about what they mean do not Technology can allow ones, because they o er “substitutes for accurately reflect the complexity of how people to be more connecting with each other face-to-face.” the technology is really used. This is not intimate with one another If the technology is not fraying or surprising: concerns about technology as than would be sustainable undermining existing relationships, sto- a threat to the social order, particularly face to face. ries abound of how it is creating false in matters of sexuality and intimacy, go or destructive ones among young peo- back much further than Internet dat- ple who send each other sexually explicit ing and cell phones. From the boxcar dating or social-network sites, as opposed cell-phone photos or “catfish,” luring the (critics worried that it could transport to phone calls or video chatting—allows credulous into online relationships with those of loose moral character from town people to interact more continuously and fabricated personalities. In her recent to town) to the automobile (which gave to save face in potentially vulnerable situa- book about hookup culture, The End of young people a private space for sexual tions. As people flirt and get to know each Sex, Donna Freitas indicts mobile tech- activity) to reproductive technologies other this way, they can plan, edit, and nologies for the ease with which they like in vitro fertilization, technological reflect upon flirtatious messages before allow the hookup to happen. innovations that a ect intimate life have sending them. As John says of this type of It is true that communication tech- always prompted angst. Often, these communication, “I can think about things nologies have been reshaping love, fears have resulted in what sociologists more. You can deliberate and answer how- romance, and sex throughout the 2000s. call a “moral panic”—an episode of exag- ever you want.”

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As couples move into committed rela- they would use technology to discuss seri- tionships, they use these communication ous issues with their partners, and a very technologies to maintain a digital togeth- small number reported that they would erness regardless of their physical distance. terminate their relationship that way. With technologies like mobile phones and When Gershon asked students at her uni- social-network sites, couples need never be versity to describe a “bad” breakup, they truly apart. Often, this strengthens inti- immediately discussed any breakup that mate relationships: in a study on couples’ was initiated via social media. In Hang- use of technology in romantic relation- ing Out, Messing Around and Geeking ships, Borae Jin and Jorge Peña found Out, “Grady,” a 16-year-old high-school that couples who are in greater cell-phone student, said that breaking up by text or contact exhibit less uncertainty about their social network was especially “disrespect- relationships and higher levels of com- ful,” because “they can’t say anything back mitment. This type of communication or anything.” becomes a form of “relationship work” in which couples trade digital objects of Research indicates that aection such as text messages or comments on online photos. As “Champ,” a people often have a 19-year-old in New York, told one of my shared understanding of collaborators on Hanging Out, Messing how and when technology Around and Geeking Out about his rela- should be used in tionship with his girlfriend, “You send a romantic relationships. little text message—‘Oh I’m thinking of you,’ or something like that—while she’s working … Three times out of the day, you Given the nuanced understanding probably send little comments.” people have of the role technology plays To be sure, some of today’s fears are in their relationships, the idea of new based on the perfectly accurate observa- media as a dehumanizing force is over- tion that communication technologies blown. What research tells us is that tech- don’t always lend themselves to construc- nology can’t make relationships, nor can tive relationship work. The public nature it ruin them. But technology has changed of Facebook posts, for example, appears to relationships. It can facilitate the devel- promote jealousy and decrease intimacy. opment of emotional intimacy. It can When the anthropologist Ilana Gershon lubricate sexual liaisons with strangers. interviewed college students about their It can also increase the risk of decep - romantic lives, several told her that Face- tion among intimates. All this may put book threatens their relationships. As one an extra burden on relationships, requir- of her interviewees, “Cole,” said: “There is ing that couples do relationship work in so much drama. It’s adding another stress.” oine as well as online spaces. Had Rick But overall, the research by Gershon and Jessie mastered those demands, they and others indicates that people often might have been spared the years apart. have a shared understanding of how and when technology should be used in C.J. Pascoe is an assistant professor at the romantic relationships. In fact, in no small University of Oregon, where she teaches part because people primarily use social courses on sexuality, gender, and youth. media to express connection, they do not She is the author of Dude, You’re a Fag: like using it to end relationships. Only 25 Masculinity and Sexuality in High School percent of social-media users claim that (2007).

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technology at Apple, and now as a management consultant in product design, I visit research laboratories at companies and universities all over the world. I’ve experienced many of these devices. I’ve worn virtual-reality goggles that had me wandering through complex computer- ized mazes, rooms, and city streets, as well as augmented realities where the real world was overlaid with information. And yes, I’ve worn Google Glass. Unlike “immersive” displays that capture your full attention, Glass is deliberately designed to be inconspicuous and nondis- tracting. The display is only in the upper right of the visual field, the goal being to avoid diverting the user’s attention and to provide relevant supplementary information only when needed. Even so, the risk of distracting the user is significant. And once Google allows third-party developers to provide applications, it loses control over the ways in which these will be used. Sebastian Thrun, who was in charge of Google’s experimen- tal projects when Glass was conceived, The Paradox of Wearable told me that while he was on the project, he insisted that Glass provide only lim- Technologies ited e-mail functionality, not a full e-mail system. Well, now that outside developers Can devices like Google Glass augment our activities without have their hands on it, guess what one of distracting us from the physical world? the first things they did with it was? Yup, full e-mail. By Don Norman It’s a great myth that people can multitask without any loss in the qual- ver talk to someone at a party or of attention, and continual blank stares ity of their work. Numerous psychology conference reception only to dis- in hopes of achieving focused attention, experiments show that when two rela- Ecover that he or she is constantly continual enhancement, and better inter- tively complex tasks are done at the same scanning the room, looking this way and action, understanding, and retention. time, performance deteriorates measur- that, perhaps finding you boring, perhaps Google’s latest hardware toy, Glass, which ably. Some of these experiments were looking for someone more has received a lot of attention, done by me, back when I was a practicing important? Doesn’t the per- is only the beginning of this cognitive scientist. David Strayer, whose son realize that you notice? Google Glass challenge. research group at the University of Utah Welcome to the new Thinking, Fast Actually, it isn’t the begin- has studied these issues for decades, has world of wearable computers, and Slow ning—this stuff has been shown that hands-free phones are just as where we will tread uneas- by Daniel Kahneman around for over a decade. In distracting as handheld ones, and using Farrar, Straus, and ily as we risk continual dis- my former roles as a cognitive one while driving is just as bad as driving UEL MONTANER UEL Giroux, 2011

MI G traction, continual diversion scientist and vice president of while drunk.

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Even pairs of tasks as simple as walk- champion who has worn these devices to get back what attention theorists call ing and talking can show performance for almost a quarter-century and was a “situation awareness.” Interruptions dis- decrement: it happens to me all the time. technical advisor to Google Glass, sent rupt performance, and even a voluntary While I am thinking or deep in conver- me comments on an early draft of this switching of attention from one task to sation on my morning walk, I often stop article. “I am very bad at multitasking,” he another is an interruption of the task walking when I get to dicult and pro- said, noting that when he attends a lec- being left behind. found thoughts. The stopping is subcon- ture, “[by] putting the physical focus of Furthermore, it will be difficult to scious, perceived only when my conscious the display at the depth of the blackboard resist the temptation of using powerful mind breaks its concentration to notice and having a fast text entry method, I technology that guides us with useful side that the walking has halted. Psychologist could (suddenly) both pay attention and information, suggestions, and even com- (and Nobel laureate) Danny Kahneman mands. Sure, other people will be able to notes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow see that we are being assisted, but they that he discovered he couldn’t think at all Much of what is being won’t know by whom, just as we will be when he walked too fast. He had to slow done with wearable able to tell that they are being assisted, down to allow new thoughts. devices is happening and we won’t know by whom. If performing tasks simultaneously is simply because it can Eventually we will be able to eaves- so deleterious, why do people maintain be done. drop on both our own internal states and that they can do it without any deteriora- those of others. Tiny sensors and clever tion? Well, it is for somewhat the same software will infer emotional and mental reason that drunk drivers think they can take good notes.” He did far better than states. Worse, the inferences will often drive safely: monitoring our own perfor- he could with paper and pencil, which be wrong: many factors could cause a mance is yet another task, and it suers. forced his attention to shift from note- person’s pulse rate to go up or skin con- The impairment in mental skills makes it book to blackboard. He then reminded ductance to change, but technologists dicult to notice the impairment. me of a conversation we had on this topic are apt to focus upon a simple, single So while the supplementary, justin 2002. I didn’t remember the conver- interpretation. in-time information provided by wear- sation, so he described the interaction, Is this what we want? People staring able computers seems wonderful, as we reminding me of both his comments and blankly at the real world as their virtual come to rely upon it more and more, we my responses. minders tell them what is happening? We can lose engagement with the real world. How can Starner remember the are entering unknown territory, and much Sure, it is nice to be reminded of peo- details of a conversation from more than of what is being done is happening simply ple’s names and perhaps their daughter’s 10 years ago? He takes notes during his because it can be done. recent skiing accident, but while I am conversations, one hand in his pocket typ- In the end, either wearable technolo- being reminded, I am no longer there—I ing away on a special keyboard. The result gies will be able to augment our experi- am somewhere in ether space, being told is that during any interaction, he is far ences and focus our attention on a current what is happening. more focused and attentive than many of task and the people with whom we are Years ago, I wrote a piece called “I Go my non-computer-wearing colleagues: interacting, or they’ll distract us—divert- to a Sixth Grade Play” in which I discussed the act of taking notes forces him to con- ing our attention through tasty morsels the parents so anxiously video-recording centrate upon the content of the inter- of information that are irrelevant to the their children in the play that they didn’t action. Moreover, he has records of his current activity. experience the event until the next day. interactions, allowing him to review what When technologies are used to supple- Detached engagement is not the same took place—which is how he “remem- ment our activities, when the additional thing as full engagement; it lacks the emo- bered” our decade-old conversation. (See information being provided is of direct tional dimension. the Q&A with Starner in our July/August relevance, our attention can become more There is a ﬂip side to this argument, 2013 issue, and “You Will Want Google highly focused and our understanding however. It is that when implemented Goggles,” July/August 2012.) and retention enhanced. When the addi- and used mindfully, wearable technology Without the right approach, the tional information is o target, no matter can enhance our abilities significantly. continual distraction of multiple tasks how enticing it is, that’s the distracting Thad Starner, a wearable-computer exerts a toll. It takes time to switch tasks, and disruptive side.

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I like to look on the positive side of are a pleasant diversion from the hard accomplish anything of value. I’ve often technology. I even wrote a book, Things work of writing, thinking, and decision- had to unplug my computer from the That Make Us Smart, about the power making, but procrastination, even though Internet to complete my work. The proof artifacts to enhance human abilities. it’s enjoyable, does not help get the work viders of these technologies must share I am fully dependent upon modern tech- done. I already had to hire a human the burden of responsible design. nologies, because they make me more assistant to help keep me focused. Will Can wearable devices be helpful? powerful, not less. By taking away the the continual stream of messages from Absolutely. But they can also be horrid. dreary, unessential parts of life, I can wearable devices prove to be irresistible, It all depends upon whether we use them concentrate upon the important, human diverting me from my work, or will they to focus and augment our activities or to aspects. I can direct high-level activities amplify my abilities? distract. It is up to us, and up to those and strategies and maintain friendships A standard response is to put the bur- who create these new wearable wonders, with people all over the world. That’s the den on the individual: it is our respon- to decide which it is to be. focused side. On the other hand, I spend sibility to use technology responsibly. I many hours each day simply keeping up agree in theory, but not in practice. I know Don Norman is a cognitive science profes- with people who continually contact me, all too well the temptations of distrac- sor (UC San Diego, Northwestern) turned almost always with interesting comments, tion—all that fascinating news, all those executive (Apple vice president) turned news, and invitations, but nonetheless friends who send me status reports and designer (IDEO Fellow), and author of 20 exceeding my ability to cope and distract- wish me to respond with my own. I ﬁnd books, including Living with Complexity ing me from my primary activities. Yes, I it easy to succumb—anything to avoid the and The Design of Everyday Things. He welcome these distractions because they dicult, dreary concentration required to can be found at jnd.org.

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SO13_reviews_norman.indd 103 8/6/13 4:42 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. |NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM DEMO

Demo 1 Michael McAlpine is a nanomaterials scientist at Prince- ton University.

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4 5 2 Cartilage-forming Cyborg Parts cells from a cow are grown in an Princeton researchers use a incubator. 3-D printer to build a bionic ear 3 Graduate student with integrated electronics. Manu Mannoor checks to see if enough cells have By Susan Young grown. Photographs by Ken Richardson 4 The cells are cen- trifuged to collect Lab-made organs could do more than just them in the bottom of a tube. serve as ready options for patients in need: with the right blend of biology and 5 The small white materials science, they might even be able disk at the bottom of the tube is a endow people with superhuman abilities. pellet of cells. 6 7 That’s what researchers at Princeton University see as the future of tissue engi- 6 The bovine cells, neering, and they believe 3-D printing now mixed into a gummy matrix, is the way there. Michael McAlpine and are loaded into a members of his lab recently reported that a syringe for printing. 3-D printer could build a bionic ear capa- 7 A 3-D printer has ble of detecting frequencies a million times been modiﬁed for higher than the normal range of hearing. building bionic The ear demonstrates how 3-D tissues. printing can seamlessly bring together 8 The printer ejects electronics and biological tissues. Nor- droplets of dier- mally, these materials don’t play well ent materials to together—one is rigid and fractures eas- build up a bionic ily, while the other is soft and ﬂexible. But ear, layer by layer.

with 3-D printing, the two can be fabri- HERE CREDIT

SO13_demo.indd 104 7/30/13 9:32 AM 8

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW DEMO TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM VOL. |NO.

1 Oliver Peoples cofounded Meta- bolix with biologist Anthony Sinskey. CREDIT HERE CREDIT

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9 Over the next 10 weeks, the ear will be submerged in liquid nutrients. The cells will build up cartilage, which will surround the signal- receiving silver electrode coil.

cated together, says McAlpine. “It’s a way to encase the cochlea-shaped electrodes; these devices could help a person hear you can naturally intertwine everything and a suspension of silver nanoparticles. through the same mechanism used to con- together into a three-dimensional format,” The silver nanoparticles are packed tightly nect cochlear implants, or perhaps provide he says. This could help researchers make so that the cochlea-shaped coil can con- a sixth sense of electromagnetic reception. body tissues with integrated devices that duct electricity. “It acts as a metal, but Next McAlpine wants to expand the can monitor health, or even build cyborg because they are nanoparticles, you can range of objects a 3-D printer can pro- organs that augment conventional senses. print them in a way that you couldn’t nor- duce. “There are signiﬁcant challenges,” The team started with an ear because mally print a metal,” McAlpine says. he says. But with higher-resolution print- the shape is dicult to re-create with tra- Printing takes about four hours. Then ers, he thinks, his team will be able to ditional tissue engineering. Also, much the ear is bathed in a nutrient-rich broth introduce higher-end electronics. of an ear is cartilage, which lacks blood so that the cells can grow, produce col- Beyond enabling biological tissues to vessels—structures that elude tissue engi- lagen and other molecules, and replace incorporate materials with exceptional neers (for now). their original surroundings with cartilage. properties, 3-D printing could address To build the bionic organ, the printer With its fully embedded coil, the a tissue- engineering challenge: how to is guided by a computer model of an ear bionic ear can detect and transmit radio grow organs with blood vessels. “Vascu- to which the team added the model of an signals—but not sound waves. McAlpine lature networks have an incredibly com- internal electrode coil. Layer by layer, the says that functionality could be added to plicated geometry,” McAlpine says. Such machine alternates among three “inks”: a future models by integrating piezoelec- a breakthrough would be key to printing mix of bovine cartilage-forming cells sus- tric materials, which convert mechani- organs that contain blood vessels, such as pended in a thick goo of hydrogel; silicone, cal energy into electrical energy. One day livers, kidneys, and hearts.

“ Made in America” is making its way back.

Somewhere in America, the most forward-thinking companies turn to Siemens every day for groundbreaking answers that are redefining the way the country looks at manufacturing. Answers that aren’t just about making things, but making things right.

Answers that help companies become more productive while reducing their costs and their ecological impact, like the advanced software systems that helped a state-of-the-art chemical plant in Salisbury, NC, cut their production time in half.

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Today, pride, confidence, and the ability to compete on the global stage are making their way back.

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siemens.com/answers

Untitled-2.indd 1 7/30/13 3:21 PM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VOL. | NO. TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM 33 Years Ago

Who’s Listening to Your Calls? “More wiretapping is going on than people realize or even like to think about,” warned a 1980 article on surveillance.

The telephone is fundamental the ‘test board’ typically associated with that does the same thing in vastly more to communication in soci- an ESS exchange could become a power- complex and comprehensive ways. ety. The public has a right ful tool to an eavesdropper. With such advances must come an to expect that these communications are The Wall Street Journal, for example increasingly alert public. People must and will be private. That expectation is (October 5, 1973), quoted a New Jersey abandon the attitude that ‘it may be true, not being fulﬁ lled. We cannot rely on tele- assistant prosecutor: ‘We use a system but it doesn’t concern me, and I don’t care phone company assurances that everywhere you can e ectively sit in your home if my phone is tapped.’ That is said by peo- thing is all right. Everything is not all and monitor any phone in the country. ple who are fairly, if perhaps falsely, sure right, and the public would need protec- You’ll hear everything that transpires over that their telephones are not tapped. If tion even if it were. that number.’ they discovered that their conversations Perhaps 50 percent of U.S. telephones The general e ect of this new tech- were being overheard and transcribed, are now served by electronic switching nology is to widen the gap between the they would almost certainly be outraged.” systems (ESS), in which messages are communications elite and the public. transmitted electronically under com- Most people can easily understand a cord Excerpted from “Telephone Technology and puter control. Soon after the first elec- patchboard, in which an operator sits and Privacy,” by Oliver G. Selfridge and Robert T. tronic switching system exchanges went plugs people’s wires in where lights shine. Schwartz, in the May 1980 issue of Technol- into service in 1966, we discovered that But few understand a computer program ogy Review.

MIT Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), September/October 2013 Issue, Reg. U.S. Patent Office, is published bimonthly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Entire contents ©2013. The editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Printed by Brown Printing Company, Waseca, MN. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to MIT Technology Review, Subscriber Services Dept., PO Box 16327, North Hollywood, CA 91615, or via the Internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice. Basic subscription rates: $39 per year within the United States; in all other countries, US$52. Publication Mail Agreement Number 40621028. Send undeliverable Canadian copies to PO Box 1051 Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Printed in U.S.A. Audited by the Alliance for Audited Media

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