MIT Celebrates 150 Years

8:15 pm | MIT, Music | No comment

The Guardian just published a great read on MIT‘s 150 year celebration. The campaign is called “Inventional Wisdom”,  what they define as a combination of imagination and knowledge. I like this idea of taking a term that means what you intend to do (make “Inventional Wisdom” conventional wisdom or an accepted term by the public) and changing it to Brand your organization or mission.

Check out their event’s site here.  It’s an interesting way to compartmentalize user entry points, but seems a little too confusing to me. I’m glad they included a simplified menu on top.  I must acknowledge that MIT has made significant contributions to facilitating student genius. The example I wish to use is the Rock Band story described in the article.

“Todd Machover designed an interactive system for Prince that the rock star deployed on stage at Wembley Stadium a few years ago, conjuring up haunting sounds through touch and gesture. Later, two of Machover’s students at the media lab had the idea of devising an interactive game out of the technology. They went on to set up a company called Harmonix, based just down the road from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which they developed Rock Band and Guitar Hero.”

Just a little game named Rock Band, that’s all. This and other examples of student geniuses are plentiful at MIT, so Student Genius will join the celebration by spotlighting a current MIT student genius. Stay tuned.

MIT Student wins Tony Stark Challenge

11:05 pm | Comp: Audi Tony Stark Innovation Challenge, Engineering, MIT, Robotics | No comment

Natan Linder, an MIT Graduate Student won “The Tony Stark Innovation Challenge”. He designed LuminAR, a device that is made up of a small computer and has a small pico-projector and a camera attached to it. The “digital bulb” will cast an image of the internet on the desk, wall or anything you want to aim it. As you type on the projected keyboard, the camera watches this image and detects anything you touches.

The project from MIT was depicted as it “reinvents the traditional incandescent bulb and desk lamp, evolving them into a new category of robotic, digital information devices”. The pico-projector part functions just like a regular lamp in that you can put it in a regular lamp holder. The system uses a gestural user interface and is capable of blending computer content with your workspace. To ensure the unit is always in focus the students have used a laser projector that can always stay at the right focus despite how far the surface is away.

MIT’s Sixth Sense

9:14 pm | Engineering, Internet, MIT, Video | No comment

The Sixth Sense, a device that you can wear that allows new interactions between the real world and the world of data was invented by Pranav Mistry, 28, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. A graduate of IIT and had worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher before his studies at MIT, Pranav Mistry is obsessed about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.

A wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information, Sixth Sense allows us to use natural hand gestures to interact with information by just using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant that can be worn by the user. All it needs is a natural hand gestures, arm movements, or your interaction with the object itself.

Sixth Sense has been awarded 2009 Invention Award by Popular Science. Pranav also won Young Innovator Award TR35 byTechnology Review. In 2010, he was named to Creativity Magazine’s Creativity 50. Mistry has been called “one of the two or three, best inventors in the world right now” by Chris Anderson.

MIT student develops wound-healing device

12:46 am | Engineering, MIT | No comment

Danielle Zurovcik, an MIT graduate student was one of the team who had developed a cheap and portable version of the negative-pressure devices that is now being used to speed wound healing in hospitals.

After the great earthquake that happened in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a wound-care team from Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston decided to go to the devastated capital and offered help for patients suffering from the large open wounds that accompanied amputations, crushed limbs, and other injuries. As part of Zurovcik thesis research, she began a test using her cheap and portable version of the negative-pressure device. The negative-pressure therapy decreases the need to change wound dressings from one to three times per day to once every few days and provides a way to improve care for patients after the emergency phase of relief efforts.

The device that costs only $3 is human-powered that applies pressure via a simple bellows pump that weighs less than half a pound.