Innovators

I went to the awards ceremony for R&D 100 2006. It is awards for top technology/engineering research. Many national research labs had winners, so did a few companies including big ones such as Toyota. My brother featured to the left was a winner too for some research I hope to understand some day. An algorithmus, Michael Bender, was also a winner, for his scheduling work done at Sandia National Labs.

The innovator of the year award went to Dean Kamen, among other things, the inventor of Segway. Dean knows how to get a hold on the audience and retain it. He described his program FIRST: a technology competition for high school kids, making technology as exciting as sports; it is run like a tournament in a superdome with cheerleaders I hear. He spoke passionately about using technology to solve biggest problems in the world such as the lack of clean water and electricity in third world countries. He is doing something about it.

ps: In the story of David and Goliath, Dean said the moral he learned was "Technology (i.e., slingshot) helps". For theorist, it is more like "changing the computational model" to beat the lower bound?