AI for Impact ~ Spring'19 @ MIT Media Lab...

Together with colleague Ramesh Raskar, I'm co-teaching the AI for Impact seminar this Spring 2019 every Mon afternoon starting Feb 11th from 2:30-4:30a in E15-341, the heart of the MIT Media Lab! Our goal is to bring computational, analytics, and AI techniques to bear on solving problems in the high impact realms of health & wellness, cities & sustainability, across scales of action from each of us as individuals to embracing all of humanity, in both developed and emerging markets alike, all broadly understood.  We want to help students identify top AI opportunities for impact and help make progress towards building prototypes, planning action ventures, and/or better understanding the emerging technology and impact trendscape.  Formerly known as "Imaging Ventures" or “AI Ventures”, this “AI for Impact” class seeks answers to the question:  If you could make almost anything, what's actually most worth making, i.e. what problems are most worth picking?  We believe starting with the right problem is 90% of what makes for great projects and ultimately epic, worthy solutions.

Greening the Desert ~ Alt Perspectives...

Three documentary examples of rehabilitating large-scale damaged ecosystems...

Golden Gate ~ Building This Epic Infrastructure!

Arguably the most amazing piece of civil engineering infrastructure -- or certainly a Top 10 together with Roman aqueducts, the Suez & Panama Canals, various Chunnels, transcontinental railroads, the Hoover Dam, and more -- is surely building the Golden Gate Bridge as documented here... And look at those dimensions! Huge!

Pearl Supercity ~ River Delta Conurbation!

The recent opening of world's longest (55km) sea-crossing bridge between Hong Kong + Macao + Zhuhai completes the southern connection linking a half-dozen Chinese megacities into a ~70M+ inhabitant supercity as Visual Capitalist shows...

R.I.P. Peter Spier ~ Epic Dutch Inspiring Illustrator

Richard Sandomir in the NYTimes shares the sad news that inspirational illustrator Peter Spier has passed away at 89 from congestive heart failure. My very earliest favorite book -- i.e. when I was a toddler and my parents read to me -- was about Hendrika the Cow Who Fell in the Canal but as a teen I really spent endless hours on Of Dikes and Windmills. Amazing stuff about Dutch history, epic civil engineering, and the power of nature!

Prelude Progress ~ Shell's FLNG Project Update!

gCaptain spots Shell's latest construction porn -- a progress video on the Prelude FLNG and related facilities!

"The 600,000 tonnes Prelude FLNG facility, the largest offshore facility ever constructed, is nearing completion at the Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) shipyard in Geoje, South Korea. Once completed, the floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility will be moored off Western Australia for a period of 20 to 25 years where it will be used to chill natural gas produced at the Prelude field to –162°C (-260°F), shrinking its volume by 600 times so it can be exported to customers in Asia. Once operational, the Prelude FLNG facility will produce at least 5.3 million tonnes (mtpa) per annum of liquids: 3.6 mtpa of LNG, 1.3 mtpa of condensate (equivalent to 35,000 bbl/d) and 0.4 mtpa of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)."

Amino ~ Desktop DIY Bioengineering Kits!

Very cool to see Media Lab alumna Julie Legault launch Indiegogo campaign for her Amino desktop DIY bioengineering kits bringing synthetic biology techniques to laypeople! This is part of the burgeoning "Grower" movement that's adding to the already thriving "Coder" and "Maker" movements...

"Amino is our first product, a counter-top sized biolab that enables anyone to grow living cells to create new and interesting things - like fragrances, flavours, materials, medicine, and more."

Revolutionary Ventures ~ Bold Transformations!

My MIT Media Lab colleagues Ed Boyden, Joe Jacobson, Adam Marblestone, Desiree Dudley and I are co-hosting an upgraded and basically new incarnation of our Neurotech Ventures class -- now called Revolutionary Ventures -- this Fall 2015 at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon September 10th from 2-4pm.

While we emphasize a variety of emerging technology domains including neurotechnology, imaging, cryotechnology, gerontechnology, and bio-and-nano fabrication, this course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- anything ranging from entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units to new research centers or universities, even the creation of new disciplines and entire industries!

LEGO Brickumentary ~ Sharing a True Toy Story!

A LEGO Brickumentary coming soon; trailer here!

Motion Compensation ~ MacG Heavy Ship Crane

gCaptain's Rob Almeida spotlights MacGregor's 3-Axis Motion Compensated Crane Aboard the Siem Moxie. This is like Bose's "noise compensating" headphones or "bump canceling" active car shocks but for a heavy-lift crane on a ship moving in 3 meter waves!

Moving Mr Al ~ 400 Ton Oak Tree Shifted!

Berard heavy lifts Mr Al, a 400 ton oak tree 2 klicks!

MIT Engineering Health ~ Thur 7-9p Spring 2015

Our MIT Engineering Health class is about Designing and Deploying Affordable Health Diagnostics and Therapeutics. Design and build novel health diagnostics and sensors while learning the fundamentals of rapid prototyping, applied optics, signals processing, imaging and other advanced sensing modalities. Students work in teams with a physician and technical mentor to design and construct a cutting edge health diagnostic or device. The best projects will be continued in the summer through a clinical trials and ventures program with the best projects reaching early trials by the end of the school year. Example projects include spectroscopic sensing of ear infection, an automated stethoscope, non-contact blood pressure sensors, ultra wide angle endoscopy, and wound perfusion monitoring. Structured labs will build engineering and design skills, lectures will introduce considerations for medical design and new prototyping techniques.

First class is Thursday night 7-9p on February 5th, 2015 in Media Lab E15-341.

Decommissioning ~ Retiring GasOil Rigs Correctly

Ingenia's Brian Nixon spotlights Decommissioning North Sea giants...

"A growing number of oil and gas assets have either reached, or are approaching, the end of their economic lifespans, and, in accordance with current regulations, will have to be decommissioned and removed. This presents challenges for the owners and operators of these assets, but offers major business opportunities for engineering consultants, contractors and service specialists. [...] At the moment, there are three accepted strategies for the removal of these larger production facilities, namely piece small, reverse installation and single lift. [...] Until recently, decommissioning has not been considered within the overall lifecycle of an offshore asset. As a result, maintenance regimes have often overlooked key items of plant and equipment that would be needed during the abandonment stages, leading to significant and arguably unnecessary costs. There are welcome signs that this attitude may be changing, with some companies now introducing decommissioning as part of their graduate development programmes. However, further effort is required before decommissioning is fully considered throughout the lifecycle."

And to give you a sense of the scale of what it takes to remove such rigs, here's a NatGeo docu on assembling one of the very biggest! And Discovery docu on North Sea Mega Rigs!

Strip the City ~ Urban Tech Underneath & Inside!

Cool Discovery show Strip the City! Here's Dubai... San Francisco... New York... Sydney... London...

Aircraft MRO ~ Aviation Engineering & Upkeep...

Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) services are key to keeping airplanes flying...

Hendo ~ Magneto Hoverboard Kickstarting!

Check out Hendo hoverboards Kickstarting now! Thanks to Next Big Future for spotting!

Faraday ~ Working-Class Scientist-Inventor!

One of my favorite Barron's columns is The Long View by historian and author John Steele Gordon. This week he spotlights Michael Faraday: Working-Class Hero...

"Faraday would be the first great man of science to have a working-class background. Because the family had little money, Faraday received only the most rudimentary formal education. Indeed, he never mastered mathematics beyond simple algebra, an astonishing fact for someone who would become one of the world's greatest physicists. But if he had little formal education, he was a voracious autodidact. [The Danish scientist] Ørsted discovered that an electric current running through a wire induces a magnetic field around the wire. This was the first indication that electricity and magnetism, long thought to be completely different forces, must have a connection. [To explore this, Faraday] hung a copper wire, able to rotate freely, from a metal support. The wire reached into a vessel below containing a magnet in a pool of mercury. When he attached a battery to the support, the copper wire began to rotate around the magnet, following the lines of the magnetic field (a term Faraday coined) in the mercury. Faraday had converted electrical energy into mechanical, work-doing energy. In other words, he had invented an electric motor [...] One of the attributes of great scientists is a knack for asking the right question. And Faraday wondered, since an electric current could induce a magnetic field, whether a magnetic field could induce an electric current. [...] in 1829, Faraday found the answer to his question. He wrapped two copper coils on opposite sides of an iron ring. He found that when he attached a battery to one coil, there was a momentary electric current generated in the other coil. And when he disconnected the battery, there was a second momentary current. He soon found that it was changes in the magnetic field that induced the current. By simply keeping the magnetic field in continuous motion, he was able to generate a steady current. Faraday had invented the generator, a device that turns mechanical energy into electrical energy -- the opposite of the electric motor. It was the means of providing a bottomless supply of electric power, and the modern world could be born."

Truly one of the heroes of progress and civilization! See more in this Great Moments in Science and Technology video...

R.I.P. Peter Glaser ~ Solar Power Satelliteer...

Sad to read that visionary engineer Peter Glaser has passed away at age 90. Glaser worked for nearly a half-century at ADL, the pioneering technology & management consultancy, but his big passion was satellite-mounted solar panels which would beam power down to ground.

Gotthard Base Tunnel ~ 57km Under Swiss Alps!

Some more construction porn, again thanks to pointer from MIT colleague Jonas, this time the Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT), an epic railway endeavor burrowing under 57km of Swiss Alps to connect north and south in most efficient manner!

"Its main purpose is to increase total transport capacity across the Alps, especially for freight, notably between Germany and Italy, and more particularly to shift freight volumes from road to rail to reduce environmental damage caused by ever-increasing numbers of heavy lorries."

Epic Swiss Build ~ Pumped-Storage Gigaproject

My MIT colleague Jonas Brunschwig spotted this really epic Swiss engineering project Linthal 2015!

"A new underground pumped-storage power plant will be used to pump water from Lake Limmern back up to Lake Mutt, which is 630 m higher. When needed, it can then be used to generate electricity again. The new facility will boast pump and turbine capacities of 1,000 MW each. This will boost the output of Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG (KLL) from the current 480 MW or so to 1,480 MW. In terms of performance, this will put it on a par with the Leibstadt nuclear power plant or the Cleuson Dixence hydroelectric power plant. This will serve to safeguard the future security of electricity supply for northeastern and central Switzerland. Construction is expected to take about five years, and the plant should go into operation in 2015/2016."

Check out build video (in German, but spectacular graphics!-)