Inventions

A recent edition of Forbes Magazine (U.S.) has a feature article dedicated to the future of robots. From help around the house help, laboratory assistance, to help for the military, robotics is poised to be the next big technology.

Ryan Calo, director of the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence estimates that by 2015, robotics will be a 6 billion dollar industry. He believes that rapid growth of the industry will be incentivized by open robotics and has published a white paper explaining why. A look back at the PC industry provides motivation. When the first microcomputer was introduced in 1975, it had no clear purpose. However, thousands of electronics enthusiasts ordered the computer kit, simply to tinker and figure out what they could do with it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Glaxo Smith Kline Consumer Products Division has recently launched an online Open Innovation portal as part of its business development strategy. GSK describes its open innovation strategy as a “Want – Find – Get – Manage” model. Wants represent technologies or innovation that will significantly contribute to the growth of global brands, and are the result of extensive research by our commercial and R&D teams. The company actively Finds those wants by building networks with innovators then works with them throughout the development process to Get technologies and effectively Manage relationships with external innovators. The result is market-leading products that meet consumers’ needs.

To spread awareness, GSK is using sites like www.urweb.tv, a rich media site devoted to accelerating commercialization, to reach hard-to-find inventors, entrepreneurs and garage geniuses. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent post highlighted a project to refine the capabilities of Mechanical Turk for use in software applications. While MIT researchers work on that project, University of Rochester scientists have taken a similar concept and created a way to aid the blind.

VizWiz is an iPhone app that works in conjunction with a Turkit application, allowing a blind user to snap a photo of something, record a question about something shown in the photograph, and then receive an answer back within seconds. Designing a computer program that can reliably recognize text and distinguish objects in the real world has proven to be a massive challenge for artificial intelligence researchers.

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