Technology Review’s TR35 2009

Every year since 1999 the MIT’s Technology Review selects 35 Young Innovators Under 35 whose work the magazines editors consider to be exciting and potentially world changing. Needless to say that the list always makes for a great and very inspiring read. This year is no exception and after reading through all the entries here’s a list of the 10 research efforts I find to be the most interesting:

Jeffrey Bigham (28) – efforts to enable blind people to use the Internet
Adam Dunkels (31) – Honey, I Shrunk the Internet Protocol
Nathan Eagle (32) – innovative use of mobile phones
José Gómez-Márquez (32) [Humanitarian of the Year] – inventing low-cost and appropriate tools to improve health especially in developing nations
Jeffrey Heer (30) – Protovis visualization toolkit
Anat Levin (31) – interesting use of digital cameras
Pranav Mistry (28) – Sixth Sense wearable computing project (if you haven’t seen it yet then you should really watch the TED talk on the project)
Aydogan Ozcan (30) – interesting efforts to replace microscrope lenses with a combination of inexpensive chips and software
Vik Singh (24!) – allowing third parties to make us of Yahoo’s search technology
Jaime Teevan (32) – improving search results by drawing on other available information

Technology Review's article about OLPC in Peru

There's an interesting article about what's happening with OLPC in Peru in the current edition of Technology Review. While it doesn't contain any radically new information about the deployment and mostly focuses on the general environment and the experiences made at the pilot in Arahuay it's quite a nice read. My favourite quote comes up towards the end where it says:

"The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte's early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now."

...and Nepal, Uruguay and every other country where deployments and pilots are happening these days.

Regardless of all the bad press (no links necessary) and the occassional feel-good what really keeps me going is thinking of the potentially large impact that OLPC and similar initiatives and programs can have on people around the word.

And looking at this video (from the Technology Review article) I realize that I have to find a way to get back to Peru as soon as possible. I really want to visit some of these schools to gain a better understanding of what actually happens when you introduce ICT into educational settings and come up with ways to better disseminate that feedback to developers, the larger interested community and policy makers. Now that mission should certainly keep me busy over the next few years.

P.S. The second video that accompanies the article is also worth looking at!

It's a good Sunday for (online-)videos

Ahhh, what a great Sunday to be watching some online-videos... Given that I was quite busy these past couple of days I haven't really had the time to check out the latest episodes of all my favourite (online-) shows. So while I'm writing this I'm downloading the latest episodes of CrankyGeeks and Diggnation for my viewing pleasure. Plus the latest Scrubs episode is also being transfered to my hard-drive as we speak. That should make for a good 2 hours of watching amusing videos instead of completing my university assignment in "functional programming" (yes, it's as amusing as it sounds!).

One question that I'm currently pondering is whether I should add any of the ChannelFlip shows to my RSS reader. While I really enjoy reading Wil Harris' blog none of the 3 shows they produce over there at the moment have really managed to capture me. While Play:Digital is certainly an excellent show my interest in video-games is so low at the moment that I can't bring myself to watch it. Unwired on the other hand is too focused on gadgets in my opinion and by the time they actually produce a show about something I'm interested in I've read all about it on another website anyway. I haven't watched their third show, Discus, so far but I don't really like movie-reviews to begin with (except in 2000 ~ 2001 when I regularly watched the BBC World's "talking movies") so it's not something I'm really interested in.

One last video that nearly forgot to mention here is the latest one from Technology Review: It's called Twitter and Ambient Intimacy. I haven't watched it so far but in general TR's videos are extremely interesting and always talk about or provide a new perspective of things that I haven't thought about.

Well, off to watch some videos... Have a great Sunday everyone!