Thursday, May 14, 2015

FUTURE SPECIAL ...................Next Frontier: Convergence of Physical, Digital and Biological

Next Frontier: Convergence of Physical, Digital and Biological


Carlo Ratti, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives a sense of how this (Convergence of Physical, Digital and Biological ) will impact the lives of the people and how the lab is trying to anticipate the changes it will bring

Google is working on a driverless car. So are Tesla and Uber. And BMW and Audi. Not so far into the future, cars will be driving us to our destinations without any help from humans. As these driverless cars whiz by, they will have the power to detect other vehicles, pedestrians, avoid collisions, accelerate, slow down doing away with the need for traffic lights and possibly even waiting at junctions.
“Mumbai,“ says Carlo Ratti, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “can then theoretically run with 20% fewer cars.“
Ratti is director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, which is studying the impact of the convergence of the physical and digital on people and cities and anticipating the changes it will bring. Self-driving cars, for example, will make carpooling and even car-sharing much easier. Many people may choose not to own a car and instead just use a ride from the existing pool. “The reason why we have companies like Uber and Airbnb now is because real-time information sharing is now possible with cell phones,“ he points out.
“We are doing a lot of mathematical analysis of what the consequences will be...There will be a blurring of private and public transporta tion,“ adds Ratti, who is an engineer and architect by training.
Some of what's happening now were lab experiments 10 years back, he recalls. The lab had experimented with studying cities in real-time in 2006 based on cell phone signals.It had also done ride-sharing experiment similar to Uberpool called Hubcabs.
The next frontier, which the lab is now experimenting with, is the convergence of not just the physical and the digital but of the physical, digital and bio logical.
The SENSEable lab is working with MIT's bioengineering lab to predict epidemics be fore they happen. It is studying microbi omes ­ groups of mi croorganisms croorganisms present in humans ­ to predict diseases.
Microbiomes are known to behave dif ferently in diseased people and by using small robots to study sewage and through it the micro biomes in an aggregat ed manner, it can monitor the collective microbiome and health of a neighbourhood.
“Most of what we do is a workable demo ­ to show some thing is fea sible. We provide a proof of concept,“ says Ratti, who believes it's important to have ideas even if there is no customer.
The Superpedestrian, a startup from the lab valued at $100 million, has designed a wheel ­ called the Copenhagen Wheel ­ that turns any bicycle into an electric bike.
The neat battery-operated device fits on the back wheel of a bicycle and senses when the cyclist needs an additional boost ­ such as while pedaling up an incline ­ and kicks in with that extra power. It can also capture some of that kinetic energy when the cyclist brakes and store it up for when it's needed.
“All the technologies that made the first iPhone were there but the brilliance of Steve Jobs was to put them together in a different way and change the world,“ says Ratti about design. The 44-year-old, who also has design studio in Italy, Carlo Ratti Associati, was recently invited to give a talk to top leaders at the Godrej group.
Not all the stuff he designs is serious, though. The Makr Shakr, a design innovation from his studio, became a business idea quite by accident.
His studio designed an installation ­ a robotic arm that mixed customized cocktails based on people's preferences that could be specified using a mobile app ­ which became such a hit that it has now been spun off as a startup.Its first customer is the Royal Caribbean International, which operates cruise liners.
N SHIVAPRIYA MUMBAI

ET9MAY15

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