A row of fruit-flavored syrups at a snow cone stand in Salvador, Brazil (© Owen Franken).
Curious about Owen Franken? View more of his work via the Franken Photo of the Week category, learn more in this profile, read a What Matters opinion column he wrote called “Life in Brownian Motion,” or visit his website.
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The most prolific bartenders have knowledge of thousands of different drink recipes, but a how about a googol? A new robotic bartender developed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab makes that claim and more.
The Makr Shakr is a three-armed robotic barman created through a partnership with Coca-Cola and Bacardi USA. The robot’s programmable mixing system claims an infinite number of drinks and users can submit their own through a mobile app.
From dezeen magazine:
“Users will download an app on their handheld devices and mix ingredients as virtual barmen. They can gain inspiration by viewing other users’ recipes and comments before sending in their drink of choice. The cocktail is then crafted by three robotic arms, whose movements reproduce every action of a barman—from the shaking of a Martini to the muddling of a Mojito, and even the thin slicing of a lemon garnish.”
The Makr Shakr was previewed during Milan Design Week in April and made its official debut at the Google I/O annual developer conference in San Francisco on May 15. The machine was created at Google’s request. A year earlier, they asked the inventors to create a device that best exemplifies participatory design.
The robotic arms mimic the movements of a bartender—a very graceful bartender. The designers programmed the robot’s gestures by recording the movements of Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle.
Five SENSEable researchers helped develop the Makr Shakr, including project leader and graduate student Yaniv Turgeman. SENSEable’s 35-person team includes associate director Assaf Biderman ’05, Otto Ng ’12, Dietman Offenhuber ’08, Anthony Vanky SM ’11. Bacardi also has MIT ties; Joaquin E. Bacardi III MBA ‘98 is the company’s president and CEO.
Inspired by Coca-Cola’s Freestyle touchscreen beverage dispenser, the Makr Shakr can create alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The app’s customization system can monitor alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels and help users self-monitor their intake. Users can also share their recipes and drink photos.
SENSEable City director Carlo Ratti told Boston Magazine that the Makr Shakr will not replace human bartenders and is “more a research platform aimed at the third industrial revolution, where anyone can design and produce.”
Fear not, barkeeps. There are no plans to make the Makr Shakr commercially available.
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Trevor Walker on the Jeopardy set.
If you’ve been watching this week’s College Championship on Jeopardy, you know that MIT Computer Science and Engineering sophomore Trevor Walker has already won the quarter-final and the semi-final on May 8 and 13. Tonight and tomorrow, Trevor takes the podium once more for the two-day final.
“The communal score from both of those days determines who the winner is,” Walker explains at the Stata Center, while on a quick break from working on an MIT project final.
After all, Walker filmed the show last April. “I already know who the winner is,” he admits with a shy smile. But he won’t spoil it for me.
Whether Walker wins or not, he had a great time getting to know his fellow contestants. “It was great getting to know them. We’re all still friends – we’re friends on Facebook.”
Walker would like to do Jeopardy again someday, or perhaps a different quiz show.
“But Jeopardy was always my favorite,” he says. “When I was a teenager, I would take the teen tournament online test. One year, I got an audition, but I didn’t get any further than that, that time.”
Walker’s voice brightens as he describes his passion for fact-finding. “If I see something interesting, I’ll look it up on Wikipedia, and then I’ll find more links and read about that, so I’ll end up reading something completely unrelated to whatever I was originally looking for.”
Many people enjoy similar Wikipedia binges, but Walker has a gift for remembering the results of his information trawls. “I tend to remember a lot of little things,” he says. “My memory’s not incredible – it’s just good.”
Tapping his memory on Jeopardy is more fun than a final exam at MIT. “[Jeopardy] was a lot less stressful. I didn’t feel like I had to cram or anything. I knew what I knew and I was going to do the best I could.”
Does he feel that confident about his final exams, though? “Not necessarily,” Walker admits.
Walker’s appearance on the show has earned him other perks besides new friends. “People here all seem to know about it now,” Walker tells me. “I got recognized in UBurger the other day! That was unexpected.”
Check out Trevor Walker’s final push for a Jeopardy win tonight and tomorrow. Use Jeopardy.com’s When to Watch guide to find the channel and show time for your location.
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Karen Kinnaman ’06 (left) honored alongside colleague Heather Studley by the Celtics. (Photo: Boston Celtics)
For eleven months per year, Karen Kinnaman ’06—a soon-to-be chief resident of the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program—is based out of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. For the other month, she can be found at Mount Auburn Hospital, a community hospital located in a quiet part of Cambridge, which is where she was on Friday, April 19, 2013.
The early morning of April 19 lives in infamy—the date suspected Boston Marathon bombers engaged in a violent standoff with local police officers in Watertown, MA, a Boston suburb less than one mile from Mount Auburn.
While working in the ER, Kinnaman helped save the life of an individual who was wounded in the shootout. For her efforts, she was part of a group of first responders honored by the Boston Celtics as “Heroes Among Us” during their playoff game with the New York Knicks on Friday, April 26. (The Knicks won, 90-76.)
Karen Kinnaman ’06
“It was a great honor—so overwhelming,” she says. “The emotions from April 19 were still very, very raw. Receiving that fan support was an experience I’ll never forget.”
A teaching hospital, Mount Auburn’s emergency room is not often home to large-scale trauma.
“We weren’t given much heads up, which was a benefit because we had no time to worry, only to react,” she says. “What happened in the emergency room that night was a positive story of hope. It was a testament to the hospital and the people who work there.”
A four-year athlete at MIT, Kinnaman captained the women’s basketball team and earned varsity letters in soccer, track, and cross country. During her senior year, she was named the Malcolm G. Kispert MIT Scholar Athlete of the Year. A course 7 (biology) major at MIT, Kinnaman says her undergraduate education and athletic background provided a strong foundation for her medical career. She attributes much of her professional success to lessons learned at MIT.
“Being able to stay calm under pressure is something I learned from to playing sports at MIT,” she says. “Working in an ER parallels the experience on an athletic field: following your instincts and working together towards a common goal. The emotional highs and lows that take place in an emergency room are similar to the types of emotions you feel in sports.”
At MGH, she has a constant reminder of her time at MIT. Her former basketball assistant coach, Kelly Stubbs, is a nurse in MGH’s emergency department.
“My coaches at MIT always believed in me,” she says. “They instilled in me how to be a good leader in chaotic situations.”
For most Celtics fans, a blowout loss to the Knicks would leave little to cheer about. But the ceremony was a compelling moment that New York and Boston fans shared together.
“I’m actually a huge Knicks fan,” she says. “But on that night I was all in for Boston. It was a perfect night.”
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Guest blogger: Peter Dunn
The phrase “young nuclear engineer” has been something of an oxymoron in recent decades, with the nuclear energy industry offering few openings for newcomers. Yet a new crop of nuclear engineers are coming out of MIT and videos themed, “I’m A Nuke,” tell some of their stories.
MIT students host the American Nuclear Society 2013 Student Conference in April.
Newly educated engineers are vital because the engineers who entered the field in the 1960s and 1970s are retiring, and climate change concerns are sparking renewed interest in the ability to generate continuous carbon-free energy. MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) has seen a surge in applications from a diverse, dynamic group of students, many of them with strong environmental orientations.
Last month, MIT hosted the recent American Nuclear Society 2013 Student Conference, with the theme, Public Image of the Nuclear Engineer. About 630 US and international students attended the event, which was co-chaired by NSE students Nathan Gibson, Ekaterina Paranomova ‘13, and Samuel Brinton. Publicity coordinator Jake Jurewicz ’14 said the timing, about two years after the Fukushima disaster, was opportune.
“People have had time to digest Fukushima and the lessons learned; we all sat in on talks about what went wrong and what can be done to improve plants and remedy what happened,” said Jurewicz.
More broadly, he added, the conference focused on innovation, new ideas, and cultivation of the new workforce. In addition to talks and technical sessions, activities included a large poster session showcasing attendee research, career and political workshops, a job fair, tours of MIT’s fission and fusion reactors, and a three-minute pitch contest.
Brinton, who is studying nuclear waste policy, captured some of the complexity faced by his generation, saying, “my mother was raised near Three Mile Island, and my dad was an anti-nuclear weapons activist, so I wanted to address the big problems that nuclear was facing….I want to apply a scientific solution to a political problem.”
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Alison Wong ’03 spent several weeks last year working on a missile defense system for thwarting rocket attacks.
Wong also designed methods to disengage car engines as they approached military checkpoints, one-person shelters capable of withstanding fire and extreme winds, and contraptions to prevent explosions in colliding vehicles.
Alison Wong ’03. Photo: Discovery Channel.
Wong did all this on the set of the Discovery Channel’s Big Brain Theory, a reality TV show that premiered in April and that will continue its run this spring on Wednesday nights.
Wong is one of ten contestants on the reality show and one of its two female stars.
After answering a casting call a year ago for the new show, which is hosted by Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar fame, Wong flew to Los Angeles for the full-immersion reality TV program. There, she lived with other contestants in a community house while solving those puzzling challenges and the occasional interpersonal dramas native to the medium of reality TV. The show’s top prize is $50,000 and a one-year contract at a top design firm.
Wong jumped at the opportunity to combine her passions in design and engineering. “Engineering is a team sport and this show is about teamwork,” she says.
At MIT, Wong majored in mechanical engineering with an architecture minor in the early years of course 2-A. She penned two regular comic strips for The Tech and did UROPs with David R. Wallace and the Media Lab.
A designer at heart, Wong pursued a master’s in design at Stanford and spent five years at IDEO as a principal designer. In 2010 she launched her own firm, Integral Design. She is currently working on bringing Keyprop, a key-ring tripod for smartphones, to market.
On Big Brain Theory’s first episode, contestants focused on the colliding-vehicle conundrum, with Wong leading efforts in the design and blueprint phase to keep an explosive box on the back of a pickup truck from reaching 25 g.
“The Discovery Channel makes quality shows, and I’m proud of them for taking a risk on promoting a show like this,” Wong says. “There’s nothing like it on TV. I’m honored to be among them.”
Wong got the full Hollywood treatment last month. Discovery hosted a red-carpet premiere for the show’s cast at design firm WET’s headquarters in LA.
Though Wong doesn’t rule out future roles on screen, her focus remains on her design career and using this experience to inspire others.
“I’m open to a lot of things, but I’m mostly trying to leverage this to inspire girls,” she says. “I just talked at a local school and showed students some of my 3D prints and products. I want to lead by example and show them that math and science can be really creative industries.”
To judge the contestants’ efforts in the first episode of Big Brain Theory, Discovery brought in another alum—astronaut Michael Massimino ME ’88—who critiqued Wong’s design and participated in the elimination vote at the end of the show.
Rest assured, he did not vote Wong off.
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Did you see Jeffrey Lin’s video tutorial on how to navigate the MIT Alumni Directory?
MIT’s Class of 2013 should find it useful next month as they earn their official listing in it, and the thousands of alumni who haven’t yet logged in to the Infinite Connection should check it out as well. You know who you are.
Lin didn’t just make the video for the $300 gift card prize offering in the MIT Alumni Association contest. An avid designer, Lin enjoys fooling with film technologies and says he made this video on the night before deadline.
“I saw the listing and figured I had a shot,” he said. “And I thought, ‘what better way to do this quickly than with animation?’ I grabbed a Wacom tablet, which you can hook to your laptop and use for drawing by hand. I used QuickTime screen capturing.”
A big fan of RSA Animate, Lin designed the directory tutorial with its instructional, straightforward style in mind, telling the story of a login through clever animated slides.
“I hadn’t really done something like it before and wanted to see how it would work out,” he recalled.
Whether experimenting with live-action or animation, Lin enjoys storytelling. His short documentary on the MIT lightweight crew team and his moving profile of Emma Nelson ’14 demonstrate his attention to a film’s narrative arc.
Though Lin is a course 4 (architecture) major, he has enjoyed Professor Vivek Bald’s documentary filmmaking course and Angel Nevarez’s intro to video class. In the latter, Lin directed A Proper Meal, which won the undergraduate CMS Media Spectacle Award last year.
Lin has also been active in the Asian American Association and the DynaMIT engineering camp, where he mentors middle school-aged students in math and science.
Whether Lin pursues film or architecture or design or none of the above, he clearly knows how to use the alumni directory for reaching out to fellow beavers. During IAP in 2011, he interned at the Brand Union in New York, working under its North American CEO Robert Scalea ’77, an experience he chronicled on Slice.
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A group of buyers and sellers negotiate the price of Gouda cheese around a trailer loaded with cheese in Gouda, The Netherlands (© Owen Franken).
Curious about Owen Franken? View more of his work via the Franken Photo of the Week category, learn more in this profile, read a What Matters opinion column he wrote called “Life in Brownian Motion,” or visit his website.
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Tony Stark, class of 1987 (maybe), proudly sporting his Brass Rat.
It’s been established that Tony Stark is MIT’s greatest (fictional) alumnus. In fact, Stark can be seen wearing his Brass Rat in multiple scenes in the first Iron Man movie. The film’s director, Jon Favreau, once said of Stark, “He’s somebody who created a suit using his own intelligence and sweat of his brow. I would love for that to make being an engineer cool—that people might want to go to MIT instead of being on MTV.”
A proud affiliation notwithstanding, little is known about Stark’s time at MIT. His academic record is sealed and existing public information is inconsistent. MIT Admissions tentatively lists Stark as receiving his undergraduate degree in 1987 but Marvel Comics claims he received two master’s degrees in engineering by age 19. Confusing matters more, a LinkedIn profile for Tony Stark indicates he received doctorates in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.
These contradictory statements lead to one question: Just who was Tony Stark during his time at MIT?
Boston.com’s Radio BDC blog helped answer this question earlier this week. In honor of the release of the third Iron Man film, the blog tracked down real-life Bostonians—including one former MIT director—who shared their encounters with a young Stark during the mid-80s.
A sample of the memories includes:
Perhaps the most poignant recollection comes from Henry Jenkins, the former co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies.
From “Bostonians sharing their memories of MIT class of ’87 grad Tony Stark:”
“Some students are larger than life—they leave a trace across the entire campus, and people talk about them well after they have left the building, so to speak. Stark was one of those people.”
“And don’t get me started about the hacks that have been ascribed to Stark through the years. I have heard all kinds of claims about what Stark put on the Great Dome to the ways he rewired the elevators in the Green Building. They can’t all be true, can they?”
Read more about Tony Stark’s (fictional) time at MIT on the Radio BDC blog. Thanks to Harbo Jensen PhD ’74 for contributing to this story.
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My doctor told me recently to stop running. He said my knees, like most human knees, have had enough of high-impact exercise after twenty years of road races.
He’s the third doctor to tell me so. Maybe this time it will sink in. In a small, perhaps completely incomparable way, I’ve felt the same zeal to overcome the body’s limitations that those who have endured paralysis, severe arthritis, or amputations experience. We all have that need to mend, overcome the pain, and return to the challenge.
Hugh Herr SM ’93. Photo: Webb Chappell.
So when I heard interviews with victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in the past few weeks, who, despite severe injury and amputation, vowed to run the race again, I nodded my head. I understood.
MIT Media Lab Associate Professor Hugh Herr SM ’93 heard the same declarations coming from bombing victims this month. He, too, understood.
But Herr, himself a double amputee, is in a unique place to help. Partnering with No Barriers USA, Herr and his Biomechatronics Research Group intend to support any marathoner who, despite severe injury or limb loss as a result of the bombings, aims to run again next year.
No Barriers, a nationwide nonprofit with a goal of improving lives through assistive technology, launched the No Barriers for Boston fund on April 26. It hopes to raise $500,000 to support investments in sport-specific prosthetic limbs to help survivors run, bike, swim, or otherwise compete athletically again.
“Assistive technology makes a profound impact on the lives of people struggling with physical disability,” Herr wrote in a May 3 post on a Wall Street Journal blog. “It created a passion in me for science and engineering that has since defined my career.”
Herr’s award-winning team focuses on creating “intimate extensions of the human body” that react with ease to the nervous system’s electromechanical commands as fluidly as natural limbs. With fourteen patents relating to the field of bionics, Herr hopes to make an array of such advanced prosthetics commercially available and affordable.
What about knees like mine? In a New York Times interview last week, Herr speculated that someday, “smart” pants that act like a second skin on one’s legs might make running a painless, lifelong pursuit. My joints like the sound of that.
An avid athlete himself, Herr says he intends to run alongside his fellow amputees in next year’s Boston Marathon.
“We will participate as a beautifully defiant statement to the world that we the people will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence,” he writes.
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