Venkataraman Balaji: Fighting Drought with Technology

Age:

43

What He Does:

Uses information and communications technology to help poor and rural people solve life-threatening problems

For Whom:

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat)

Where He Does It:

Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India

Fun Factors:

Travels widely; interacts with a wide variety of people, including policy-makers, technologists, and rural villagers; does work that has an immediate impact on people's lives

It's only 500 metres from Venkataraman Balaji's three-bedroom cottage to his office—to say he lives at work is not an exaggeration. Work and home are on a lush, palm-dotted campus that sprawls over 1480 hectares, with more than a dozen two-story buildings housing offices and laboratories. Still, sometimes even half a kilometer can seem like a long way when you have a lot to do.

And Balaji has a lot to do. As head of the Information Systems Unit of Icrisat, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, in Patancheru, a suburb of Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, India, he has set an immediate goal that is both simple and ambitious. He wants to stop drought in Africa and Asia from threatening people's lives. Meanwhile, he spends at least half his time running Icrisat's information infrastructure, which connects its eight centers across Africa and Asia.

Sounds like a job for an agrichemist, perhaps, or maybe, in other times, a rain dancer. But Balaji thinks it is a job for an information technologist, because, he says, only with information and communications technology can the problem be solved. Such technology will allow knowledge of advanced agricultural techniques to spread to rural farmers, and it will link those rural farmers as well to local, national, and international markets. Both those factors, as well as improved drought prediction and the dissemination of that information, will allow information technology to finally defeat drought-created famine, he predicts. He calls this effort Vasat, for Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics.

The scale of operations for such an effort is enormous and involves what, to an outsider, would seem like an impossible number of meetings each day. Today, as IEEE Spectrum visited, Balaji, in a pinstriped white shirt, black trousers, and sandals, started out by meeting with a small group of visiting villagers. Crowding into his spartan office, the villagers updated him on their new information center and their effort to build a microcredit system using computers to keep a database of local banks and people.

Drought Fighter:: Venkataraman Balaji works with rural families, top technologists, and government officials to use information technology to fight drought-created famine.

Later, after a series of administrative meetings, he departed for Delhi to meet with the chairman of a grants commission, followed by a meeting of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. From Delhi, it was on to Bangkok, for a set of meetings organized by the United Nations and the Asia Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions. Meanwhile, he was making plans for an upcoming trip to Afghanistan, to help the Afghan government extend its information infrastructure to the northern and western parts of the country.

Such meetings, which for many engineers might be a trial, are a pleasure for Balaji. "In a day's work, I get to meet policymakers, field researchers, techies, and social activists," he says. "Interacting with front-rank experts across the world, top-level practitioners of new technologies, and rural families is absolute fun." Plus, he says, "I love traveling. I get to know more about ordinary lives. If I hadn't been an engineer, I would have been an anthropologist."

The Vasat project is not the first time Balaji has tackled such an ambitious technological goal along with such a vital humanitarian goal. As director of the informatics center at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, India, he brought the women and youth of 10 villages near the coastal city of Pondicherry online. To do this, he and his team installed VHF radios in each village, along with one central telephone exchange modified to receive video signals on one end and then pass the signals on to copper wires. The VHF radios created a local-area network; the exchange was able to route data and voice traffic through the network and onto the Internet. Another innovation was an uninterruptible power supply using various sources of battery, solar, and line power, optimized by fuzzy logic software.

With this system in place, local volunteers built their own databases, including ones for local market prices for grain, details of government subsidy programs, and pest management information. In the village of Villianur, where 1500 people were dependent upon fishing and had no modern means of navigating their boats, villagers began using the network to obtain the U.S. Navy's wave-height predictions for the Bay of Bengal, and they believe such information continues to save lives today.

Balaji studied both engineering and chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, in Kanpur, and at the University of Madras, in Chennai, finishing with a multidisciplinary Ph.D. in energy studies. He credits his stint at the Swaminathan Foundation with teaching him that the true job of an engineer is to use science and technology for the greater good. "In India," he says, "there are a lot of people who are less than ordinary, and if we cannot do anything for them, we have no right to be in the business of technology."

A few years down the road, Balaji hopes his current work preventing drought from threatening lives will be self-sustaining and he will be able to move on to work on his dream project. That goal is to create a cloud of nanosatellites—tiny communications satellites, almost the size of cellphones—over small regions to serve as communications outposts in the sky for poor rural communities. "The technology is already tested," he says. "It's only a matter of entrepreneurial initiative to make it real."

—Seema Singh

Dave Fruehling: His Job Rocks!

Age:

32

What He Does:

Designs digital guitars that model classic guitars and related products

For Whom:

Line 6

Where He Does It:

Agoura Hills, Calif.

Fun Factors:

Plays with priceless guitars and amplifiers; works surrounded by people with musical talent; sees his "baby" in the hands of rockstars (and gets to meet some); knows his daughter thinks his job is cool; gets calls from his grandmother when she sees one of his guitars on TV

Rock stars are thrilled to meet him. Teenage boys want his autograph. But Dave Fruehling is not some kind of longhaired pop star; he's a shorthaired electrical engineer, a mild-mannered systems architect at Line 6, the electric guitar and amplifier company in Agoura Hills, Calif.

Fruehling didn't set out to be an EE. No way; his dad was an EE—a long-time employee of Motorola Inc.—and Fruehling was into youthful rebellion. Heading off to college in 1989, in his 1976 Pontiac Firebird with Rush blasting on the CD player and an electric guitar on the back seat, he had set his sights on being a rock star and getting his picture on the cover of Guitar Player magazine.

But he soon realized that as an instrumentalist, anyway, he would never find his way into the pantheon of guitar gods. His grades as a music major at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville were dismal. Before long he was spending more time tinkering with electric guitars than playing them. This was nothing new: a week after he got his first guitar at age 11, he took it apart; during high school, he spent some 20 hours a week building sound-shifting circuits described in his dog-eared copy of Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians.

In 1993, Fruehling bowed to the inevitable—maybe it was in his genes—and switched his major to EE.

From that point on, he was a straight-A student. "Once I focused on engineering, it became my complete passion," he recalls.

Music Man:: Dave Fruehling thought he would grow up to be a guitar player, but his job designing digital electric guitars may be even more fun.

A two-year stint after graduation at hard-disk maker Seagate Technology LLC in Simi Valley, Calif., gave Fruehling engineering experience and enabled him to see the business card (on the desk of a co-worker) of the vice president of engineering at Alesis. Fruehling perked up; he knew that Alesis, in Santa Monica, Calif., put out music-related systems. The timing couldn't have been better: Alesis was hiring engineers to design a hard-disk recorder, and Seagate had announced that it was leaving California.

From Alesis he soon moved on to his present company, Line 6. Formerly Fast Forward Designs, it had consulted for Alesis but was also making its own products—guitar amplifiers, which lined up perfectly with Fruehling's passion.

At Line 6, Fruehling developed the bass guitar version of the POD, the company's flagship project. The POD is a kidney-bean-shaped signal-processor-based device that makes transistor-based guitar amplifiers sound exactly like vacuum tube amplifiers. For Fruehling, working on the POD was a dream come true. After all, to get the modeling down right, he had to obtain and test a dazzling variety of pathbreaking vintage amplifiers (still scattered today throughout the company).

After a brief stint researching the feasibility of building a USB (for Universal Serial Bus) guitar-computer interface (a project that was handed to another team), Fruehling, along with fellow senior design engineer Pete Celi, took on a blue-sky research project. The basic idea was to develop an electric guitar that, through massive digital signal processing, could convincingly mimic the unique sounds of the most legendary electric and acoustic guitars. It would be almost like taking an ordinary violin and giving it a switch that could let it sound not only like a Stradivarius but also a Guarneri or a Ruggieri, depending on your mood.

"When we started," Fruehling recalls, "we had no idea what we were going to make. Were we going to make a guitar? A box you plug a guitar into? An acoustic pickup that doesn't plug into the guitar at all?"

"It wasn't like an amp," he adds. "You can't just plug in a signal generator; you can't create a controlled signal by plucking the strings. And if it could be done, could it be done at a reasonable price?"

The project took two years. The result is the Variax, an electric guitar that looks fairly unremarkable, except for one extra knob that has the names of classic guitars. It models 50 historic guitars, faithfully capturing all their beloved quirks, like the distinct twang of the Fender Stratocaster or the singing sustain of the Gibson Les Paul. The product came out in November 2002, and more than 10 000 have been sold at an average price of US $1000. It is being played by a growing cadre of stars like Pete Townsend, Steve Howe, and Joe Walsh, along with a host of ordinary folks.

These days, Fruehling hobnobs with guitar gods who come to his office or invite him backstage to quiz him about the Variax. He has met several of his idols, including Eddie Kramer, the producer/engineer on Jimi Hendrix's albums, and Craig Anderton, the author of the guitar projects book that figured so prominently in his high school days. He gets a thrill when he sees guitar players on TV with his guitar in their hands.

Each morning, Fruehling spends an hour or two working on a computer interface for the Variax. In the early afternoon, he consults on a variety of internal projects, before getting together with Celi to make plans for the evolution of the Variax. Sometime during the day, he'll play a guitar for an hour or so, sometimes in the guise of testing, sometimes just for fun.

When he wants to jam, there's no shortage of partners; the majority of Line 6's 200 employees play. Many offices contain mixers and high-quality amps, along with a variety of guitars. Fruehling usually has half a dozen in his.

And in July 2003, Fruehling's photo appeared in Guitar Player magazine. "I always thought when that happened, I'd be holding a guitar and have long hair and fire shooting around me," he says. "But I'll take it this way, sitting in my office with scopes on the desk and equations on the whiteboard."

—Tekla S. Perry

John Gage: He IS The Network

Age:

60

What He Does:

Travels the world discovering new technology and problems awaiting solutions

For Whom:

Sun Microsystems Inc.

Where He Does It:

All over the world

Fun Factors:

Sets his own agenda; visits every corner of the globe; meets the smartest people around, from technical geniuses to political leaders

Leaning against a grimy, graffiti-covered wall in Berkeley, Calif., John Gage is deep in conversation with a couple in business dress. I'm a little early, but Gage motions for me to join them. He briefs me while I'm dragging over a chair—his other guests have a plan for getting high-speed Internet access into low-income housing projects nationwide. Gage explains that I'm from the IEEE, which triggers a brainstorming session about what role IEEE engineers could play in their effort.

When the pair leave, Gage, without skipping a beat, begins describing a Nortel product he just saw at the International Telecommunication Union conference in Geneva. The IEEE 802.11-based device, the size of a Pringles potato chip can, self-configures into a wireless network. Gage speaks rapidly, in a low voice, excited by the possibilities. "The thing can find its own network," he says. "So I figure, you can put one in all the Coke machines in the world, because vending machines have power supplies. And you put them in the townships of South Africa, which lets you get telephony."

"We could wash entire neighborhoods with it," he goes on. "You could get the governments involved—like Thailand. The new minister of information and communication technology is planning to say that the government will provide to every inhabitant of Thailand around 10 megabits of sustained broadband at some low price. So with national initiatives, there would be a market."

Globe-Trotter:: John Gage is director of the Science Office for Sun Microsystems Inc.— but he doesn't even have an office.

Listening to Gage is a wild ride with leaps, bounds, and hairpin turns. He knows what technologies are incubating, and what the specific technical needs are around the world. As he talks, the connections between the two light up like a switchboard in San Francisco after an earthquake.

This, in fact, is what Gage does for a living—making connections between disparate people and technologies. His company, Sun Microsystems Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif., has a slogan: the network is the computer. Within Sun, Gage is the network.

Gage's title is director of the Science Office, but that doesn't mean much. There is really no science office. There is only Gage, on the road with his laptop and his cellphone, gathering and dispersing ideas, the Johnny Appleseed of the Information Age.

Gage went to college for a long time, at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard, in a variety of majors—mostly mathematics, but also economics, public policy, and mathematical economics, rarely completing a degree. He took time out from college, on and off, to travel in France, to serve as a 1968 convention delegate for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, to help organize the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium, and to run the press bus for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign.

But where he got his real education, he says, is through the IEEE. He joined as a student member and attended all the conferences he could. "When you go to conferences, you find out what the real issues are that are confronting people who are trying to solve problems," he says. Besides the IEEE, a huge influence on Gage has been Unix pioneer Bill Joy.

At Berkeley in the early 1980s, Gage was trying to complete a graduate degree in mathematical economics but was frustrated by the difficulty in printing papers with mathematical notations. Wandering around campus one day, he saw beautifully typeset mathematics displayed on a wall and set out to learn how it was done. The secret turned out to be an early application of Unix, presided over by Joy, then a graduate student acting as system administrator. Gage tapped Joy for an education in this new technology, and was so enthused about it that he left Berkeley (without finishing his degree) to join Joy at the 1982 founding of Sun.

Gage initially worked in technical support, marketing, and sales— the functions that involved Sun's interface with the outside world. Those responsibilities evolved into his current duties. Through his job, he has met such luminaries as Kofi A. Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations; Jean Chretien, former Prime Minister of Canada; French President Jacques Chirac; European Commission President Romano Prodi; rock star Bono; and the Dalai Lama.

Last year alone he traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, China, Japan, Holland, Italy, Spain, Jordan, Australia, France, Vietnam, Finland, Germany, Mexico, and Switzerland.

But his job isn't all jet-setting. He schedules days when he just sits in the Sun cafeteria and talks to people at random. "I table-hop," he says, "I say, 'Hi, what are you doing?' I'm a nice person; people like to talk to me. And it's valuable for them because I'll have picked up something related to what someone else is doing that they wouldn't know about."

While gathering ideas comes easily to him, follow-up is sometimes a chore. He forces himself to go back through his notebook and his e-mail regularly. "I'll sort [a message] by who sent it, then again by topic. New links will pop up," he says.

His job may seem scattered to someone who prefers to dig deep into one technology. But it suits him. "I'm a surfer, so I understand that there are forces greater than yourself; you need to capture those forces and stay with them. You discover that you can die if you don't."

What's next on his agenda?

"China," he says. "The dominance of China is inevitable. So my plan, in February or March, is to find a place to live in Beijing, work on my Chinese, and set up a series of meetings with the people organizing the Beijing Olympics, because that is a focal point driving the building of all China's telecommunications links. I'll talk with the telcos. I'll go to the universities."

If Gage weren't doing this for Sun, he'd be doing it anyway; he just couldn't stop. As he puts it, "I spend my time with the world's smartest people and can see—even feel—the impact of change on people's lives."

—Tekla S. Perry

Lau Kofoed Kierstein: Playtime in the Land of Lego

Age:

30

What He Does:

Comes up with ideas for new toys; designs toys

For Whom:

Lego System A/S

Where He Does It:

Billund, Denmark

Fun Factors:

Tests prototype toys with children; travels around the world to meet with toy designers and check out new electronic components; plays with competitors' toys

"Up there is where I have my table, but, unfortunately, you can't see it," says Lau Kofoed Kierstein, smiling sheepishly and pointing at some second-story windows in a brick building with a red-tile roof. We're standing in a charming, green, leaf-strewn quadrangle in the bucolic headquarters complex of the toy giant Lego System A/S in Billund, Denmark.

For a year now Kierstein has been the technical lead "on a project of great strategic importance....It's going to be a big blast when it comes out, that's for sure. It will be a new era for Lego."

"We play a lot, and we test a lot of different things," he adds. "Every week, we have kids coming in, and we play with them to see what is cool for them, what is hip for them. It's intense because we are on unknown ground."

That's all he can say about it.

Really? Nothing else? "Well, it comes out in 2005."

The world of high-tech toy making is viciously competitive, with huge fortunes turning on the ideas and expertise of a relatively small number of people. But if the 30-year-old Kierstein is typical, these people are not letting a little cutthroat competition stand in the way of rather great amounts of fun. On our second day of meetings, he apologizes for being a few minutes late. It turns out he and his co-workers had spent the morning racing some radio-controlled cars.

Toy Story:: Lau Kofoed Kierstein's first big project for Lego was the Galidor Kek Powerizer, which responded to cues broadcast by a children's television show.

The ubiquitous primary-colored plastic building blocks remain the backbone of the Lego line, but electronics-based playthings—such as the MindStorms line of modular robotic toys—make up about 10 percent of the company's 450 different retail offerings, according to Lego spokeswoman Mette Uhd Hansen. And Kierstein, as senior technologist in Lego's Global Innovation and Marketing Organization, finds himself involved with almost everything the company is working on that beeps, glows, talks, walks, or races around the floor.

Besides designing toys and brainstorming about them, he helps designers and marketers understand what can be done with electronics, he travels around the world to keep in touch with Lego freelance toy designers, and he checks in periodically at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., which Lego cosponsors.

At Lego's home base in Billund, he has a work area in each of two Lego buildings; they're bright, open, airy spaces where he and other Lego designers and engineers talk, hash out designs, play with toys, and kick around ideas. At the moment, those areas are strewn with secret prototype toys, which is why I'm not allowed to enter.

A lifelong music fan who plays bass guitar in a U2 cover band called Elevation, Kierstein found his way into the toy business through his specific passion: acoustics. Four years ago, while he was working in Copenhagen as an engineer at an acoustics institute affiliated with the Technical University of Denmark, he had an idea for an inexpensive circuit to detect where sounds are coming from. He thought Lego might want it. They didn't, but they did want him.

"I was lucky. Or they were lucky. I don't know," he laughs.

His first assignment at Lego was to come up with an action figure to go with a children's sci-fi television show called "Galidor." The company's franchise director, Jacob Kragh, turned Kierstein loose on the project with these words: "We need a $50 item. Do something interesting."

He did. He designed a doll that interacts with the "Galidor" TV show, or with other dolls of its kind. Placed up to a few meters away from a TV, the dolls occasionally blurt out comments, seemingly reacting with perfect timing to the TV characters' exclamations or other events on the screen. It's all done with a simple but powerful acoustic communications system of Kierstein's conception.

Basically, the show's soundtrack sends out acoustic signals that trigger any one of 227 prerecorded utterances in the doll, or 85 simple animations that play on a small LCD screen on the toy figure's back. Viewers of the show don't notice the signals, an extremely faint chirping, because Kierstein's system masks them in other noises in the show's soundtrack and also exploits psychoacoustic quirks in human hearing.

The ingeniousness of the system is in that masking, and also in the fact that by relying on simple electronic components and very clever design, Kierstein's team held the cost of the entire acoustic receiving system in each doll below 7 Danish kroner, or about US $1.

For Kierstein, the project was a whirlwind introduction to the world of big-time toy making. Several months into the project, he had to fly to California for some meetings with the producers of "Galidor." "I had just started at Lego, and suddenly I'm standing on Santa Monica Beach, talking to Hollywood producers. Who could imagine that?"

The action figure, called the Galidor Kek Powerizer, was well received by its target audience of six- to eight-year-old boys. But the TV show wasn't a big hit, and the doll is already hard to find in stores. Nevertheless, the acoustic communications system will show up in future toys, Kierstein hints.

Best of all, though, as far as Kierstein is concerned, the toy made some children happy. Of all the possible confirmations of a new toy's worth, the best one for him is "looking at children's faces when they see something surprising and they think it's magic."

—Glenn Zorpette

Yoshihiro Kuroki: Dancing with Robots

Age:

51

What He Does:

Designs and builds humanoid entertainment robots

For Whom:

Sony Corp.

Where He Does It:

Shinagawa, Japan, a district of Tokyo

Fun Factors:

Teaches robots to dance

The dancers stand motionless at their positions and the room grows quiet. But as the music starts, they begin to move, bending, turning, and waving their fans gracefully as they perform a traditional Japanese dance. Yoshihiro Kuroki watches in silence, occasionally making notes. But as the dance ends, he beams with happiness. The performance has been flawless.

There have been many performances of traditional Japanese dances over the centuries, but this one is unique, because it is performed not by human dancers but by robots. And the performance takes place not in a dance studio but in a laboratory of Sony Corp.'s Entertainment Robot Co. in Shinagawa, Japan, where Kuroki is general manager. He is the mastermind behind a series of ever more capable humanoid entertainment robots, starting with the Sony Dream Robot, or SDR, in 1997, up to the current QRIO (pronounced "curio") in 2003.

These delightful machines are only 58 cm tall, about the size of a newborn infant, weigh about 7 kg, and move with 38 degrees of freedom, each with its own servomotor.

QRIO's predecessor, the SDR4X, announced in 2002, can walk, dance, sing, speak, recognize faces, and understand continuous speech. Each robot has two charge-coupled-device cameras to detect color and position and can locate a colored ball, move toward it, and kick it into a goal. It also has contact sensors in several joints to avoid pinching real human fingers. Seeing the robot perform, it is difficult to remember that there is no sentience behind those glass eyes.

Kuroki knew he wanted to work with robots ever since his second year of high school. His school was affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo, and one day his class visited the lab of Professor Ichiro Kato. Kato had a vision, says Kuroki, that the 21st century would be the age of the personal robot. That vision was contagious.

Close Friends:: QRIO, Sony's entertainment robot, sees, hears, dances, and sings. Here, he shakes hands with Yoshihiro Kuroki, his creator.

In 1973, as soon as he was out of high school, Kuroki headed straight for Kato's lab, where Wabot 1, for Waseda robot, had just been developed. Kuroki, though, was not assigned to build humanoid robots but rather to develop prosthetic arms. Much of his work in graduate school was to analyze the electrical signals from real muscles and transfer the information to the prosthetic arm to make it move appropriately. "So it's similar to a robot," says Kuroki, "which also has artificial hands and limbs."

When he joined Sony Corp., Tokyo, in 1977, straight out of graduate school, there were no jobs for designers of humanoid robots. He started a project to develop robots for manufacturing television tubes, camcorders, and audiocassette players.

At the time, Sony's manufacturing lines were highly automated. But in 1990 the company did a complete about-face and redesigned its manufacturing lines to focus on human assembly—a decision that turned out to be a stroke of luck for Kuroki. "I was very disappointed and had to change my job," he says. "And then I decided it was time to develop a personal entertainment robot."

He and a colleague, Tatsuzo Ishida, started by researching the history of humanoid robots, including one developed in the 19th century by Hisashige Tanaka, the founder of Tokyo's Toshiba Corp. Kuroki laughs as he tells about the "karakuri doll," which could pick up one of four arrows, fix it in a bow, draw the bow, and shoot it at a target. "Three of them hit the target, and one of them is programmed to miss it."

It was while he was studying the field, in 1990, that Kuroki traveled to Hollywood to see No. Five, the robotic hero of the movie Short Circuit, along with No. Five's creator, Eric Allard. He was particularly impressed with the robot's ability to express emotion by moving its eyebrows and widening and narrowing its eyes.

Back in Japan, Kuroki set to work designing Sony's first entertainment robot. He knew he could not use the same servomotors that he had designed for the assembly robots in the 1980s, because this robot was much more complicated. All told, its torso, neck, and limbs had to have 28 degrees of freedom, compared with 4 degrees for the assembly robots. So he decided to develop special servomotors specifically for his small humanoid.

He and his team produced the first prototype in 1997. And the first time they switched it on, it made some weird motions and didn't behave very well. If the robot moved its arms one way, it fell over, because there was no countering movement to compensate for the shift in the center of gravity. Since then, engineers have designed a whole-body motion control system that knows what each joint is doing and calculates what other motions have to occur to keep the unit upright and stable.

Now that Kuroki's robots are famous, he spends a lot of his time writing papers and preparing presentations. But the best part of his job, he says, is developing new motion-control technologies for his robots.

As you might expect of a top engineer at the world's preeminent consumer electronics company, Kuroki surrounds himself with gadgets. In his Yokohama home, he's got a high-definition TV, a DVD player, a PlayStation, a Walkman, and a camcorder, but, unfortunately, no entertainment robot. Still, every summer he rents one and takes it home, he says, for evaluation. Or maybe he just does it for the fun of it.

—Linda Geppert

Jim Newman: Call of the Sea

Age:

44

What He Does:

Designs unmanned submersibles for deep-sea exploration

For Whom:

Self-employed; main client is Robert D. Ballard's Institute for Exploration, Mystic, Conn.

Where He Does It:

Woods Hole, Mass., and Narragansett, R.I.

Fun Factors:

Spends part of each summer at sea and no time in a cubicle

If you've ever tuned into one of those National Geographic specials on underwater archaeology, then you've probably seen Jim Newman's work. You may even have seen Newman himself. No, he's not the charismatic oceanographer discussing the extraordinary 2000-year-old shipwreck that's just been unearthed in the Black Sea—that would be Robert D. Ballard, Newman's boss. But you see that busy guy in the background, checking on data and video feeds and just generally making sure the research equipment is running smoothly? That's Jim Newman.

For the last five years as chief engineer for Ballard's Institute for Exploration, in Mystic, Conn., and more than a decade before that, Newman has been designing remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, for doing underwater research. His one-of-a-kind machines are used to survey, excavate, and film sites of scientific or historical interest hundreds or thousands of meters below the ocean's surface. Because they're piloted from the ship, via a long cable, ROVs can be deployed where it's too dangerous or difficult for a human diver to go.

Mighty Hercules:: Jim Newman's latest creation is a two-armed excavating robot used for underwater archaeology and ocean science

Water has always been Newman's element. Growing up outside Boston, he summered in Woods Hole, on the southern shore of Cape Cod. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology intent on studying ocean engineering and designing sailboats for a living. Though he stuck with the former, earning his B.S. and M.S. in 1981 and 1986, respectively, he soon gave up the latter.

Instead, he started hanging around the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the world's leading research facility for ocean science. As an undergrad, he wrote software for crunching data and helped build instrumentation. Later, he got involved in designing Jason, one of the earliest research-oriented ROVs.

Though no longer employed by the Woods Hole facility, Newman remains close by. He, his wife, and their three kids live down the street from where he summered as a child. Most days, you'll find him in his home office or puttering around the hangar-like structure at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett where his ROVs are stored.

The hangar has the feel of an auto mechanic's garage, with spare parts and spools of wire scattered about, except that the vehicles up on blocks here are custom-built creations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In the parking lot outside sit several shipping containers; they house a video studio, a computer hub, a repair workshop, and a storage room. Loading the containers onto an ordinary fishing boat transforms it into a floating research lab.

Every summer, Newman goes to sea with Ballard's crew, to places like Turkey, Israel, Malta, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. Exotic travel aside, what Newman really loves about his work is its non-9-to-5-ness. "Everything we do is unscripted," he says. "There are no university classes to teach you what to do."

Putting together a new ROV is a group effort: Newman does the conceptual design and then supervises five to 10 other engineers on the electrical, mechanical, software, and other systems. Each vehicle is a balance of the general-purpose and mission-specific; its potential uses run the gamut from archaeology to oceanography, marine biology, geology, and geochemistry.

A big part of designing an ROV is protecting it from seawater. "You really shouldn't put stuff in the ocean," he jokes. "It's a nasty environment." He points out a junction box on Hercules, a 2-meter-tall, canary-yellow ROV used to excavate deep-sea sites. The electronics are bathed in mineral oil, which is noncorrosive and nonconductive, and an air bladder puts positive pressure on the oil.

Because it's too costly to go to sea just to test a vessel, a lot of bugs get worked out during actual expeditions. Last summer, for example, a hydraulic line on Hercules failed at 500 meters and fried its hydraulic pump. It seemed like a freak accident. They had a new pump flown in, installed it, replaced the damaged line, and sent Hercules back down. At 500 meters, another line blew and the pump failed again. Hercules was now out of commission.

"That's the one I kick myself over—giving in to wishful thinking and not analyzing what went wrong before we did it again," Newman says. Since then, he and a colleague have exhaustively studied the problem; as best they can tell, several small mistakes led to the big one—the choice of hydraulic line, the setting on the hydraulic controls. They're now fixing and upgrading Hercules and the other ROVs.

"In the big picture, nobody got hurt, and I worry a lot more about that than about the hardware," Newman adds. "But the second priority is to have working hardware, and I failed in that." He's not offering a heart-rending confession, mind you, just an engineer's level-headed self-appraisal.

Robert Ballard, for his part, shrugs off last summer's mishap. "Jim Newman is the personification of the professional engineer—he's bright, he's honest, he's unflappable. He designed all these beautiful vehicles, he put the engineering team together, he's the troubleshooter....I can't imagine going to sea without him."

Newman's next project will be an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV. Rather than being tethered to the ship, it will be battery-powered and either self-guiding or controlled through acoustic signals. Newman has never designed an AUV but seems confident he can. "Nothing we use is very exotic," he says. "We're just adapting standard technology to a very cool application."

Jean Kumagai

Julie Payette: Geek in Space

Age:

40

What She Does:

Astronaut mission specialist

For Whom:

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency

Where She Does It:

Johnson Space Center, Texas, and outer space

Fun Factors:

Microgravity; incredible views; high-tech adventure

Fixing a balky battery recharger might seem a pedestrian activity for most EEs, but Julie Payette's circumstances were a little unusual: she was hurtling around the earth at 28 000 kilometers per hour, some 320 km up. Astronaut Payette was on board the then-embryonic International Space Station (ISS) as part of a 1999 shuttle flight to prepare the station for its first permanent inhabitants. One of the crew's key tasks during that mission was to replace a set of voltage regulators that were preventing the station's batteries from charging properly. After the power system was successfully repaired, Payette also oversaw a lengthy spacewalk from the flight deck of the shuttle and released a miniature satellite from its payload bay.

The path that led to her stint as an orbiting repairwoman can be traced all the way back to Payette's childhood in French-speaking Montreal, where, growing up, she watched the Apollo astronauts on TV. "I thought it was really cool, and I wanted to do the same thing," she remembers. People around her were skeptical, because "when you don't speak English and you're from Canada and you're a girl, wanting to be an astronaut sounds weird." But Payette stuck with her dream. "It influenced me to go into engineering. I knew I couldn't count on being an astronaut to make a living, but I did make some choices with that idea in the back of my mind," she explains.

Orbiting Fixer:: Julie Payette before a mock-up of the International Space Station. She was one of the first astronauts to visit the orbital outpost.

She received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, in Montreal, in 1986, and went on to receive a master's in computer engineering from the University of Toronto before working for IBM as a system engineer and then for Nortel in the field of voice recognition. Payette credits her education with giving her the right mental toolkit to do her job. Being an astronaut "is about learning how systems work, how to operate systems, how to troubleshoot them, how to think on your feet. This methodology is very much in line with what you learn in engineering school," she explains.

Still, Payette feels that engineering students should broaden their horizons: "I'm a very big fan of versatility. I know that many engineers have to take a few writing or history courses and hate it. But it makes them better people, and better engineers, too, because solutions to problems often require openness and creativity, and if you haven't seen anything else but your own little domain, you won't have that." Payette practices what she preaches—she speaks six languages, has become an accomplished musician, and is an experienced pilot, with hundreds of hours in jet planes. She came to NASA in 1996, on loan from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), in Saint-Hubert, Quebec, which provides NASA with equipment—most notably robot arms for the shuttle and the International Space Station. In exchange, NASA integrates Canadian astronauts as members of its astronaut corps and provides them with a ride into space.

Like all astronauts, however, Payette spends most of her time on the ground. A large portion of it is divided between maintaining her general skills as an astronaut, which requires working in mock-ups and simulators to practice for such events as an emergency bailout from a damaged shuttle and working in mission control for the ISS as a so-called Capcom, or capsule communicator.

A Capcom is the vocal link between mission control and astronauts working in space—to avoid confusion, only the Capcom is allowed to talk to those in orbit, and by tradition the role is filled by an astronaut. Being Capcom is a job that requires constant training and simulation with the other mission controllers and astronauts.

Payette must also maintain her piloting skills by flying the astronaut corps' T-38 Talon jet planes. The rest of the time is spent on her administrative duties as the Canadian chief astronaut and on public relations projects. All this activity leads to Payette's one grouch about what she considers the best job in the world: "There's no time. I'm not in control of my time and haven't been in many years. My time is scheduled" by NASA and the CSA.

Frequently, Payette finds herself working nights and weekends, but she appears to thrive on the pressure. She gave birth to her second child a few months ago, and beyond forcing her to swap her ragtop Jeep Wrangler for an SUV-style Jeep Liberty, having a larger family appears to have scarcely slowed her down.

Although Payette expects at least one more chance to soar in space, the loss of the Columbia and its crew last February has grounded the shuttle fleet and raised questions about the future of NASA's human space flight program. The Columbia disaster affected Payette deeply, but it hasn't changed her willingness to go into space.

Speaking of NASA's efforts to return to human flight, Payette says she feels that the disaster actually "motivates us to go back to flying and completing missions, because otherwise my colleagues, my friends, would have lost their lives in vain."

—Stephen Cass

Dennis Shelden: Turning Dreams into Reality

Age:

38

What He Does:

Develops computer tools for architectural design

For Whom:

Gehry Technologies LLC

Where He Does It:

Los Angeles

Fun Factors:

Surrounded by visionaries; has a great many difficult, seemingly unsolvable problems to wrestle with; and belongs to a firm that gets tremendous recognition for its work as it creates landmark after landmark

Frank Gehry's acclaimed new Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles is all sweeping curves, strange angles, and huge glistening slabs. It is a steel flower so revolutionary that when Gehry first designed it in the late 1980s, it seemed impossible to build. In fact, work stopped in the mid-1990s as costs soared.

But while the Disney project languished, there was another revolution going on at Gehry Partners LLP, a technological one. And computer scientist Dennis Shelden was in the thick of it.

Gehry Partners had begun using software developed for aircraft design, a computer modeling system called CATIA. CATIA, short for computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application, got its first major workout in the design and construction of the striking Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed in 1997.

The Bilbao Guggenheim was already under way when Shelden joined the firm in 1997 as director of R and D. He was hired to work on software that would let designers collaborate with colleagues working at other sites. But as one of the most technically savvy people at the firm, Shelden soon found himself tapped to extend the capabilities of CATIA by developing original software. For CATIA had limitations. Shelden explains: "In an airplane, a bolt is basically a bolt. But in architecture, a wall isn't just a wall. It has different behaviors. It is two lines on a piece of paper. It encloses a space. It represents a structure. It's a boundary in an energy model."

R and D for Buildings:: When Dennis Shelden looks at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, he sees traces of the technologies he helped develop.

One of the first challenges he tackled was to create software to make the "swoopy" shapes of a Seattle museum design buildable. Shelden created software that rendered curved surface models into organizations of panels that took into account the structural and support requirements imposed on the glass, aluminum, and stainless steel elements of the complex design. Another project he worked on at the time involved using software to analyze the constraints of certain building materials to extend the possible. For example, after designers determined how much a panel of glass could bend without breaking, they found that curved glass surfaces could be built without forming special panes of glass, as long as the curvature was limited.

Coping with these problems at Gehry's firm enhanced the technical tools at hand, tools that became a boon when the Disney effort was relaunched in 1998. Today, when he looks at the stunning structure, completed last year, Shelden sees the traces in the building forms of the technologies he helped develop.

Shelden's career path resembles a Gehry building—it is hard to find a straight line anywhere. Like many 30-something engineers today, he got his hands on computers as a preteen and programmed for fun throughout his adolescence. Meanwhile, he shuttled around the world as his parents' job assignments changed—his father was a technical specialist in chemical engineering for the United Nations, his mother worked for Swissair. Regularly, though, his family would vacation in Boston, and every time they drove past the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they would point it out to him as a mecca.

So when the time came for college, the place to go was obvious. "I felt like a salmon going upstream when I got to Cambridge," he recalls. He had initially planned to be a computer science major, but he spent his last year of high school near Stuttgart, Germany, as an exchange student, and suddenly, the computer profession seemed stifling. Instead, he entered college as a double major in physics and philosophy, but quickly found out he was good in neither field.

Eventually he graduated with a B.S. in art and design in architecture, worked briefly as an architect, then as a carpenter, and then, falling back on the computer-aided design (CAD) courses he had taken at MIT, as a CAD consultant. He then joined a start-up in California that was developing technology to do energy system simulations for buildings. Working on the user interfaces, he programmed them in Smalltalk.

Meanwhile, he took engineering courses at the University of California at Berkeley as an extension student. In 1994 the CAD company failed, and Shelden went back to MIT, getting a master's degree in information technology and, later, a Ph.D. in computation. While he was at MIT, he worked on a project backed by Gehry Partners on collaborative design, intended to facilitate joint work by engineers and architects, and the firm offered Shelden a job, which he took in 1997.

Now, Shelden and the growing group of EEs and computer professionals at Gehry are taking their technology out from behind the scenes. They've spun off a company, Gehry Technologies LLC, in Los Angeles, to develop and market their tools to other architects. Shelden is chief technology officer of the new venture, which expects to have its first products out by midyear. "As part of an architecture firm, we were behaving an awful lot like a technology firm," Shelden says. The group's Holy Grail is to convert the industry at every level to these new design tools, to the point that the archaic but still ubiquitous paper blueprints will be a thing of the past.

Today, Shelden explains, an architect's vision is first realized as a drawing on paper; that paper is interpreted by engineers and then again by builders. "Potentially," he says, "we could compress that to the point where an architect can directly affect the making of things." And that, he adds, gazing out over a forest of architectural models, would be radical.

—Tekla S. Perry

Karl Stahlkopf: Engineer in Paradise

Age:

63

What He Does:

Directs Hawaii's renewable energy efforts

For Whom:

Hawaiian Electric Co.

Where He Does It:

All Hawaiian Islands except Kauai

Fun Factors:

Works with cutting-edge renewable energy technologies—in one of the most beautiful places on Earth

Anybody who gulps his morning coffee out of a paper cup while stuck in traffic or on a lurching commuter train will surely envy Karl Stahlkopf's morning caffeine ritual. He sips his coffee while gazing out at the deep blue Pacific Ocean from halfway up Pali Mountain, northeast of Honolulu, Hawaii.

Then, wearing an aloha shirt, he climbs into his car, drives the back streets down the mountain, and rolls into the company parking lot in downtown Honolulu 10 minutes later.

There, as chief technology officer of the Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO), he presides over the energy future of all the islands except for Kauai, which has its own electricity co-op. He is also the company's senior vice president for energy solutions and president of Renewable Hawaii Inc., the company's renewable energy subsidiary.

Arriving in Honolulu last spring after 30 years with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, Calif., where he was vice president of power delivery, Stahlkopf was given a simple but sizable mandate: reduce the amount of fuel the islands must import to generate electricity. He's doing it by pushing the development of renewable sources like wind energy and by encouraging hotels and other big customers to generate power on-site.

Wind is the most abundant source of renewable energy in Hawaii, says Stahlkopf. But tapping into it is not exactly a breeze. Each island has its own grid, completely disconnected from those of the other islands. "With a very small grid like the one on the Big Island or on Maui," he explains, "a wind farm of even 20 MW, which wouldn't be a pimple on the mainland, can make a big difference to a small system."

The Power Game:: It was the chance to be at the cutting edge of alternative energy that lured Karl Stahlkopf to Hawaii. But Oahu's beautiful beaches didn't hurt.

That's because the wind is, of course, unpredictable, buffeting and changing directions. That point was driven home for Stahlkopf when he visited the control room of HECO subsidiary Hawaiian Electric Light Co., in Hilo, a small city on the southeastern coast of the Big Island. The frequency meters were showing wild variations due to surges of power from a wind farm. "I thought I'd seen it all," Stahlkopf relates, "But, boy, I hadn't."

The phenomenon led him to design an electric shock absorber to smooth out such power surges, allowing the connection of more wind farms to the grid. He applied for a provisional patent last spring and had just signed the final patent papers when this reporter walked in for the interview.

But in his quest to cut Hawaii's oil dependency, Stahlkopf is looking far beyond wind. Renewable Hawaii is aiming to partner with developers of such other renewable resources as sun, hydro, biomass, ocean, and geothermal energy. The HECO subsidiary will, as a minority partner, help finance the most promising projects.

Another venture on Stahlkopf's front burner is the use of power lines for broadband communications, now called broadband over power lines, BPL. In the past, he explains, the big stumbling block has been how to get the data through power transformers in one piece. But he and his engineering staff have found new technologies to overcome that limitation.

He led the formation of a consortium to run initial market trials in single and multi-family dwellings in downtown Honolulu. "We have seen data rates in individual homes from 1.5 to 4 Mb/s," he says. The next generation of chip sets, which he expects to arrive this quarter, will increase these speeds by a factor of 10. He is now working with the consortium on a business plan for a commercial rollout.

Stahlkopf extols the virtues of a broad and diverse education, citing his own experiences. Working his way through college in the 1960s as a guitar player and folk singer at coffeehouses, he received degrees in electrical engineering, naval science, and nuclear engineering. He spent seven years working as an engineer on nuclear submarines and at the Pentagon before joining EPRI. But, not surprisingly, the HECO job ranks as the pinnacle for him, and not just for the location. Aggressive use of new technologies is "part of HECO's corporate culture, and it's what drew me here from California," he says.

Of course, living in paradise is nothing to sneeze at, either. It falls right in with his two main hobbies—golf (at which he claims to be terrible) and scuba diving. His office wall sports a stunning photograph of a shark, taken when he and his wife, Carole, were diving off the coast of Fiji along with a native guide and another couple.

They had gone into a small cave that had only one narrow entrance. The guide went first and Stahlkopf was second, followed by the other couple. Carole brought up the rear. Inside they found a large shark at rest. "I snapped a picture of it," says Stahlkopf, "and the strobe scared the living daylights out of it." The shark made a beeline for the entrance just as Carole was swimming through and knocked her head over heels. "I didn't know it was possible for someone to scream underwater, but she did it. And I don't think she has ever forgiven me."

—Linda Geppert

Steve Sullivan: Shaping the Future of the Movies

Age:

37

What He Does:

Research in digital movie production and special effects

For Whom:

Industrial Light and Magic

Where He Does It:

San Rafael, Calif.

Fun Factors:

Works with artists, directors, and celebrities; pushes the state of the art in moviemaking at a company with the clout to influence the future of the industry; and sees the results of his work on the big screen

Steve Sullivan was 12 years old when he wrote his first graphics program. The year was 1981, his computer was Radio Shack's primordial TRS-80 Color Computer, and the program enabled Sullivan to make simple sketches.

Now his name rolls on the visual-effects credits for such blockbuster movies as The Mummy, Pearl Harbor, and Minority Report.

As director of R and D for LucasFilm Ltd.'s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), in San Rafael, Calif., he has been on movie sets with Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Jennifer Connelly. He's even been kissed by actress Charlize Theron, when she handed him his Academy Award for technical achievement. But for Sullivan, an IEEE member, "it's really all about pushing the technology to make new art." Sullivan supervises a department that creates software to realize the visions of moviemakers and is inching toward the visual-effects industry's biggest challenge: to create a digital human, indistinguishable from a real actor.

Despite never having met an electrical engineer, Sullivan entered college at the University of Missouri-Rolla an electrical engineering major, with the intent to do something involving R and D. He chose EE instead of computer science, he says, because, in those days, "hardware was part of getting anything cool to happen. The platforms were primitive, so if you wanted to build a speech synthesizer, say, you had to have a few chips to mess with."

He got his bachelor's degree and then accepted an offer to work as a research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, thinking he'd get to do more interesting work if he had a master's degree. After finishing his master's in two years, focusing on wavelets and signal processing, he stayed at Illinois for five more years, refocusing his research on automatically modeling and recognizing objects from images.

Dynamic Duo:: What do this life-sized robot model and engineer Steve Sullivan have in common? They both work behind the scenes at ILM to create movie digital effects.

He was headed toward a Ph.D. in EE but had no clear idea what he would do once he got there.

"Just about all the EEs I knew were professors," he says, "but I didn't think I wanted to do that. I couldn't imagine myself covering the same material year after year."

Instead, he thought he might work in a big corporate R and D lab. Then, in the final year of his Ph.D. program, he saw a TV special on the making of Jurassic Park. The documentary explained the complex task of figuring out just where the cameras were in each frame in relation to the real actors and the computer-generated dinosaurs. The filmmakers were doing this by placing tennis balls on the ground as markers and then adjusting the viewpoint of the computer camera by hand, frame by frame.

This was Sullivan's aha! moment—he immediately realized that the computer-vision techniques that were part of his Ph.D. research could be adapted to solve this camera-location problem. Clearly, the movie industry would welcome him with open arms. His career path now in focus, he called ILM in the fall of 1996. It had open positions and flew him to California for an interview. ILM had little interest in his computer-vision concepts but did offer him a job—in tech support.

Since tech support was an awfully long way from R and D, Sullivan turned the offer down and instead found a job at a graphics company that also did computer work for the movie industry, Rhythm and Hues Studios in Los Angeles. There he worked on computer animation techniques, contributing to Babe 2, Mouse Hunt, and Speed 2: Cruise Control. He stayed there for two years, lobbying for a job at ILM all the while. Finally, in 1998, ILM not only had openings but had identified a need for camera tracking. The company hired Sullivan to develop automatic camera-tracking techniques based on computer-vision algorithms.

As Sullivan explains it, the solution is to track a few points in the image over a few frames. Then, using the motion of those two-dimensional points and the knowledge that you are looking through a camera that sees in perspective, you can write algorithms that reconstruct the 3-D positions of those points as well as the position from which the points are being viewed.

The technique was first used to calculate virtual camera angles in the movie Pearl Harbor and is now used on every ILM project, such as the recent Pirates of the Caribbean and Peter Pan.

He was promoted to R and D director for ILM in 2003; now, he says he can apply his efforts to a broader range of problems. This probably isn't the highest-paying career he could have, he indicates, but it certainly is one of the most fun.

Every morning he gets into his blue Porsche Boxster for the 25-kilometer drive over the Golden Gate Bridge from his San Francisco home to ILM's San Rafael facility—an unmarked, unglamorous hodgepodge of 1970s office buildings, converted warehouses, and portable construction trailers just east of the freeway. There he collaborates with teams of artists, producers, and developers to tackle the technical challenges of the latest movie in production. When that movie doesn't chew up his day, he gets to focus on the future, such as generating photorealistic digital human characters or developing virtual production techniques to make movies in new ways.

Meanwhile, the industry is growing, Sullivan says, and opportunities for engineers abound. He toys with the idea of starting his own company. But for now he's just having too much fun where he is.

—Tekla S. Perry