National Academy of Engineering 2011 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium September 19-21, 2011 Google, Inc. Mountain View, California Ultra Low Power Biomedical and Bio-inspired Systems September 21, 2011 Presented by Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar. ABSTRACT: Google hosted 100 attendees of the 2011 Nat’l Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering symposium (FOE) at our Mountain View office and Dinah’s Garden Hotel in Palo Alto. The symposium is an annual three-day meeting that brings together 100 of the nation’s outstanding young engineers (ages 30-45) from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. About the speaker: Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar is an Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talk discusses how analog, RF, and bio-inspired circuits and architectures have led to and are leading to novel systems for ultra-low-power biomedical applications. Examples from systems for bionic ear processors for the deaf, brain–machine interfaces for the blind and paralyzed,body sensor networks for cardiac monitoring, and in circuits for systems biology and synthetic biology were also presented.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

“The Theory That Would Not Die” How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy” Bayes’ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of numerous books, including Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries and Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. She is a prize-winning former reporter for Scripps …
Video Rating: 4 / 5