EQN

The June 4 issue of Newsweek features a provocative essay by molecular biologist Lee Silver on the maverick field of synthetic biology.

Silver surveys the work of a number of researchers in synthetic biology. “SynBio engineers think they can take what we know [about living organisms] and design and construct novel forms of life that are programmed to do practical things that couldn’t otherwise be done,” he writes.

One of the researchers Silver writes about is his Princeton colleague Ron Weiss, an associate professor of electrical engineering. “We can now regard cells as ‘programmable matter,’ ” he quotes Weiss as saying. Weiss goes on to predict that soon we will be able to “program cell behaviors as easily as we program computers.”

Silver and Weiss both participated in a recent forum on genomics, health information, and ethics.

Image: Ron Weiss

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Bloggers are agog with admiration for Photosynth, the software that Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed off at the TED conference this spring and which Microsoft Live Labs calls “a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.”

In a video of the demo, which TED recently posted, Blaise Aguera y Arcas explains Photosynth’s 3-D computational reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral, assembled from photos of the Paris landmark that had been posted to Flickr by hundreds of different people. Aguera y Arcas says that this emergent software will yield “immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and satellites and so on but from the collective memory” — i.e., myriad random snapshots taken by ordinary people.

The Long Zoom says it blows the doors off the concept of 2-D image-place connections. The demo has got Hong Kong Ham’s quill quivering. And Ticklebooth says the demo will rock your world.

Aguera y Arcas was a doctoral student at Princeton under wavelet innovator Ingrid Daubechies in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He elaborates on her influences in this recent post to Channel 9 (scroll down — it’s the last item on the page).

You can read a lovely essay about Daubechies’ early life influences. She happens to be married to Robert Calderbank, the director of PACM and a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton who is a former vice president for research at Bell Labs and the co-inventor of space-time codes that improve the reliability of wireless communication.

Princeton is quite an incubator of digital graphics innovation. Fei-Fei Li recently brought her Vision Lab to Princeton. You can hear Adam Finkelstein explain in this podcast how difficult — yet important — it is to make an imperfect image with a computer. Szymon Rusinkiewicz and colleagues explore surface textures in this upcoming SIGGRAPH paper (you will never be able to see Swiss chard in the same light again).

Speaking of fascinating visualizations, check out Akamai’s new “weather map” of the Internet. Akamai (co-founded by Princeton Engineering graduate Tom Leighton) slices web weather in three ways: security, speed, and traffic. At the moment, Venezuela is being buffeted by a bodacious security storm while the Internet skies in France appear fair and breezy.

Image: “Multiscale Shape and Detail Enhancement from Multi-light Image Collections ACM Transactions on Graphics,” (Proc. SIGGRAPH), August 2007, Raanan Fattal, Maneesh Agrawala, Szymon Rusinkiewicz

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Princeton has many space-traveling connections, some of them quite unexpected.

For example, the new entrepreneur-in-residence at Princeton Engineering is Greg Olsen, the founder of Sensors Unlimited and one of Earth’s first private space travelers.

Olsen talks about his adventures in an illuminating interview in the current issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. In addition to fueling the entrepreneurial passions of Princeton students, Olsen devotes much of his time to inspiring school-age children to pursue careers in science and engineering. His talks are sprinkled with videos of his trip on the Russian Soyuz rocket. They provide an incredible glimpse into the everyday life of an astronaut. Here is a delightful video of Olsen drinking water in space.

Princeton’s august history in space began in 1948 when the Guggenheim Foundation named Princeton and Cal Tech as the two sites for its jet propulsion centers. One of the goals of the program, believe it or not, was to figure out how to deliver mail with rockets. Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering went on to make decades of contributions to the U.S. space program and the aerospace industry.

Princeton Engineering grads who have flown on space missions include Pete Conrad (1969), Gerald Carr (1973), J.C. Adamson (1991), Greg Linteris (1997), and Dan Barry (1999). These days Barry may be better known for his tenacious tenure on the reality TV show Survivor.

The cover of the current issue of Wired magazine is devoted to the “dawn of the private space age” and the space ambitions of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Princeton Engineering alum Jeff Bezos. Could entrepreneurs like Bezos eventually put NASA out of business? In a related Wired story on the decline of NASA, writer Gregg Easterbrook speculates that this is a possibility — “but not for the next couple of decades — space has colossal economic barriers to entry.”

Given his fascination with space and his phenomenal success as an Internet innovator, Bezos gave a surprising answer when asked recently what he considered the most exciting fields of today, according to a report from Agence France-Presse. Bezos, who in 1986 graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, said that if he were in college today he would be very interested in nanotechnology, biotechnology and genetic engineering.

While we’re on the subject of the new frontier at the intersection of biology and engineering, be sure to read this recent article by EETimes, which provides a glimpse into Ron Weiss’s latest work in synthetic biology. Finally, to bring us full circle, it is interesting to note that Princeton’s Robert Stengel, who designed the human module control system for the Apollo space mission, is now employing similar techniques to look for optimal treatments for HIV and other diseases.

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Sir Gordon Wu recently spoke in Hong Kong to the Wharton Global Alumni Forum about the trajectory of China’s growth and opportunities that lie in the country’s rapid urbanization.

An introduction to an edited transcript of Wu’s remarks, published on www.knowledgeatwharton.com, notes that when Wu graduated in 1958 from Princeton University’s School of Engineering with a degree in civil engineering, the Eisenhower administration was inaugurating an ambitious investment in the nation’s highway system. This in turn led to a real estate boom and the rise of suburbia in the 1960s.

When China opened its economy in the 1970s, Wu argued — often to skeptical ears — that the key to a vibrant future lay in building China’s own robust infrastructure. Wu’s company Hopewell Holdings pioneered the building of highways, power plants and bridges in China and Hong Kong and has become one of Asia’s largest civil construction firms.

You can learn what Wu sees in China’s future (and also learn how he came up for the name for his company) by reading the entire transcript. In a recent post commenting on Wu’s remarks, blogger Atanu Dey asks, “Who’s India’s Wu?,” sparking a lively discussion about the future of India.

By the way, when Wu recently completed a record-breaking $100 million gift to Princeton University, President Shirley Tilghman noted that his “generosity has touched every corner of the University.”

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Sergio Verdú, a giant in the field of information theory, tomorrow will be delivering the Shannon Lecture at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory being held this week in Nice, France.

What exactly is information theory? Not to be confused with “information technology,” information theory is the discipline in applied mathematics that drives technologies like MP3s and ZIP files and which lies at the intersection of a diverse range of fields, from physics and neurobiology to electrical engineering and statistics.

“Its impact has been crucial to success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the CD, the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet, the study of linguistics and of human perception, the understanding of black holes, and numerous other fields,” according to the Wikipedia entry on the field.

The Shannon Lecture is delivered by the recipient of the Shannon Award, the most prestigious prize in information theory. The award is named in honor of Claude Shannon, who launched the field in 1948 when he published his classic paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in Bell Labs’ technical journal.

Verdú’s talk tomorrow is playfully titled “teaching it” — “it” being information theory. Verdú is part of Princeton Engineering’s peerless powerhouse in information theory, a group of formidable theorists who are as renowned for their teaching as for their scholarship. This group includes H. Vincent Poor, Princeton’s dean of engineering, who is giving today’s plenary talk at the conference in Nice. A world-class authority on wireless, Poor will be talking about two different models of wireless networks: competitive and collaborative. At Princeton, Poor’s collaborators include Stuart Schwartz, Mung Chiang, and Sanjeev Kulkarni, who by the way has written a book with philosopher Gilbert Harman that has just been published by MIT Press.

Many will be listening closely to what Poor has to say today. The Economist magazine recently devoted a 14-page report on the impending wireless revolution, concluding that “wireless technology is akin to the electrical grid, which was originally intended for a particular use, the light bulb, but whose ‘killer application’ turned out to be the power socket that allowed a multitude of new and unforeseen devices to draw energy from it. In time, the new wireless technologies will likewise reshape society in unpredictable ways.”

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