BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. Previously he was head of Google’s core search algorithms group, and of NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Watch Q&A with Dr. Peter Norvig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ_sEImbCJU&feature=youtu.be

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Peering into the Future at the Stevens Innovation Expo
Stevens President Farvardin Discusses Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Small Business at the United Nations

Peering into the Future at the Stevens Innovation Expo

The ingenuity and inventiveness of Stevens Institute of Technology students and faculty were on full display May 3 at the university’s Annual Innovation Expo, a showcase of innovation and entrepreneurship featuring an array of senior design projects, research presentations by faculty and invited industry leaders, a keynote speaker and the crowd-pleasing elevator pitch competition.

Scores of visitors, including members of the Stevens community, local and national entrepreneurs, distinguished guests and media gathered to learn more about the scientific discoveries and inventions taking place at Stevens, and to ask questions from the individuals behind those innovations.

Spread across four venues on the university’s 155-acre campus, 133 senior design projects represented disciplines from the university’s four schools – the Schaefer School of Engineering and Science, the School of Business, the College of Arts and Letters and the School of Systems and Enterprises – and fell under one of four categories: energy, defense and security, healthcare and wellness, infrastructure and sustainable systems.

A mobile health future

At Stevens’ Babbio Center, Dr. Kamran Sayrafian, a program manager at the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), gave a stimulating research talk titled “Human Body, the Final Frontier,” which centered on the promising wireless technologies that could allow patients to be monitored continuously without having to be at a hospital or care facility. Sayrafian spoke about the possibility of continuously gathering and processing a variety of important health or physiological data of patients through body area networks (BAN) that work in concert with miniaturized electrical devices placed in wearable and implantable sensors. There is a host of technology- and system-level issues to sort through before the potential of this very complex multidisciplinary field can be fully realized, said Sayrafian. The need for human subject involvement, energy limitation and interoperability issues are just some of the many challenges these new technologies currently face, he says.

A lesson in entrepreneurship: separating the chefs from the cooks

Described by Vice Provost Mo Dehghani as the “crown jewel” of the Expo, the Thomas H. Scholl Lecture by Visiting Entrepreneurs featured superstar science blogger Tim Urban. Making his third appearance at Stevens, Urban is the creator of the long-form, stick-figure-illustrated blog “Wait But Why.” His extraordinary talent for simplifying the complex was evident last fall when he delivered a talk at Stevens in which he connected the Big Bang Theory, evolution, space travel, artificial intelligence and the future of mankind in just a little over an hour.

So it’s no wonder that he is Elon Musk’s favorite “explainer of things.” Urban was recruited by Musk to explain through his popular blog the motivation behind the launch of such companies as Tesla and SpaceX.

Urban was called to service more recently by the billionaire entrepreneur to describe Musk’s latest venture – Neurolink, a brain interface company that aims to link brains with computers in order to create an AI layer within the human mind.

Musk was the subject of Urban’s talk for the Scholl Lecture – “The Cook and the Chef: What We Can Learn from How Elon Musk Thinks.”

The distinction between chefs and cooks, according to Urban, is that “chefs write the recipes,” whereas “cooks follow the recipes.” Departing from conventional thinking is what has allowed Musk, and other great entrepreneurs like him, to create innovations that spawn entire new industries, according to Urban.

Applying the chefs vs. cooks theory to his own success, Urban says the ability to think like a chef was what led him to break the rules when he started his blog. His lengthy posts, which stretch beyond 3,000 words, flies in the face of conventional wisdom that long-form content is incompatible with a world where people communicate in 140 characters or less. Combining humor, stick-figure drawings and high quality writing, Urban’s blog receives more than 1 million unique visitors each month and has more than 440,000 email subscribers.

Prize-winning elevator pitches

This year’s Expo closed in dramatic fashion with an exciting Elevator Pitch Competition, a high-stakes contest in which student teams have three minutes to persuade prospective investors to help them turn their senior design projects into effective businesses. At stake was $17,500 in total prizes made possible by the generosity of the Ansary Foundation.

The panel of judges comprised business, academic and community leaders: George Abraham, founder and CEO of Rhodium Strategies; Brad Ansary, managing director of Ansaco; Sandra Doran, CEO of Castle Point Learning Systems; Jonathan Hakakian, managing director of SoundBoard Angel Fund; Roman Malantchouk, founder and CEO of walkTHIShouse; Darren Riva, director of brand management and product development at Pfizer; Stephen Socolof, managing partner at New Venture Partners; Joseph Yaccarino, executive vice president of operations of the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation; and Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer.

Scored on two metrics — presentation and feasibility — ten teams competed for first ($10,000), second ($5,000) and third ($2,500) place awards.

The first place winners were Maria De Abreu Pineda, Andrew Falcone and David Ferrara, the trio behind CerebroSense, a device that can monitor and measure exposed brain tissue from a distance, thereby reducing the risks that come with the traditional method of directly touching the brain.

Mark Liotta came in second place for CardiLoop, a control system for adjusting the blood flow of heart patients with left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) implants.

Rounding out the top three was the team behind SoPure – Maria Gomez-Botero, Megan Kohr, Kristina Miller, Christina Sciarra and Danai Argyri – a solar-powered water purification system aimed at combatting clean-water and power scarcities around the world.

The audience also weighed in with their take on the team presentations via the Stevens Innovation Expo 2017 app downloaded on their phones. Their pick for the best elevator pitch went to the team behind Knee3D, a wearable device for measuring the range of motion in knee flexion and extension for people who have had knee replacement surgery.

Innovation Expo 2017 concluded with an outdoor reception where attendees had an opportunity to engage with student innovators, faculty and members of the entrepreneurial community.

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Stevens President Farvardin Discusses Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Small Business at United Nations

Highlights barriers, pathways to supporting small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs at conference of international business leaders

Stevens Institute of Technology President Nariman Farvardin addressed distinguished business, political and academic leaders at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on May 11 as part of an international small business summit, outlining innovative means of nourishing entrepreneurial ecosystems and smaller-scale ventures — including some deployed on the Stevens campus. Portions of the event were webcast to more than 100 nations worldwide.

Speaking at the International Council for Small Business’ (ICSB) day-long MSME Knowledge Summit, Farvardin participated in discussions of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, delivering remarks as part an hour-long panel discussion among university leaders. He began by discussing several major barriers to entrepreneurial success, including skills gaps that prevent success in a knowledge-based, technology-rich economy; cultural aversions to risk; and insufficient public and private support for research and development.

Stevens, he explained, is actively creating an ecosystem that is highly supportive of new ideas and ventures, one that has already begun paying dividends.

“We are educating generation after generation of technological innovators and entrepreneurs — many of whom started micro- or small enterprises which then flourished to multi-million dollar, international companies employing hundreds or thousands of employees,” noted Farvardin.

Using Stevens’ programming as an example of academic institutions’ potential to nurture entrepreneurial qualities and ventures, Farvardin described the university’s required freshman-level and doctoral entrepreneurship courses; its unique “design spine” course sequence, which blends technical design training with entrepreneurial training; the creation of a Stevens Venture Center to inspire and support new ventures by students, faculty and alumni; and required senior-year capstone design projects.

“In all of these programs I have mentioned, we imbue in prospective entrepreneurs an appreciation of risk-taking and failure as a routine step on the path to success,” he added.

Farvardin also highlighted Stevens’ creation of long-term education partnerships with national governments worldwide, citing the example of an ongoing collaboration with Malaysia to assist that country’s universities in the creation of new entrepreneurial curricula and coursework.

The academic leadership panel was chaired by Winslow Sargeant, a former Small Business Administration official who chairs ICSB’s MSME Fund and serves as a member of President Farvardin’s President’s Leadership Council at Stevens.

Watch President Farvardin address the the United Nations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14mQoqZ45wQ&feature=youtu.be