Abhijit Majumder, 33 ( Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur)
Making stronger adhesives that can imitate nature
Inspired by insects and wall lizards that can run up vertical
surfaces such as rock-faces or walls, Abhijit Majumder has created a
microfluidic adhesive that can stick to the surface as tightly as a wall
lizard does.
For long, surface patterns have been appreciated for controlling adhesion. However, Majumder's study observed that other than surface structures, the natural adhesive pads of insects also have sub-surface structures that play an equally important role in helping them defy gravity and stay on vertical surfaces. To replicate the phenomenon, he embedded subsurface microchannels into elastic adhesive films to demonstrate subsurface structure's influence on adhesion. He further filled the micro-channels with liquid to exert a capillary force that modifies the apparent stiffness of the adhesive material, making it more compliant. The dynamic interplay of different forces results in an enhanced adhesion that is 30 times stronger than conventional adhesives.
"By more intelligent manipulation with channel geometry and arrangement, adhesion can be further improved by 70 times," says Majumder. The uniqueness of the product lies in its reusability. "As the mechanism is based on mechanics and not on viscoelastic energy loss, the adhesion does not decrease even after 25 attachment-detachment cycles. Moreover, the same adhesive, with geometric manipulation can also be used as an easy-release coating that has a very low adhesion. The same mechanism also achieves strong adhesion underwater showing the potential of using this adhesive for marine and tissue adhesive applications," says Majumder.
The invention holds potential to be used for designing wall-climbing robots, surgical tapes, suture free surgery and underwater applications. Overall, it presents the possibility of designing smart responsive soft materials, prosthetics and soft joints, shock absorbers, pressure sensors and optical modifiers. Majumder has demonstrated some of these applications and is currently working on making the adhesive directional which will make detaching from one direction effortless while making it difficult to do the same from other directions.
For long, surface patterns have been appreciated for controlling adhesion. However, Majumder's study observed that other than surface structures, the natural adhesive pads of insects also have sub-surface structures that play an equally important role in helping them defy gravity and stay on vertical surfaces. To replicate the phenomenon, he embedded subsurface microchannels into elastic adhesive films to demonstrate subsurface structure's influence on adhesion. He further filled the micro-channels with liquid to exert a capillary force that modifies the apparent stiffness of the adhesive material, making it more compliant. The dynamic interplay of different forces results in an enhanced adhesion that is 30 times stronger than conventional adhesives.
"By more intelligent manipulation with channel geometry and arrangement, adhesion can be further improved by 70 times," says Majumder. The uniqueness of the product lies in its reusability. "As the mechanism is based on mechanics and not on viscoelastic energy loss, the adhesion does not decrease even after 25 attachment-detachment cycles. Moreover, the same adhesive, with geometric manipulation can also be used as an easy-release coating that has a very low adhesion. The same mechanism also achieves strong adhesion underwater showing the potential of using this adhesive for marine and tissue adhesive applications," says Majumder.
The invention holds potential to be used for designing wall-climbing robots, surgical tapes, suture free surgery and underwater applications. Overall, it presents the possibility of designing smart responsive soft materials, prosthetics and soft joints, shock absorbers, pressure sensors and optical modifiers. Majumder has demonstrated some of these applications and is currently working on making the adhesive directional which will make detaching from one direction effortless while making it difficult to do the same from other directions.
-------------------------------------
Anthony Vipin Das, 28 (LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad )
Digitizing medical records
At LV Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI), one of the India's largest eye
hospitals that has treated over 13 million patients till date, getting
information about a particular patient instantly is paramount. Written
records at a single center are not only difficult for the doctor to
access, but also cumbersome for the patient to carry for each visit.
This is where eyeSmart, a Web-based application for retrieval of patient records comes in. Designed by Anthony Vipin Das, the paperless system spans the entire LVPEI pyramid and allows a doctor to access the medical records of a patient from any of its clinics. EyeSmart is a distributed database linked to a central database which makes the data at all urban and rural centers available in real time.
Das has designed the Web-based model based on the PHP platform, which provides detailed summary of the patient's examination each time he visits a clinic. Apart from the advantages of convenience to both the doctor and the patient, this model has cut costs on printing as well as has reduced the number of man hours required for maintaining written records. The eyeSmart also allows for online booking of appointments and personalized SMS alerts.
Today the application is being used in eight of LVPEI's centers and is accessible on platforms such as iPads and tablets. Das is hopeful of integrating eyeSmart with all the 102 LVPEI centers to enable seamless connectivity.
(Reported by Manasi Vaidya for TR35)
--------------------------------------------------------
This is where eyeSmart, a Web-based application for retrieval of patient records comes in. Designed by Anthony Vipin Das, the paperless system spans the entire LVPEI pyramid and allows a doctor to access the medical records of a patient from any of its clinics. EyeSmart is a distributed database linked to a central database which makes the data at all urban and rural centers available in real time.
Das has designed the Web-based model based on the PHP platform, which provides detailed summary of the patient's examination each time he visits a clinic. Apart from the advantages of convenience to both the doctor and the patient, this model has cut costs on printing as well as has reduced the number of man hours required for maintaining written records. The eyeSmart also allows for online booking of appointments and personalized SMS alerts.
Today the application is being used in eight of LVPEI's centers and is accessible on platforms such as iPads and tablets. Das is hopeful of integrating eyeSmart with all the 102 LVPEI centers to enable seamless connectivity.
(Reported by Manasi Vaidya for TR35)
--------------------------------------------------------
Sarbajit Banerjee, 33 (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)
Windows that block heat—but let it through when you want them to
A window that changed in response to the heat might behave in just that way. Sarbajit Banerjee, a materials chemist at the University at Buffalo in New York, is applying his work on a compound called vanadium oxide to coat glass with a material that makes this possible.
Banerjee had been studying vanadium oxide because he was interested in the physics of phase transition—for example, the way water freezes as the temperature drops. When the temperature reaches 153 °F, this compound’s crystalline structure changes from one that’s transparent to infrared light—that is, radiated heat—to one that reflects the light.
Using nanofabrication techniques to change the microscopic structure of the crystalline material, Banerjee found a way to lower the temperature at which that change occurs. When the material is formed as long, thin nanowires, it undergoes the transition at a mere 90 °F. A researcher at a window company suggested that this version had good characteristics for a switchable window coating.
Banerjee was able to bring that temperature down even further by mixing tungsten into the material. And perhaps most promising of all, he found that he could trigger the transition at a range of temperatures by sending an electric current through the material—holding out the promise of changing a room’s temperature with the flip of a switch, and without racking up an energy bill.
Banerjee is now in the process of licensing his heat-blocking window coating to a U.S. building-materials company; he predicts that it will cost just 50 cents per square foot. He also has a partnership with Tata Steel, a global manufacturer headquartered in Mumbai, India, and they are looking at how to use the material to deflect heat from the corrugated-steel roofs that commonly turn houses stifling in India and other parts of the developing world.
(Reported by Katherine for TR35)
-----------------------------
Saikat Guha, 30 (Microsoft Research India)
Letting advertisers send targeted pitches to your mobile phone without ever seeing your personal information
Guha found a way to protect privacy while delivering customized ads to your phone.
(Photograph by Sami Siva)
(Photograph by Sami Siva)
Saikat Guha is convinced that privacy and profit don’t have to
conflict online. The Microsoft Research India computer scientist has
developed a software platform that allows advertisers to precisely
target potential customers without exposing the customers’ personal
information.
The trick involves flipping the basic model of targeted advertising. Companies now track your browsing and purchasing behavior and then sell your data to advertisers. But instead of acquiring data from your phone or PC so that companies can send the right ads to websites you visit, Guha’s system calls for companies to send potential ads to you; then software on your device figures out which of them are targeted effectively. Thus, if you search for video games, the software will fetch entertainment-related ads. If your computer or phone recognizes that, say, you often buy DVDs, the device will pick out a DVD ad to show you. Guha’s ad-selecting software could be built into browsers, or into websites such as Facebook. And he estimates that the ads wouldn’t take up significant amounts of memory on your machine.
Since companies wouldn’t be able to see or store your data or toss it around the Web, risking accidental leakage, even data normally too private to share with advertisers could be brought to bear in picking from among them.
Today, for instance, Google can’t determine your birth date unless you offer it up. But Guha’s software might come across it on your PC and use it to enhance the targeting of Google’s ad network, without ever revealing the date to Google. It’s a privacy protection scheme that, unlike almost all others, indirectly gives businesses an even richer set of data to work with.
Guha has also addressed the privacy threat from smartphone apps that package and sell sensitive information such as a user’s name and location. “Today someone could construct a full history of where you are at any given time of the day,” he says. His idea is a platform that cryptographically splits information such as a person’s name, the name of the store the person is visiting, and the amount of time spent at the previous store into disconnected fragments before sending it to the cloud. Software on the phone or tablet could then use all or most of those fragments to target advertisements, but no party involved could connect them to create a privacy-violating portrait of the user.
There will always be those who will try to get around privacy protection schemes to scope out more about you than you care to share. Guha is on top of that problem, too. He’s working on algorithms that detect when websites and apps are surreptitiously using your personal data, so you can block them.
(Reported by Prachi Patel for TR35)
----------------------------------------
The trick involves flipping the basic model of targeted advertising. Companies now track your browsing and purchasing behavior and then sell your data to advertisers. But instead of acquiring data from your phone or PC so that companies can send the right ads to websites you visit, Guha’s system calls for companies to send potential ads to you; then software on your device figures out which of them are targeted effectively. Thus, if you search for video games, the software will fetch entertainment-related ads. If your computer or phone recognizes that, say, you often buy DVDs, the device will pick out a DVD ad to show you. Guha’s ad-selecting software could be built into browsers, or into websites such as Facebook. And he estimates that the ads wouldn’t take up significant amounts of memory on your machine.
Since companies wouldn’t be able to see or store your data or toss it around the Web, risking accidental leakage, even data normally too private to share with advertisers could be brought to bear in picking from among them.
Today, for instance, Google can’t determine your birth date unless you offer it up. But Guha’s software might come across it on your PC and use it to enhance the targeting of Google’s ad network, without ever revealing the date to Google. It’s a privacy protection scheme that, unlike almost all others, indirectly gives businesses an even richer set of data to work with.
Guha has also addressed the privacy threat from smartphone apps that package and sell sensitive information such as a user’s name and location. “Today someone could construct a full history of where you are at any given time of the day,” he says. His idea is a platform that cryptographically splits information such as a person’s name, the name of the store the person is visiting, and the amount of time spent at the previous store into disconnected fragments before sending it to the cloud. Software on the phone or tablet could then use all or most of those fragments to target advertisements, but no party involved could connect them to create a privacy-violating portrait of the user.
There will always be those who will try to get around privacy protection schemes to scope out more about you than you care to share. Guha is on top of that problem, too. He’s working on algorithms that detect when websites and apps are surreptitiously using your personal data, so you can block them.
(Reported by Prachi Patel for TR35)
----------------------------------------
Prashant Jain, 30 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Tuning nanocrystals to make tinier, more efficient switches for optical computing and solar panels
Vials hold some of the nanocrystals that Jain can manipulate with voltage to change their light-related properties.
Quantum dots are crystal particles, with a diameter of tens to
thousands of atoms, that can absorb and emit different wavelengths of
light or move electric charges around. Now Prashant Jain, a chemistry
professor at the University of Illinois, has figured out a way to create
tunable quantum dots that can be adjusted on the fly. His innovation
could be key to designing optical computers and ultra-efficient solar
panels.
Jain makes quantum dots out of copper sulfide, varying the ratio of copper atoms to sulfur atoms. At certain ratios, the amount and distribution of electrical charges inside the dots becomes sensitive to small changes in voltage—and it’s that charge distribution that mostly determines the dots’ properties, such as which wavelengths of light they’ll absorb and emit. “You can controllably push and pull charges into these semiconductor nanocrystals and thus turn on and off their ability to interact with light,” he explains.
That means the dots could function as submicroscopic optical switches—potentially, core components of an ultrafast optical computer that replaces electricity with beams of light. Jain’s tunable-quantum-dot switch is about one-sixth the size of today’s smallest transistors, and about a hundredth the size of current optical switches. Jain is also making quantum dots out of titanium oxide mixed with bismuth. These dots absorb solar light and convert it to electrochemical energy, which is used to generate hydrogen fuel from water.
Jain’s dots are still very much in the research stage, and he predicts it will take an enormous amount of additional research to achieve practical optical computers or the super-efficient hydrogen production needed for energy applications. “There’s a lot more fundamental work to be done,” he says.
(Reported by Peter Fairley for TR35)
------------------------------------------------
Combining tools used to manufacture printed circuit boards with the spirit of origami, Pratheev Sreetharan has found a way to build tiny machines and complex objects that were previously impossible to fabricate without assembling them manually. Some of the results: a robotic bee created in a day, a tiny, precise icosahedron, and a small chain of interlocking carbon-fiber links. The small, intricate items demonstrate a fundamentally new fabrication approach that Sreetharan believes can be broadly applicable in making a range of new medical devices, robots, and components of analytical instruments.
If Sreetharan is successful, he could open up the manufacturing no-man’s-land between the micrometer-scale features of silicon chips and the centimeter-plus scale of everyday items. It’s a size range that’s of critical importance in biology and medicine. But today there’s simply no practical way to mass-produce three-dimensional objects and complex machines on this in-between scale.
Sreetharan’s prize creation is the robot bee, fabricated through a series of steps inspired by pop-up books. As a graduate student in the lab of Harvard microrobotics pioneer Robert Wood (a member of the 2008 TR35), Sreetharan was familiar with the task of laboriously gluing the miniature robots together under a microscope, and his fabrication approach was born of his determination to find a better way.
He began by adapting standard lamination and micromachining techniques from circuit board manufacturing to carve the needed parts into a flat substrate. But the real trick came in adding features that allowed the parts to pop up and lock into place in one step, creating the bee.
Sreetharan, who spent a recent summer in the Indian region of Tamil Nadu teaching Sri Lankan refugees about renewable energy and designing a solar-powered computer charger, recently got his PhD from Harvard and founded a startup called Vibrant Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to adapt his fabrication methods to advanced manufacturing.
He is still deciding which specific products the company will focus on, but he says he is able to routinely make objects that have never before existed. And he hopes the novel production methods will create new opportunities in manufacturing. That would be a pretty good way to build on the buzz from his robot bee.
(Reported by David Rotman for TR35)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Imagine walking down to the nearest grocery shop or a bus stop with your eyes blindfolded and you’ll probably get an idea how tricky outdoor navigation for the visually impaired can be.
Arduino Lilypad is the main circuit board, which is kept at the back mid-sole region of the shoe. The mini-vibrational actuators are placed on all sides for the directional haptic feedback so that an approaching turn triggers the vibration. See the slideshow for a full-coverage of how shoe-Le Chal works. (Credit: Sujith Sujan)
Sensitive towards the needs of the visually impaired people, Anirudh Sharma, 24, a young researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bangalore, worked over several nights to design a shoe for the blind. Unlike other existing aids that are available in the market for people with limited or no vision, this haptic shoe is simple and unobtrusive in design, uses low-cost readily available components, and provides tactile feedback to assist the visually impaired in their day-to-day outdoor navigation tasks.
To Sharma the first idea of a haptic shoe struck at the Design and Innovation workshop in Pune, Maharashtra, during 24-28 January, 2011. The workshop was organized by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and the College of Engineering, Pune to engage and inspire students across all disciplines in Indian universities in inventing the future. During the workshop Sharma, along with two other technologists, created the first prototype of the haptic shoe and showcased it to the delegates. The shoe was instantly named “Le Chal” which is a Hindi translation of “Take Me There”.
At present people with limited or no vision depend either on walking canes, which help them detect obstructions, or seek help from friends and other people for assistance, or using voice-based navigation aids. The existing form of voice-based navigation aids can be very distracting for the blind as they mostly depend on their sense of hearing. Such devices are prohibitively expensive to buy too.
This motivated Sharma to create a shoe that could navigate the route for the visually impaired and lead them to their desired destination without hampering their hearing power or making them wear bulky stuff and look awkward on the street.
The unobtrusive design of Le Chal is its most significant feature. The system comprises of a mechanism that condenses complex geographical navigational information and lets the user feel the directional and proximity information through vibrations. The vibrators and proximity sensor put in one shoe of the pair enables the user to walk without any physical aid.
All that the user requires is a Le Chal shoe and a mobile phone with global positioning system (GPS). Once the user sets a destination on the phone before starting the journey, the Bluetooth communication between the shoe and phone does the rest. The phone fetches turn-by-turn Google maps data in the background and keeps updating the user with haptic feedback about the direction the user needs to turn to.
As soon as the user starts his or her journey, the GPS transmitter within the cellphone gets real-time location using Google Maps. The built-in compass in the GPS module calculates the direction user is walking in. When the turning point is approached a mild vibrational feedback activated in the shoe informs the user the direction he or she needs to turn to. The strength of the vibration depends upon the overall proximity from the destination, that is, vibration is weak in the beginning and is incrementally stronger at the end of the navigation task. The built-in proximity sensor of the shoe can detect up to 10 feet, informing the user of the surroundings and allowing him or her to make decisions and plan the next move.
Sharma is planning to release the code of Le Chal Android application and schematics to public through Arduino community channel. He is also planning to create a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) guide through an editable Wikipedia where users can participate and help him create better version of the technology. He is also exploring the idea of how the commutation data of multiple users could decrease the overall time.
( Reported by Vantika Dixit for TR35)
-----------------------------------------------
In May 2010, Government of India formed the IndianSmart Grid Task Force to execute a $132 million (Rs.600 crore) pilot smart grid project to demonstrate power saving measures and improve energy efficiency in distribution networks across the country. VSK Murthy Balijepalli has recently developed a novel method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load which can assist in making power grids smarter. He hopes his technology will find a place in the government proposed smart grid pilot.
One of the key goals of a smart grid is to empower the consumers to actively participate in the power demand-supply flow. Forecasting electricity parameters such as price, grid frequency, and load can facilitate consumers' participation in balancing the power demand-supply ratio. Balijepalli's forecasting technology, called km-stochastic error correction technique (km-SEC), uses robust regression algorithms and artificial neural network to give accurate forecast of elecriticy price, effective load, and grid frequency.
The algorithms use Indian Energy Exchange market clearing price values, forecast values by industry standard software, and histroy of errors as inputs to predict forecasts. "The maximum reduction of the error for a day-ahead forecast of a single day is 3.35 percent when km-SEC is used," says Balijepalli. He says, "The price forecasting will help users to schedule electricity usage. Using the price forecasting technology in a residential metering device can reduce the electricity bill between 18.5 to 25.64 percent on day-ahead basis."
The km-SEC technology can also be used for effective load forecasting which has multiple applications for the energy utilities, retailers, and the captive power plants. Balijepalli's technology can be applied with any forecasting model to improve the accuracy of predictions. Accurate, near real-time price and load predictions will eventually lead to shifting of transmission peaks, better outage management and distribution system. Balijepalli has patented the km-SEC technology in India. He is now planning to use the technology in European and U.S. markets to assess its potential benefits.
--------------------------------------------------
Jain makes quantum dots out of copper sulfide, varying the ratio of copper atoms to sulfur atoms. At certain ratios, the amount and distribution of electrical charges inside the dots becomes sensitive to small changes in voltage—and it’s that charge distribution that mostly determines the dots’ properties, such as which wavelengths of light they’ll absorb and emit. “You can controllably push and pull charges into these semiconductor nanocrystals and thus turn on and off their ability to interact with light,” he explains.
That means the dots could function as submicroscopic optical switches—potentially, core components of an ultrafast optical computer that replaces electricity with beams of light. Jain’s tunable-quantum-dot switch is about one-sixth the size of today’s smallest transistors, and about a hundredth the size of current optical switches. Jain is also making quantum dots out of titanium oxide mixed with bismuth. These dots absorb solar light and convert it to electrochemical energy, which is used to generate hydrogen fuel from water.
Jain’s dots are still very much in the research stage, and he predicts it will take an enormous amount of additional research to achieve practical optical computers or the super-efficient hydrogen production needed for energy applications. “There’s a lot more fundamental work to be done,” he says.
(Reported by Peter Fairley for TR35)
------------------------------------------------
Pratheev Sreetharan, 28 (Vibrant Research)
Mass-producible tiny machines snap into place like objects in a pop-up book
Combining tools used to manufacture printed circuit boards with the spirit of origami, Pratheev Sreetharan has found a way to build tiny machines and complex objects that were previously impossible to fabricate without assembling them manually. Some of the results: a robotic bee created in a day, a tiny, precise icosahedron, and a small chain of interlocking carbon-fiber links. The small, intricate items demonstrate a fundamentally new fabrication approach that Sreetharan believes can be broadly applicable in making a range of new medical devices, robots, and components of analytical instruments.
If Sreetharan is successful, he could open up the manufacturing no-man’s-land between the micrometer-scale features of silicon chips and the centimeter-plus scale of everyday items. It’s a size range that’s of critical importance in biology and medicine. But today there’s simply no practical way to mass-produce three-dimensional objects and complex machines on this in-between scale.
Sreetharan’s prize creation is the robot bee, fabricated through a series of steps inspired by pop-up books. As a graduate student in the lab of Harvard microrobotics pioneer Robert Wood (a member of the 2008 TR35), Sreetharan was familiar with the task of laboriously gluing the miniature robots together under a microscope, and his fabrication approach was born of his determination to find a better way.
He began by adapting standard lamination and micromachining techniques from circuit board manufacturing to carve the needed parts into a flat substrate. But the real trick came in adding features that allowed the parts to pop up and lock into place in one step, creating the bee.
Sreetharan, who spent a recent summer in the Indian region of Tamil Nadu teaching Sri Lankan refugees about renewable energy and designing a solar-powered computer charger, recently got his PhD from Harvard and founded a startup called Vibrant Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to adapt his fabrication methods to advanced manufacturing.
He is still deciding which specific products the company will focus on, but he says he is able to routinely make objects that have never before existed. And he hopes the novel production methods will create new opportunities in manufacturing. That would be a pretty good way to build on the buzz from his robot bee.
(Reported by David Rotman for TR35)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Haptic Shoe For The Blind
Le Chal is an unobtrusive navigation aid for the visually impaired.
Imagine walking down to the nearest grocery shop or a bus stop with your eyes blindfolded and you’ll probably get an idea how tricky outdoor navigation for the visually impaired can be.
Arduino Lilypad is the main circuit board, which is kept at the back mid-sole region of the shoe. The mini-vibrational actuators are placed on all sides for the directional haptic feedback so that an approaching turn triggers the vibration. See the slideshow for a full-coverage of how shoe-Le Chal works. (Credit: Sujith Sujan)
Sensitive towards the needs of the visually impaired people, Anirudh Sharma, 24, a young researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bangalore, worked over several nights to design a shoe for the blind. Unlike other existing aids that are available in the market for people with limited or no vision, this haptic shoe is simple and unobtrusive in design, uses low-cost readily available components, and provides tactile feedback to assist the visually impaired in their day-to-day outdoor navigation tasks.
To Sharma the first idea of a haptic shoe struck at the Design and Innovation workshop in Pune, Maharashtra, during 24-28 January, 2011. The workshop was organized by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and the College of Engineering, Pune to engage and inspire students across all disciplines in Indian universities in inventing the future. During the workshop Sharma, along with two other technologists, created the first prototype of the haptic shoe and showcased it to the delegates. The shoe was instantly named “Le Chal” which is a Hindi translation of “Take Me There”.
At present people with limited or no vision depend either on walking canes, which help them detect obstructions, or seek help from friends and other people for assistance, or using voice-based navigation aids. The existing form of voice-based navigation aids can be very distracting for the blind as they mostly depend on their sense of hearing. Such devices are prohibitively expensive to buy too.
This motivated Sharma to create a shoe that could navigate the route for the visually impaired and lead them to their desired destination without hampering their hearing power or making them wear bulky stuff and look awkward on the street.
The unobtrusive design of Le Chal is its most significant feature. The system comprises of a mechanism that condenses complex geographical navigational information and lets the user feel the directional and proximity information through vibrations. The vibrators and proximity sensor put in one shoe of the pair enables the user to walk without any physical aid.
All that the user requires is a Le Chal shoe and a mobile phone with global positioning system (GPS). Once the user sets a destination on the phone before starting the journey, the Bluetooth communication between the shoe and phone does the rest. The phone fetches turn-by-turn Google maps data in the background and keeps updating the user with haptic feedback about the direction the user needs to turn to.
As soon as the user starts his or her journey, the GPS transmitter within the cellphone gets real-time location using Google Maps. The built-in compass in the GPS module calculates the direction user is walking in. When the turning point is approached a mild vibrational feedback activated in the shoe informs the user the direction he or she needs to turn to. The strength of the vibration depends upon the overall proximity from the destination, that is, vibration is weak in the beginning and is incrementally stronger at the end of the navigation task. The built-in proximity sensor of the shoe can detect up to 10 feet, informing the user of the surroundings and allowing him or her to make decisions and plan the next move.
Sharma is planning to release the code of Le Chal Android application and schematics to public through Arduino community channel. He is also planning to create a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) guide through an editable Wikipedia where users can participate and help him create better version of the technology. He is also exploring the idea of how the commutation data of multiple users could decrease the overall time.
( Reported by Vantika Dixit for TR35)
-----------------------------------------------
Vivek Nair, 23 (Damascus Fortune, Mumbai)
Carbon nanotubes from carbon emissions
There are many technologies for carbon capture but Vivek Nair has
found an innovative way to convert carbon emissions into industry grade
carbon nanotubes. His company Damascus Fortune has forged partnerships
with several rice mills and carbon emitting
plants in India to produce carbon nanotubes. Even though there are
numerous applications of carbon nanotubes, most of the products are
still not in the market due to the high cost of the carbon nanotubes.
The challenge is in manufacturing these on a mass scale.
His invention uses a pressing problem (industrial and auto emissions) as a "raw material", applies transformative chemistry using a regenerable catalyst, and produces innovative carbon nanotubes. The process followed is a catalytic substrate exposed to the flow of flue gas or flame coming out of the furnace to tap and produce carbon nanotubes by a carbon vapor deposition process.
The main advantage of the invention is large-scale high yield production of carbon filaments from pollution causing carbon emissions from industrial and automobile exhausts. Nair has completed the basic research and optimized the catalyst and substrate for a set of other industries and automobiles too. And he has set his sight on automation instruments that can continuously perform the carbon capture when the industrial furnace or the automobile is in operation.
--------------------------His invention uses a pressing problem (industrial and auto emissions) as a "raw material", applies transformative chemistry using a regenerable catalyst, and produces innovative carbon nanotubes. The process followed is a catalytic substrate exposed to the flow of flue gas or flame coming out of the furnace to tap and produce carbon nanotubes by a carbon vapor deposition process.
The main advantage of the invention is large-scale high yield production of carbon filaments from pollution causing carbon emissions from industrial and automobile exhausts. Nair has completed the basic research and optimized the catalyst and substrate for a set of other industries and automobiles too. And he has set his sight on automation instruments that can continuously perform the carbon capture when the industrial furnace or the automobile is in operation.
VSK Murthy Balijepalli, 26 (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay)
Forecasting the price and load of electricity
In May 2010, Government of India formed the IndianSmart Grid Task Force to execute a $132 million (Rs.600 crore) pilot smart grid project to demonstrate power saving measures and improve energy efficiency in distribution networks across the country. VSK Murthy Balijepalli has recently developed a novel method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load which can assist in making power grids smarter. He hopes his technology will find a place in the government proposed smart grid pilot.
One of the key goals of a smart grid is to empower the consumers to actively participate in the power demand-supply flow. Forecasting electricity parameters such as price, grid frequency, and load can facilitate consumers' participation in balancing the power demand-supply ratio. Balijepalli's forecasting technology, called km-stochastic error correction technique (km-SEC), uses robust regression algorithms and artificial neural network to give accurate forecast of elecriticy price, effective load, and grid frequency.
The algorithms use Indian Energy Exchange market clearing price values, forecast values by industry standard software, and histroy of errors as inputs to predict forecasts. "The maximum reduction of the error for a day-ahead forecast of a single day is 3.35 percent when km-SEC is used," says Balijepalli. He says, "The price forecasting will help users to schedule electricity usage. Using the price forecasting technology in a residential metering device can reduce the electricity bill between 18.5 to 25.64 percent on day-ahead basis."
The km-SEC technology can also be used for effective load forecasting which has multiple applications for the energy utilities, retailers, and the captive power plants. Balijepalli's technology can be applied with any forecasting model to improve the accuracy of predictions. Accurate, near real-time price and load predictions will eventually lead to shifting of transmission peaks, better outage management and distribution system. Balijepalli has patented the km-SEC technology in India. He is now planning to use the technology in European and U.S. markets to assess its potential benefits.
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