See into 10 Breakthrough 50 Smartest Innovators

the Future Technologies p. 5 Companies p. 41 Under 35 p. 62

SPECIAL EDITION
Best in Tech

DISPLAY UNTIL 5/1/2017

SPECIAL EDITION

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Best 10 Breakthrough Technologies

Some of these breakthroughs are already changing the way we
live. Others are setting the stage for innovations that will change

inTech
the way we live decades from now.

8 Immune Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Antonio Regalado

14 Precise Gene Editing in Plants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by David Talbot

16 Conversational Interfaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Will Knight

20 Reusable Rockets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Brian Bergstein

22 Robots That Teach Each Other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Amanda Schaffer

26 DNA App Store. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Antonio Regalado 

28 SolarCity’s Gigafactory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Richard Martin

34 Slack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Lee Gomes

36 Tesla Autopilot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Ryan Bradley

40 Power from the Air. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mark Harris

50 Smartest Companies
Our picks of the most audacious and ambitious companies,
innovating in the areas of energy storage, gene therapy, virtual
reality, autonomous cars, e-commerce, and more.

44 The 50 Smartest Companies List

46 23andMe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Antonio Regalado

48 Toyota. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by George Anders

54 Didi Chuxing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .by Christina Larson

56 24M. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Elizabeth Woyke

60 Bosch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Russ Juskalian

Innovators Under 35
Our young innovators are individually tackling the trickiest
technology problems of our time. Collectively they offer us a
sense of how we can solve our greatest challenges.

68 Visionaries

74 Inventors

84 Entrepreneurs

90 Pioneers

98 Humanitarians

104 30 Years Ago From our archives, a 1986 essay on what

Cover art by Jessica Svendsen looked like the dim prospects for artificial intelligence.

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From the Editor

It may sometimes feel as if our large technological challenges have no end. And
certainly solutions to problems like climate change or inequality can feel very far
off indeed. Our ability to harness genome editing for disease treatment or pre-
vention is likely many years away, despite our desperate need. Our lack of digital
privacy and the vulnerability of our connected systems and devices is a potential
nightmare. Yet if you turn the page you’ll see evidence of everyday technologists
and enterprises chipping way at the problems, bit by bit, in a way that’s both reas-
suring and inspiring.
Inside this magazine—our annual compilation of the most fascinating and
promising young innovators, companies, and technologies—you’ll find stories on
efforts to use genetically engineered immune cells to treat cancer, or methods of
genetically editing crops to make them more resistant to disease and drought.
You’ll read about advances in artificial intelligence that are making intelligent
digital assistants from the likes of Amazon a reality for the average household,
and about the aggressive steps taken toward self-driving cars by companies such
as Tesla and Toyota.
The section that might offer the greatest hope is our list of Innovators Under
35, where you’ll meet the people who’ve devoted themselves to challenges such
as digital privacy, drones that coöperate, imaging systems that detect cancer
early, and methods of doubling your wireless data speeds. Another of our young
innovators has developed a method of turning dirty water into drinking water
by using the sun to make steam. And yet another has used nanocrystals to help
solar cells generate more energy.
We hope you’ll find them as fascinating as we have.

Enjoy,

Jason Pontin
CEO, Editor in Chief, and Publisher
MIT Technology Review

GUIDO VIT TI

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10 Breakthrough
Breakthrough Availability
Immune Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1-2 years
Precise Gene Editing in Plants. . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 5-10 years

Technologies 2016
Which of today’s emerging technologies have a
chance at solving a big problem and opening up new
JESSICA SVENDSEN
Conversational Interfaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 now
Reusable Rockets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 now
Robots That Teach Each Other.. . . . . . . . . . 22 3-5 years
DNA App Store. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 this year
SolarCity’s Gigafactory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 next year

opportunities? Here are our picks. The 10 on this list Slack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 now
all reached an impressive milestone in the past year or Tesla Autopilot.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 now
are on the verge of reaching one. Power from the Air. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 2-3 years

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Immune
Engineering
Genetically engineered immune cells are saving the lives
of cancer patients. That may be just the start.

By Antonio Regalado

The doctors looking at Layla Richards saw a little girl with leu-
kemia bubbling in her veins. She’d had bags and bags of che-
motherapy and a bone marrow transplant. But the cancer still
thrived. By June 2015, the 12-month-old was desperately ill.
Her parents begged—wasn’t there anything?
There was. In a freezer at her hospital—Great Ormond
Street, in London—sat a vial of white blood cells. The cells had
been genetically altered to hunt and destroy leukemia, but the
hospital hadn’t yet sought permission to test them. They were
the most extensively engineered cells ever proposed as a ther-
apy, with a total of four genetic changes, two of them intro-
duced by the new technique of genome editing.
Soon a doctor from Great Ormond was on the phone to
Cellectis, a biotechnology company with French roots that
is now located on the East Side of Manhattan. The company
owned the cancer treatment, which it had devised using a
gene-editing method called TALENs, a way of making cuts
and fixes to DNA in living cells. “We got a call. The doctors
said, ‘We’ve got a girl who is out of T cells and out of options,’”
André Choulika, the CEO of Cellectis, remembers. “They
wanted one of the vials made during quality-control testing.”
The doctors hoped to make Layla a “special,” a patient who
got the drug outside a clinical trial. It was a gamble, since the
treatment had been tried only in mice. If it failed, the com-

Breakthrough Why It Matters Key Players in

Killer T cells pro- Cancer, multiple scle- Immune Therapies
grammed to wipe out rosis, and HIV could - Cellectis
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JON HAN

cancer. all be treated by engi- - Juno Therapeutics

neering the immune - Novartis
system.

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pany’s stock and reputation could tank, and even if it
succeeded, the company might get in trouble with reg-
ulators. “It was saving a life versus the chance of bad
news,” Choulika says.
T cells can crawl, sense
things, and even kill other
cells. They’re little robots.
Cellectis began developing the treatment in 2011
after doctors in New York and Philadelphia reported
that they’d found a way to gain control over T cells,
the so-called killer cells of the immune system. They
had shown that they could take T cells from a person’s
bloodstream and, using a virus, add new DNA instruc-
tions to aim them at the type of blood cell that goes
awry in leukemia. The technique has now been tested
in more than 300 patients, with spectacular results,
often resulting in complete remission. A dozen drug
firms and biotechnology companies are now working
to bring such a treatment to market.
The T cells created by Cellectis could have even
broader applications. The previous treatments use a
person’s own cells. But some patients, especially small
children like Layla, don’t have enough T cells.
Foreseeing this problem, Cellectis had set out to
use gene editing to create a more highly engineered
but ultimately simpler “universal” supply of T cells
made from the blood of donors. The company would
still add the new DNA, but it would also use gene edit-
ing to delete the receptor that T cells normally use to
sniff out foreign-looking ­molecules.
“The T cell has a huge potential for killing. But the
thing you can’t do is inject T cells from Mr. X into Mr.
Y,” Choulika says. “They’d recognize Mr. Y as ‘non-self ’
and start firing off at everything, and the patient will
melt down.” But if the T cells are stripped down with
gene editing, like the ones that were sitting in Great
Ormond’s freezer, that risk is mostly eliminated. Or so
everyone hoped.
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In November 2015, Great Ormond announced
that Layla was cured. The British press jumped on the
heartwarming story of a brave kid and daring doctors.
Accounts splashed on front pages sent Cellectis’s stock
price shooting upward. Two weeks
later, the drug companies Pfizer and
Servier announced they would ante
up $40 million to purchase rights to
the treatment.
Although many of the details of
Layla’s case have yet to be disclosed,
and some cancer experts say the
role of the engineered T cells in her
cure remains murky, her recovery
pointed a spotlight on “immune engineering,” and on
the way that advances in controlling and manipulating
the immune system are leading to unexpected break-
throughs in cancer treatment. They also could lead to
new treatments for HIV and autoimmune diseases like
arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
Known killer
The human immune system has been called nature’s
“weapon of mass destruction.” It has a dozen major
cell types, including several kinds of T cells. It defends
against viruses it’s never seen before, suppresses can-
cer (though not always), and for the most part manages
to avoid harming the body’s own tissue. It even has a
memory, which is the basis of all vaccines.
More than 100 years ago, the American surgeon
William Coley observed that an unexpected infec-
tion could sometimes make a tumor evaporate. Sub-
Boom Times
Immune-engineering startups have gone
public, raising large sums for human trials.
Amount
Company Raised in IPO Date
Kite Pharma $134 million June 2014
Juno Therapeutics $304 million December 2014
Bellicum
Pharmaceuticals $160 million December 2014
Cellectis $228 million March 2015
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sequently, Coley injected streptococcal
cultures into cancer patients and saw
the tumors shrink in some cases. The
finding, published in 1893, showed the
immune system could confront and
fight cancer—but how did it work? Until
recently, the answers weren’t known,
and cancer immunotherapy was seen as
a failed idea. 
But scientists have gradually
mapped the network of molecules that
govern how the immune system inter-
acts with a tumor. And over the last
few years, these insights have allowed
drug companies and labs to start tinker-
ing with the immune system’s behavior.
“From 40 years and more of science,
we know the general nature of the con-
versation between the tumor cells and
the immune system,” says Philip Sharp,
a biologist at MIT’s Koch Institute
for Integrative Cancer Research and
a recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in
medicine. “That’s the conversation we’re
trying to join in order to have a thera-
peutic effect. We are still at the level of
a five-year-old kid. We know there are
nouns, and that there are verbs. But the
diversity of the vocabulary is still being
mapped out.”
The most extreme of these propos-
als is to change the genetic instructions
inside the T cell itself, something that’s
become much easier using gene-­editing
methods like TALENs and the even
newer CRISPR. Last year, the gene-
editing startups Editas Medicine and
Intellia Therapeutics each struck deals
with companies developing T-cell-based
therapeutics. “It’s the perfect setup,” says
Jeffrey Bluestone, a researcher at the
University of California, San Francisco.
­­­“Immune cells are machines that work
pretty well, but we can make them work
even better.”
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A Time Line of Engineering Immunity
500 million years ago
Jawed fish are first to develop “adaptive” immunity—specialized
cells that learn from, remember, and respond to threats.
1796
Edward Jenner inoculates a boy against smallpox using pus from a
cowpox blister. It is celebrated as the first vaccine.
1893
New York surgeon William Coley believes cancer can be cured by
an immune response. He uses live bacteria, called Coley’s toxins, to
treat tumors.
1908
German doctor Paul Ehrlich wins a Nobel Prize for his theories about
the immune system. He introduces the idea of the “Wundermittel,” or
magic bullet—the precursor of today’s targeted drugs.
1971
President Nixon declares a “War on Cancer.” The National Cancer
Institute’s budget rises to $378 million, or $2.1 billion in current
dollars. Today it is $4.95 billion.
1981
The HIV epidemic begins. By 1987 the first antiretroviral drug
treatment, AZT, goes on sale. A vaccine remains elusive to this day.
1983–1987
Scientists discover the T cell antigen receptor. It is what killer T cells
use to identify virus-infected cells and cancer.
2000
Two immune-deficient children are cured in France of “bubble boy”
disease in the first successful use of gene therapy. A missing gene
is added to their bone marrow.
2011
The first immune checkpoint inhibitor, ipilimumab, is approved in the
United States to treat late-stage melanoma. The drug unleashes T
cells. In many patients, the results are dramatic.
2011
Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania reports the successful
treatment of leukemia using genetically modified T cells.
2015
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, at 90, receives immune therapy
treatments for melanoma and a brain cancer. His brain scans are
later clear.
2016
Recognizing “amazing advances” in immune therapy, President
Obama and Vice President Biden announce a new “moon shot” to
cure cancer.
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Researchers are building on decades of research
(and several Nobel Prizes involving immunology)
that worked out many important details, including
how T cells recognize invaders and go in for the kill.
Seen through a microscope, these cells display almost
animal-­like behavior: they crawl, probe, then grab
another cell and shoot it full of toxic granules. “What’s
exciting is they have the ability to move all around;
they’re autonomous,” says Wendell Lim, a synthetic
biologist who is also at UCSF. “Immune cells talk to
other cells, they deliver poisons, they can change what
happens in a microenvironment, they have a memory,
and they make more of themselves. I think of them as
little robots.”
Lim is now breaking new ground in what he calls
“synthetic immunology.” This year and last, he pro-
duced some futuristic T cells. Tested only in mice so
far, the cells deploy their targeted search-and-kill
behavior only if a specific drug is added—a feature that
could be used to turn the cells on at specific places and
times, which Lim calls “remote control.” Another T
cell he designed is a two-stage affair, which kills only
if it locates not one but two different markers on a
cancer cell; it is like a dual authentication method for
the enemy cell. Lim thinks of it as a sensing circuit or
“advanced Google search.”
Such work is critical because targeting T cells to
tumors of the liver, lung, or brain is dangerous, and
some patients have been killed in trials. The prob-
lem has been friendly fire. So far, easy ways to target
only cancer cells are lacking. Lim has founded his own
startup, Cell Design Labs, to commercialize his engi-
neering ideas. He declined to say how much money he
has raised, but he says everyone working with T cells is
stunned by the kind of money being thrown at the idea.
“It’s a ‘wow’ type of situation,” he says.
Googling cures
The search to expand immune therapy now involves
not only the world’s largest drug companies but also
tech firms. Sharp says that in 2015 Google held two
summits at MIT of top immune oncologists and bio-
engineers to determine what parts of the problem
could be “Googlified.” Attendees say the search giant
paid special attention to new research techniques
that fingerprint cells from a tumor biopsy in rapid-
fire fashion. These methods might generate big data
about what immune system cells are actually doing
inside a tumor, and new clues about how to influence
them. So far, Google’s life science unit, named Verily,
hasn’t revealed its plans in cancer immunotherapy.
But in New York’s Union Square, I met Jeffrey Ham-
merbacher, a former Facebook employee who now
runs a lab that is part of Mount Sinai, the hospital
and medical school. With 12 programmers in a light-
soaked loft—the nearest thing to blood and guts is a
photo of an exhausted surgeon on the wall—he’s also
spending time on T cells. He’s developing software to

Big Deals
T-cell companies have sought agreements with drug
companies and specialists in gene editing.

August 2012 January 2015 June 2015 November 2015 January 2016 January 2016
Swiss drug giant Novartis buys Biotech firm Drug companies Food maker Nestlé Juno pays $125
Novartis forms a CRISPR gene- Celgene pays Pfizer and Servier pays $120 million million to buy
sweeping alliance editing rights Seattle-based pay Cellectis $40 to a startup named AbVitro, a Boston
with the University from Intellia Juno $1 billion for million for rights Seres for bacteria company that can
of Pennsylvania, Therapeutics. a slice of its T-cell to the first “off pills able to ward sequence the DNA
site of early Juno and Editas treatment portfolio. the shelf” T-cell off infection and inside individual T
successes using Medicine later treatment for immune disorders. cells.
engineered T cells. strike a similar deal leukemia.
for $25 million.

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interpret the DNA sequence in a patient’s cancer
and predict from it how to goose the response of
killer T cells.
A clinical trial by Mount Sinai was scheduled to
start this year. The patients receive a dose of abnor-
mal protein fragments that Hammerbacher’s software
predicts will train T cells to attack the cancer. “What
“Where the technology
stands, it’s a pretty radical
treatment.”
was fun was that what we submitted to the [U.S. Food
and Drug Administration] was not a molecule but an
algorithm,” he says. “It might be one of the first times
the output of a program is the therapy.”
In January 2016, Juno Therapeutics (see “Biotech’s
Coming Cancer Cure,” July/August 2015) paid $125
million to acquire AbVitro, a Boston-area company
that specializes in sequencing the DNA inside single
T cells. Now Juno is trying to locate T cells that are
active inside cancers and study their receptors. Juno’s
chief scientist, Hyam Levitsky, says an experiment
that used to take seven months now takes seven days.
And data is piling up: an average experiment gener-
ates 100 gigabytes of information. “A lot of what is
happening is technology-driven,” he says. “The ques-
tions have been there for a while, but there was no
way to get at the answers. Now we’re visualizing them
with new technology in ways we never could before.”   sees the chance of a one-time treatment that can hold
Beyond cancer
In March 2016, Pfizer appointed John Lin to head its
San Francisco biotech unit, which develops cancer drugs
and recently started making engineered T cells. He says
the company had been negotiating with ­Cellectis well
before the news of Layla’s treatment and that no one
there was even aware the girl had been treated before it
hit the news. “The publicity was a big surprise,” he says.
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Lin says years of scientific work have finally
resulted in a level of mastery that makes therapeu-
tic products seem practical. He thinks the treatments
will go beyond leukemia, and beyond cancer. “We
think that this fundamental principle, engineering
human cells, could have broad implications,” he says,
“and the immune system will be the most convenient
vehicle for it, because they can
move and migrate and play such
important roles.”
Researchers are already work-
ing on autoimmune disorders, like
diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and
lupus. Infectious disease is also
in the sights of T-cell engineers.
Edward Berger, a virologist at the
National Institutes of Health who
helped discover how HIV enters
human cells, thinks it may be possible to permanently
keep the virus in check, a so-called “functional cure.”
In February, he says, he will start giving monkeys T
cells genetically programmed to find and destroy any
cell in which the simian version of HIV is replicating.
The actual process isn’t as simple as the theory.
Berger is sure that years of missteps and do-overs lie
ahead. Also, most protocols involving engineered T
cells require patients, or monkeys, to take drugs that
temporarily kill off their own T cells, which isn’t with-
out risks. “Where the technology stands, it’s a pretty
radical treatment,” Berger says. “You aren’t going to
use it on a cold sore.” But despite all the progress that
has been made treating HIV, a better approach is still
needed. Because the virus hides in the body even after
treatment, patients have to take antiretroviral drugs
for life. With immune engineering, maybe not. Berger
the virus in check for good.
“I was totally inspired by the cancer work,” he says.
“They cured leukemia, and we’ve borrowed it from
them. The extension of those ideas for engineering the
immune system against other things that ail people
is a major front. I think HIV is the best candidate in
infectious disease. If you talk to the HIV community,
they are crying for a cure—a treatment that, ideally,
you do once and never again.”
13
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Photographs by RC Rivera

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Precise Gene
Editing in Plants
CRISPR offers an easy, exact way to alter genes to create
traits such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.

By David Talbot

Breakthrough A new gene-editing method is providing a precise tory process,” Kamoun says. “But the pathogens
The ability to cheaply way to modify crops in hopes of making them yield don’t sit and wait for you; they keep evolving and
and precisely edit more food and resist drought and disease more changing.”
plant genomes with-
effectively. Research in the past year has shown that A version of CRISPR he co-developed paved
out leaving foreign
DNA behind.
the resulting plants have no traces of foreign DNA, the way for recent work on barley and a broccoli-
making it possible that they will not fall under like plant at the John Innes Centre, a plant science
Why It Matters existing regulations governing genetically modified research center also in Norwich. Kamoun and col-
We need to increase organisms and will sidestep many of the consumer leagues showed that the second generation of some
agricultural pro-
concerns over these GMOs. of the edited plants contain none of the foreign
ductivity to feed
the world’s growing The technology is known as CRISPR (see “10 DNA that had been used to create the first genera-
population, which is Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Genome Edit- tion. (Though CRISPR doesn’t require inserting
expected to reach 10 ing”), and plants modified with it are sprouting in foreign genes, it does typically use bits of bacterial
billion by 2050. laboratory greenhouses around the world. Already, genetic material to target the editing.) Meanwhile,
a lab in China has used it to create a fungus-­ a group at Seoul National University has avoided
Key Players in
Engineering Crops resistant wheat; several groups in China are using leaving any foreign genetic material even in first-
- The Sainsbury the technique on rice in efforts to boost yields; and generation plants.
Laboratory and a group in the U.K. has used it to tweak a gene in Big and small companies alike are jumping in.
John Innes Centre, barley that helps govern seed germination, which DuPont Pioneer has already invested in Caribou
Norwich, U.K.
could aid efforts to produce drought-resistant vari- Biosciences, the CRISPR startup cofounded by
- Seoul National
University eties. Indeed, because it’s so easy to do and the ­Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the tech-
- University of plants could avoid the lengthy and expensive regu- nology, and is using it in experiments on corn, soy-
Minnesota latory process associated with GMOs, the method beans, wheat, and rice. It hopes to sell seeds bred
- Institute of Genetics is increasingly being used by research labs, small with CRISPR technology in as little as five years.
and Developmental
companies, and public plant breeders unwilling The big question is whether CRISPR crops will
Biology, Beijing
to take on the expense and risks of conventional be governed by the same regulations as GMOs. The
genetic engineering. U.S. Department of Agriculture has already said
The gene-editing technique could be critical some examples of gene-edited corn, potatoes, and
in helping scientists keep up with the constantly soybeans (edited using a different method, known
evolving microbes that attack crops, says Sophien as TALENs) don’t fall under existing regulations.
Kamoun, who leads a research group at the Sains- But both the United States and the more restric-
bury Lab in Norwich, England, that is applying the tive European Union are now conducting reviews
GRANT CORNET T

technology to potatoes, tomatoes, and other crops of today’s regulations. And Chinese authorities have
to fight fungal diseases. “It takes millions of dollars not said whether they will allow the crops to be
and many years of work to go through the regula- planted.

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Conversational Stroll through Sanlitun, a bustling neighbor-

hood in Beijing filled with tourists, karaoke
bars, and luxury shops, and you’ll see plenty

Interfaces of people using the latest smartphones from

Apple, Samsung, or Xiaomi. Look closely,
however, and you might notice some of them
Powerful speech technology from China’s leading Internet ignoring the touch screens on these devices in
company makes it much easier to use a smartphone. favor of something much more efficient and
intuitive: their voice.
A growing number of China’s 691 mil-
By Will Knight lion smartphone users now regularly dis-
pense with swipes, taps, and tiny keyboards
Breakthrough Why It Matters Key Players in Voice when looking things up on the country’s
Combining voice It can be time- Recognition and most popular search engine, Baidu. China
recognition and natural consuming and Language Processing is an ideal place for voice interfaces to take
language understanding frustrating to interact - Baidu - Nuance off, because Chinese characters were hardly
to create effective with computers by - Google - Facebook
speech interfaces for typing.
designed with tiny touch screens in mind.
- Apple
the world’s largest But people everywhere should benefit as
Internet market. Baidu advances speech technology and
TOMI UM

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 BEST IN TECH
makes voice interfaces more practical and useful. That could
make it easier for anyone to communicate with the machines
around us.
“I see speech approaching a point where it could become
so reliable that you can just use it and not even think about it,”
says Andrew Ng, Baidu’s chief scientist and an associate pro-
fessor at Stanford University. “The best technology is often
invisible, and as speech recognition becomes more reliable, I
hope it will disappear into the background.”
Voice interfaces have been a dream of technologists (not
to mention science fiction writers) for many decades. But in
recent years, thanks to some impressive advances in machine
learning, voice control has become a lot more practical.
The systems offer a glimpse
of a future in which there’s
less need to learn a new
interface for every device.
No longer limited to just a small set of predetermined
commands, it now works even in a noisy environment like
the streets of Beijing or when you’re speaking across a room.
Voice-operated virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Micro-
soft’s Cortana, and Google Now come bundled with most
smartphones, and newer devices, like Amazon’s Alexa, offer
a simple way to look up information, cue up songs, and build
shopping lists with your voice. These systems are hardly per-
fect, sometimes mishearing and misinterpreting commands
in comedic fashion, but they are improving steadily, and they
Booming smartphone market
750 million
Innovation in voice technologies has
been driven by the surge of mobile
600
Internet use in China.
Mobile Internet users, in millions 450
Proportion of Internet users on
mobile devices
300
24%
150
50
2007
18
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
offer a glimpse of a graceful future in which there’s less need to
learn a new interface for every new device.
Baidu is making particularly impressive progress, espe-
cially with the accuracy of its voice recognition, and it has the
scale to advance conversational interfaces even further. The
company—founded in 2000 as China’s answer to Google,
which is currently blocked there—dominates the country’s
domestic search market, with 70 percent of all queries. And it
has evolved into a purveyor of many services, from music and
movie streaming to banking and insurance.
A more efficient mobile interface would come as a big help
in China. Smartphones are far more common than desktops
or laptops, and yet browsing the Web, sending messages, and
doing other tasks can be painfully slow and frus-
trating. There are thousands of Chinese characters,
and although a system called Pinyin allows them to
be generated phonetically from Latin ones, many
people (especially those over 50) do not know the
system. It’s also common in China to use messaging
apps such as WeChat to do all sorts of tasks, such as
paying restaurant tabs. And yet in many of China’s
poorer regions, where there is perhaps more oppor-
tunity for the Internet to have big social and eco-
nomic effects, literacy levels are still low.
“It is a challenge and an opportunity,” says Ng,
who was named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators
Under 35 in 2008 for his work in AI and robotics at Stanford.
“Rather than having to train people used to desktop comput-
ers to new behaviors appropriate for cell phones, many of them
can learn the best ways to use a mobile device from the start.”
Ng believes that voice may soon be reliable enough to be
used for interacting with all sorts of devices. Robots or home
appliances, for example, could be easier to deal with if you
could simply talk to them. The company has research teams
at its headquarters in Beijing and at a facility in Silicon Valley
86% 100%
SOURCE: CHINA INTERNET NET WORK INFORMATION CENTER
81%
75%
69% 557 80
66%
500
61%
420
60
356
40% 303
233 40
118
20
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
10/18/16 5:10 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Researchers at Baidu’s
headquarters in Beijing are
plugging away at a digital
assistant that can hold a
conversation.
SOURCE: CHINA INTERNET NET WORK INFORMATION CENTER
Few of those behind
QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG VIA GET T Y IMAGES
Deep Speech 2 speak
Mandarin or Cantonese.
It’s a universal language
engine.
BIT_2016_TR_10 19
BEST IN TECH
that are dedicated to advancing the accuracy of speech recog-
nition and working to make computers better at parsing the
meaning of sentences.
Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been
working on voice technology for the past few decades, agrees
that the timing may finally be right for voice control. “Speech
has reached a tipping point in our society,” he says. “In my
experience, when people can talk to a device rather than via a
remote control, they want to do that.”
In November 2015, Baidu reached an important landmark
with its voice technology, announcing that its Silicon Valley lab
had developed a powerful new speech recognition engine called
Deep Speech 2. It consists of a very large, or “deep,” neural net-
work that learns to associate sounds with words and phrases
as it is fed millions of examples of transcribed speech. Deep
Speech 2 can recognize spoken words with stunning accuracy.
In fact, the researchers found that it can sometimes transcribe
snippets of Mandarin speech more accurately than a person.
Baidu’s progress is all the more impressive because Man-
darin is phonetically complex and uses tones that transform
the meaning of a word. Deep Speech 2 is also striking because
few of the researchers in the California lab where the technol-
ogy was developed speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other
variant of Chinese. The engine essentially works as a universal
speech system, learning English just as well when fed enough
examples.
Most of the voice commands that Baidu’s search engine
hears today are simple queries—concerning tomorrow’s
weather or pollution levels, for example. For these, the sys-
tem is usually impressively accurate. Increasingly, however,
users are asking more complicated questions. To take them on,
last year the company launched its own voice assistant, called
DuEr, as part of its main mobile app. DuEr can help users find
movie show times or book a table at a restaurant.
The big challenge for Baidu will be teaching its AI systems
to understand and respond intelligently to more complicated
spoken phrases. Eventually, Baidu would like for DuEr to take
part in a meaningful back-and-forth conversation, incorporat-
ing changing information into the discussion. To get there, a
research group at Baidu’s Beijing offices is devoted to improv-
ing the system that interprets users’ queries. This involves using
the kind of neural-network technology that Baidu has applied
in voice recognition, but it also requires other tricks. And Baidu
has hired a team to analyze the queries fed to DuEr and correct
mistakes, thus gradually training the system to perform better.
“In the future, I would love for us to be able to talk to all of
our devices and have them understand us,” Ng says. “I hope to
someday have grandchildren who are mystified at how, back in
2016, if you were to say ‘Hi’ to your microwave oven, it would
rudely sit there and ignore you.”
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BEST IN
IN TECH
TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Reusable Thousands of rockets have flown into space, but not until
2015 did one come down upright on a landing pad, steadily
firing to control its descent, almost as if a movie of its

Rockets
Rockets typically are destroyed on their maiden voyage. But
now they can make an upright landing and be refueled for
another trip, setting the stage for a new era in spaceflight.
By Brian Bergstein
launch were being played backward. If this can be done reg-
ularly, spaceflight could become a hundred times cheaper.
Two tech billionaires made it happen. Jeff Bezos’s Blue
Origin first pulled off a landing in November 2015; Elon
Musk’s SpaceX did it the month after. The companies are
quite different—Blue Origin hopes to propel tourists in cap-
sules on four-minute rides, while SpaceX already launches
satellites and space station supply missions—but both need
reusable rockets to improve the economics of spaceflight.
Blasting things into space has been expensive because
rockets cost tens of millions of dollars and fly once before

THIS PAGE COURTESY OF EMTECH; OPPOSITE PAGE COURTESY OF SPACEX

burning up in a free fall back through the atmosphere.
SpaceX and Blue Origin instead bring theirs down on
fold-out legs, a trick that requires onboard software to
fire thrusters and manipulate flaps that slow or nudge the
rockets at precise moments.
SpaceX has the harder job because Blue Origin’s craft
go half as high and stay mostly vertical, whereas SpaceX’s
rockets have to switch out of a horizontal position. SpaceX
Breakthrough Why It Matters Key Players in the learned how many things can go wrong last January, when
Rockets that can Lowering the New Space Industry it just missed a second landing because a rocket leg didn’t
launch payloads cost of flight - SpaceX
latch into place. Another of its rockets exploded on the
into orbit and would open the - Blue Origin
then land safely. door to many - United Launch
launch pad in September. Even so, the future of spaceflight
new endeavors in Alliance will clearly be far more interesting than the Apollo-era
space. hangover of the past 40 years.

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

Facing page: SpaceX

made test landings in
Texas. This page: A long
exposure captured a
SpaceX rocket taking off
and returning at Cape
Canaveral, Florida.

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Robots
That Teach
Each Other
What if robots could figure out more things
on their own and share that knowledge
among themselves?

By Amanda Schaffer

Many of the jobs humans would like robots

to perform, such as packing items in ware-
houses, assisting bedridden patients, or
aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet
possible because robots still don’t recognize
and easily handle common objects. People
generally have no trouble folding socks or
picking up water glasses, because we’ve
gone through “a big data collection process”

Breakthrough Key Players in

Robots that learn Advanced Robotics
tasks and send that - Ashutosh Saxena,
knowledge to the Brain of Things
cloud for other robots - Stefanie Tellex,
to pick up later. Brown University
- Pieter Abbeel, Ken
Why It Matters Goldberg, and
Progress in robot- Sergey Levine,
ics could acceler- University of
ate dramatically if California, Berkeley
each type of machine - Jan Peters, Technical
didn’t have to be pro- University of
grammed separately. Darmstadt, Germany

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH
KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD

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One researcher expects called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex,

a computer science professor at Brown

“an explosion in the University. For robots to do the same

types of routine tasks, they also need

ability of robots.” access to reams of data on how to grasp

and manipulate objects. Where does
that data come from? Typically it has
come from painstaking programming.
But ideally, robots could get some infor-
mation from each other.
That’s the theory behind Tellex’s “Mil-
lion Object Challenge.” The goal is for
research robots around the world to learn
how to spot and handle simple items
from bowls to bananas, upload their data
to the cloud, and allow other robots to
analyze and use the information.
Tellex’s lab in Providence, Rhode
Island, has the air of a playful pre-
school. On the day I visit, a Baxter robot,
an industrial machine produced by
Rethink Robotics, stands among over-
sized blocks, scanning a small hairbrush.
It moves its right arm noisily back and
forth above the object, taking multiple
pictures with its camera and measur-
ing depth with an infrared sensor. Then,
with its two-pronged gripper, it tries dif-
ferent grasps that might allow it to lift
the brush. Once it has the object in the
air, it shakes it to make sure the grip is
secure. If so, the robot has learned how
to pick up one more thing.
The robot can work around the
clock, frequently with a different object
in each of its grippers. Tellex and her
graduate student John Oberlin have
gathered—and are now sharing—data
on roughly 200 items, starting with
such things as a child’s shoe, a plastic
boat, a rubber duck, a garlic press and
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEONARD GRECO

other cookware, and a sippy cup that

originally belonged to her three-year-
old son. Other scientists can contrib-
Stefanie Tellex and ute their robots’ own data, and Tellex
a Baxter robot at hopes that together they will build up
Brown University. a library of information on how robots
should handle a million different items.

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Eventually, robots confronting a crowded shelf will be able to
“identify the pen in front of them and pick it up,” Tellex says.
Projects like this are possible because many research robots
use the same standard framework for programming, known
as ROS. Once one machine learns a given task, it can pass
the data on to others—and those machines can upload feed-
back that will in turn refine the instructions given to subse-
quent machines. Tellex says the data about how to recognize
and grasp any given object can be compressed to just five to 10
megabytes, about the size of a song in your music library.
Tellex was an early partner in a project called RoboBrain,
which demonstrated how one robot could learn from anoth-
BIT_2016_TR_10 25
BEST IN TECH
Each time the robot determines the best way to
grasp and hold something, it files that data away
in a format other robots can use.
er’s experience. Her collaborator Ashutosh Saxena, then at
Cornell, taught his PR2 robot to lift small cups and position
them on a table. Then, at Brown, Tellex downloaded that
information from the cloud and used it to train her Baxter,
which is physically different, to perform the same task in a
different environment.
Such progress might seem incremental now, but in the next
five to 10 years, we can expect to see “an explosion in the abil-
ity of robots,” says Saxena, now CEO of a startup called Brain
of Things. As more researchers contribute to and refine cloud-
based knowledge, he says, “robots should have access to all the
information they need, at their fingertips.”
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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
DNA App Store
An online store for information about your genes will
make it cheap and easy to learn more about your health
risks and predispositions.
By Antonio Regalado
While driving and listening to National Public Radio one day,
Justin Kao heard about the discovery of a “sweet tooth gene”
that makes you more likely to crave sweets. “Oh my God,”
thought Kao, who has always loved cookies. “I would pay $5 to
know if I had that.”
Kao is hoping that millions of other people will be just as
eager to spend a few bucks for tidbits revealed in their DNA.
He is a cofounder of Helix, a San Francisco–based company
that in 2015 secured more than $100 million in a quest to cre-
ate the first “app store” for genetic information.
Our genomes hold information about our health risks,
our physical traits, and whom we’re related to. Yet aside from
ancestry tests that provide a limited genetic snapshot, there’s
not a mass market for DNA data. Helix is a bet by Kao’s former
employer, the buyout firm Warburg Pincus, and Illumina, the
leading manufacturer of ultrafast DNA sequencing machines,
that what’s been missing is the right business model.
Helix’s idea is to collect a spit sample from anyone who
buys a DNA app, sequence and analyze the customers’ genes,
and then digitize the findings so they can be accessed by soft-
ware developers who want to sell other apps. Helix calls the
idea “sequence once, query often.” (The company says cus-
tomers will find these apps on websites and possibly in the
Android and Apple app stores.)
With its ties to Illumina, Helix thinks it can decode the
most important part of a person’s genome—all 20,000 genes
and a few other bits—at a cost of about $100, about one-fifth
Breakthrough Why It Matters Key Players in
A new business model Your genome Consumer Genomics
for DNA sequencing determines a great - Helix
that will make genetic deal about you, - Illumina
JAVIER JAÉN
information widely including your - Veritas Genomics
accessible online. likelihood of getting
certain diseases.
BIT_2016_TR_10 27
BEST IN TECH
of what it costs other companies. That’s why Helix can afford
its second gambit: to generate and store this type of data for all
customers, even if they initially make only one specific genetic
query—such as whether they have the sweet tooth gene or a
risk for a certain disease. Maybe two guys in a garage will write
a $10 app that shows you how old you’ll look in 10 years, or
which celebrity you are most closely related to. Kao says the
tactic will make genetic information available to consumers “at
an unprecedentedly low entry price.”
The engine to power the app store is being assembled a
mile from Illumina’s San Diego headquarters, in a building
where workmen were still bending sheet metal and laying floor
tiles last January. Several miles of data cables strung through
the ceiling will be connected to a large farm of sequencing
machines, able to process the DNA from a million samples a
year. Illumina’s CEO, Jay Flatley, also chairman of Helix, has
said it could be the largest sequencing center anywhere.
Helix plans to launch the store by 2017. Customers will
control their data by deciding who sees it. There’s even a
“nuclear button” to erase every A, G, C, and T. But key details
are still being sorted out. Will people be able to download their
DNA information and take it elsewhere? Probably, though
they might pay extra for the privilege.
One company working with Helix is Good Start Genet-
ics, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that offers pre­
conception testing. These DNA tests tell parents-to-be if they
share a risk for passing on a serious genetic condition, such
as cystic fibrosis. Jeffrey Luber, Good Start’s head of business
development, says it hopes to reach a larger audience with an
app that can report a few important risks. As with browsing
on Amazon, he thinks, people will discover things they “didn’t
know they needed but that [are] targeted to them, and that
they want.”
A looming question mark is the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, which has kept close tabs on gene tests and
will decide how much information Helix apps can reveal.
Right now, says Keith Stewart, director of the Center for Indi-
vidualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, most apps that return
real medical information—your chance of cancer, say, not just
how much Neanderthal is in your DNA—would need agency
approval, or at least a doctor in the loop.
“The bottom line is going to be: What are the regulatory
constraints on information that is truly useful?” says Mirza
Cifric, CEO of Veritas Genomics. His company has been offer-
ing since last fall to sequence a person’s entire genome and is
creating its own app to explore the data, complete with a but-
ton to get a FaceTime appointment with a genetic counselor.
Cifric hasn’t decided whether to create an app with Helix, but
he says he shares its core belief: “The genome is an asset that
you have for life, and you’ll keep going back to it.”
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The massive solar

manufacturing facility,
shown here in late
2015, is scheduled
to begin full-scale
production sometime
in 2017.

SolarCity’s In an industrial park near the shore of Lake Erie, hard by the
Buffalo River, the future of the solar power industry is under
construction. SolarCity’s sprawling Buffalo factory, built and

Gigafactory paid for by the state of New York, is nearing completion and
will soon begin producing some of the most efficient solar pan-
els available commercially. Capable of making 10,000 solar
A $750 million solar facility in Buffalo will produce panels a day, or one gigawatt of solar capacity a year, it will be
a gigawatt of high-efficiency solar panels per year the largest solar manufacturing plant in North America and
and make residential panels far more attractive to one of the biggest in the world.
homeowners. When production begins, SolarCity, already the leading
installer of residential solar panels in the United States, will
become a vertically integrated manufacturer and provider—
By Richard Martin doing everything from making the solar cells to putting them
Photographs by Gus Powell on rooftops. At a time when conventional silicon-based solar
panels from China have never been cheaper, investing in a new

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SolarCity CEO
Lyndon Rive

SolarCity’s new panels

use a novel combination
of materials.

Breakthrough
Highly efficient solar
panels made using a
simplified, low-cost
manufacturing process.

Why It Matters
The solar industry
needs cheaper and
more efficient technol-
ogy to be more compet-
itive with fossil fuels.

Key Players in
Photovoltaics
- SolarCity
- SunPower
- Panasonic

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The gigafactory covers

some 27 acres, making
it the largest solar
production facility in
North America.

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type of solar technology is a risky under-

taking. However, the potential benefits are
huge. The new factory, says SolarCity chief
technology officer Peter Rive, could trans-
form both SolarCity’s business, which has
consistently lost money, and the economics
of residential solar power.
Solar panels installed by SolarCity
cost the company $2.84 per watt (includ-
ing sales and marketing plus overhead, in
addition to the cost of the hardware), down
from $4.73 in 2012. The combination of the
new, highly efficient panels, the volume of
product coming out of the new factory, and
a simplified manufacturing process is a big
reason why the company expects its costs
for residential solar to fall well below $2.50
per watt by the end of 2017, when the Buf-
falo facility reaches full production.
Bolstered by federal solar subsidies and
“net metering,” the rules that allow home-
owners to sell excess power back to the grid
at retail prices in many states, SolarCity is
already leading the way in making residen-
tial systems financially attractive to many
households, spurring an explosion in the
popularity of the rooftop panels. The drop
in installed costs could make residential
solar even more popular.
“Right now we can sell you energy in 14
states at a rate lower than what you’re cur-
rently paying the utility,” says Rive. The Buf-
falo factory, he adds, “sets us up for a future
where solar plus batteries is cheaper than
fossil fuels.”
Key to the company’s ambitions is a
technology it acquired when it bought a
small solar company called Silevo in 2014.
That technology, which allows it to make
panels that are highly efficient at convert-
ing sunlight into electricity, traces its ori-
gins to the Australian solar power pioneer
Martin Green in the late 1970s. It com-
bines a standard crystalline-silicon solar
cell with elements of a thin-film cell, along
with a layer of a semiconductor oxide.
Last October, SolarCity announced that
test panels made at a small facility in Fre-

31

BIT_2016_TR_10 31 10/18/16 5:10 PM

 BEST IN TECH
mont, California, had tested at just over 22 percent efficiency.
Today’s commodity silicon-based solar panels have efficien-
cies of between 16 and 18 percent. SolarCity competitor
­SunPower previously led the market with cells that can reach
21.5 percent.
Efficiency matters because the panels themselves repre-
sent only 15 to 20 percent of the cost of the full installation.
Much of the rest comes in what’s known as balance-of-system
costs: inverters to connect to the grid, materials to house the
array, nuts and bolts to attach it to the roof, the labor to install
it, and so on. SolarCity’s installation, says the company, will
require one-third fewer panels to produce the same amount of
electricity as conventional installations. “Fewer panels means
fewer bits and pieces, less wire, less days on the roof to install,”
says Francis O’Sullivan, the director of research and analysis at
the MIT Energy Initiative.
SolarCity uses a deposition manufacturing process that
reduces the number of steps required to make the cells from
two dozen or more to just six. It also replaces silver, one of the
most expensive elements of conventional solar cells, with less
expensive copper.
But the difference in performance between solar panels
produced in a small facility like SolarCity’s Fremont plant
and in a large factory like the Buffalo one could be signifi-
cant. And scaling up production could be particularly tricky
given ­SolarCity’s lack of manufacturing experience. Rive
acknowledges that there could be “small risks around the
actual time line” in getting the products coming out of Buf-
falo to match the efficiencies achieved at small scale. Already,
SolarCity has pushed back the target date for full production
32
BIT_2016_TR_10 32
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
The factory is
situated on a former
Republic Steel
manufacturing
site, not far from
downtown Buffalo.
from the Buffalo factory from the first quarter of 2017 to later
in the year.
But the real risk lies in the rapid advance of solar technol-
ogy: a record-setting panel today might look relatively inef-
ficient three or five years down the road. Soon after SolarCity
showed off its high-efficiency panels last October, Panasonic
topped its rival by claiming that its new panels would reach
efficiencies of 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, efficiencies in the lab
are even higher: researchers have made exotic solar-cell mate-
rials with efficiencies of up to 40 percent. “I think that within
10 years, most manufacturers will be producing panels over 20
percent efficiency, with the best commercial panels reaching
over 23 percent,” Green says.
O’Sullivan adds: “For now, SolarCity is moving the boat
out as far as it can with, generically speaking, contemporary
technology. But we’re beginning to approach a choke point for
the economics of any silicon-based technology”—including
the new cells SolarCity is bringing online. Future advances, he
says, will entail much lighter, flexible panels that offer much
higher efficiencies and are even cheaper to install—and thus
produce electricity at a much lower cost.
At that point, the solar panels coming out of the gigafac-
tory may seem as conventional as commodity panels produced
in China today. It is, however, SolarCity’s willingness to take
on such risks that makes the Buffalo facility so ambitious. Over
COURTESY OF SOLARCIT Y
the last 10 years, the Silicon Valley company has made residen-
tial solar a popular choice for many consumers through smart
marketing and attractive financing. Now it wants to transform
solar manufacturing. Whether SolarCity succeeds or fails, it is
once again pushing the possibilities of solar power.
10/18/16 5:10 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

Senator Charles Schumer

speaks alongside CEO
Rive at the Buffalo
facility, a key part of New
York’s effort to revitalize
manufacturing in the city.

33

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 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Proportion of online time spent on mobile devices in the U.S.

TODAY

51%
2008

12%

Proportion of U.S. workers who telecommute

TODAY

37%
1995

9%

Estimated average number of e-mails sent and received by business users each day

TODAY

122
2011

105

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Slack
A service built for the era of mobile phones and short text
messages is changing the workplace.
By Lee Gomes
Breakthrough The intra-office messaging system known as Slack
Easy-to-use commu- is often described as the fastest-growing workplace
nication software that software the world has ever seen. It surpassed two
is supplanting e-mail
million daily users less than three years after its
as a method of get-
ting work done.
launch in 2013.
But what, exactly, makes it so popular?
Why It Matters Slack gives you a centralized place to commu-
In many kinds of nicate with your colleagues through instant mes-
workplaces, the
sages and in chat rooms, which can reduce the
“water cooler” effect
that lets people over- time you have to spend on e-mail. Whether you’re
hear their colleagues’ on a mobile device or a desktop computer, you can
conversations can upload files, get and manipulate information stored
enhance productivity. in spreadsheets or other business applications, and
easily search through past conversations. But many
Key Players in
Communication of the core features have been around since the
Software 1990s. And there have been other “Facebook for the
- Slack office” software packages that resemble Slack and
- Quip have failed to generate anything close to the same
- Hipchat
level of enthusiasm.
- Microsoft
The reason for its success lies in part with big
MIGUEL PORLAN; DATA SOURCES: EMARKETER, GALLUP, RADICATI GROUP
trends: more and more people now get work done
on mobile devices, in collaboration with people who
aren’t always in the same office at the same time.
But Slack’s specific design choices have also been
important. Gerald C. Kane, associate professor of
information systems at Boston College’s ­Carroll
BIT_2016_TR_10 35
BEST IN TECH
School of Management, points out that Slack fun-
nels messages into streams that everyone who
works together can see. That “allows you to ‘over-
hear’ what is going on in an organization, which
research has shown can lead to business impact,” he
says. “It’s a kind of ambient awareness that you just
don’t get from e-mail.”
Kristina Lerman, a specialist in social com-
puting at the Information Sciences Institute at
the University of Southern California, notes that
Slack messages tend to be short and casual, much
more like the mobile text messages that people are
increasingly favoring over e-mail in their personal
life. This creates the perception that keeping in
touch with coworkers is effortless. “You get the feel-
ing that you are quickly responding to everything
that is happening around you,” Lerman says.
In fact, Slack makes it so easy to create mes-
sages that it might end up placing as many
demands on people’s time as e-mail traditionally
has, albeit with a hip and friendly interface. “There
are limits to the amount of time that we have to
interact with each other, and Slack doesn’t really
cure that,” Lerman says. Software might take some
of the friction out of getting work done, but it is
still work.
35
10/18/16 5:10 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

The author could keep

his hands off the wheel
as his borrowed Tesla
maneuvered itself through
Los Angeles.

36

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

Tesla Autopilot
The electric-vehicle maker sent its cars
a software update that suddenly made
autonomous driving a reality.

By Ryan Bradley
Photographs by Julian Berman

Breakthrough In October 2014, Elon Musk’s electric-car com-

A car that drives pany began rolling out sedans with a dozen
itself safely in a vari- ultrasonic sensors discreetly placed around both
ety of conditions.
bumpers and sides. For an additional $4,250,
Why It Matters Tesla customers could purchase a “technology
Car crashes caused package” that used the sensors, as well as a cam-
by human error kill era, a front radar, and digitally controlled brakes,
thousands of people to help avoid collisions—essentially allowing the
a day worldwide.
car to take over and stop before crashing. But
Key Players in mostly, the hardware sat there, waiting, waiting,
Autonomous Driving and gathering reams of data. A year later, in Octo-
- Ford Motor ber 2015, the company sent a software update to
- General Motors the 60,000 sensor-laden cars it had sold in that
- Google
time. The software update was officially named
- Nissan
- Mercedes Tesla Version 7.0, but its nickname—Autopilot—
- Tesla Motors was what stuck.
- Toyota It did in fact give drivers something similar to
- Uber what airline pilots employ in flight. The car could
- Volvo
manage its speed, steer within and even change
lanes, and park itself. Some of these features, like
automatic parallel parking, were already on offer
from other car companies (including Mercedes,
BMW, and General Motors), but the self-steering
was suddenly, overnight, via a software update, a
giant leap toward full autonomy.
Tesla customers, delighted, posted videos of
themselves on the highway, hands free, reading the
paper, sipping coffee, and even, once, riding on the
roof. One driver’s overreliance on Autopilot was
ultimately blamed for a fatal crash in Florida last
May. The feature has existed in a legal gray area,
but it’s a gesture toward an ever nearing future that

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
BEST IN |TECH
VOL. 119 NO. 2 TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Autopilot could even handle twisty

Mulholland Drive, though it shut itself off in
the middle of particularly tight turns.

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BIT_2016_TR_10 38 10/18/16 5:10 PM

 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Like many other
features in the car,
Autopilot can be
activated or shut off
from a touch screen.
It also turns off with a
tap on the brakes.
will reshape not just the car and our relationship with it but
the road and our entire transportation infrastructure.
Which is why I jumped at the chance to borrow a car
with Autopilot for a few days and drive it—or let it drive
me—around Los Angeles.
Everyone wanted to know what it felt like, the strange
surrender of allowing a car to take control. The only
moments that seemed like magic were when the car parked
itself or changed lanes, mostly because watching a steering
wheel turn all on its own was unnatural and ghostly. Other
than that, I was amazed by how quickly I got used to it, how
inevitable it began to feel. As a Tesla engineer told me—on
condition of anonymity, because the company won’t let any-
one but Musk speak publicly these days—the thing that
quickly becomes strange is driving a car without Autopilot.
“You’ll feel like the car is not doing its job,” he said.  the transition can play out in software updates. Musk has
The car can’t start in Autopilot; it requires a set of cir-
cumstances (good data, basically) before you can engage the
setting. These include clear lane lines, a relatively constant
speed, a sense of the cars around you, and a map of the area
you’re traveling through—roughly in that order. L.A.’s abun-
dant highway traffic is the ideal scenario for Autopilot, not
simply because of all the data it makes available to the ultra-
sonic sensors—which use high-frequency sound waves to
BIT_2016_TR_10 39
BEST IN TECH
identify objects up to 16 feet away—but also because humans
are awful in traffic. We are bad at estimating distances to
begin with, and we are constantly trying to switch lanes
when the next one looks faster, causing accidents in the pro-
cess. With Autopilot, I no longer had to stare at the bumper
ahead of me, and I could look around to see the variety of
bad decisions drivers make, stopping and starting and stop-
ping again. Meanwhile, my car accelerated and slowed more
smoothly than it ever could have with me in charge.
With its incremental approach, Tesla stands in con-
trast to Google and other companies that have small test
fleets gathering data in hopes of someday launching fully
autonomous cars. For Tesla, its customers and their partially
autonomous cars are a widely distributed test fleet. The
hardware required for true autonomy is already in place, so
said that could be technically feasible—if not legally so—
within two years.
The day after I returned the Tesla, my fiancée and I were
on an L.A. freeway and saw someone, speeding, cross three
lanes, cutting in front of several drivers. As the traffic stopped,
the car behind us came in way too fast and crashed into our
bumper, which fell right off. The future, I thought, was practi-
cally here, and it couldn’t arrive soon enough.
39
10/18/16 5:10 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

40

BIT_2016_TR_10 40 10/18/16 5:10 PM

 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Power from
the Air
Internet devices powered by Wi-Fi and other
telecommunications signals will make small
computers and sensors more pervasive.
By Mark Harris
Breakthrough Even the smallest Internet-connected devices
Wireless gadgets typically need a battery or power cord. Not
that repurpose for much longer. Technology that lets gadgets
nearby radio sig-
work and communicate using only energy
nals, such as Wi-Fi,
to power themselves
harvested from nearby TV, radio, cell-phone,
and communicate. or Wi-Fi signals is headed toward commer-
cialization. The University of Washington
Why It Matters researchers who developed the technique
Freeing Internet-­ have demonstrated Internet-connected tem-
connected devices
perature and motion sensors, and even a
from the constraints
of batteries and
camera, powered that way.
power cords will Transferring power wirelessly is not a
open up many new new trick. But getting a device without a con-
uses. ventional power source to communicate is
harder, because generating radio signals is
Key Players in
very power-intensive and the airwaves har-
Harvesting
Radio Waves vested from radio, TV, and other telecommu-
- University of nication technologies hold little energy.
ILLUSTRATION BY BRENDAN MONROE; PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL BERMAN
Washington Shyamnath Gollakota and his colleague
- Texas Instruments Joshua Smith have proved that weak radio
- University of
signals can indeed provide all an Internet
Massachusetts,
Amherst gadget needs, using a principle called back-
scattering. Instead of generating original sig-
nals, one of their devices selectively reflects
incoming radio waves to construct a new
signal—a bit like an injured hiker sending
an SOS message using the sun and a mirror.
BIT_2016_TR_10 41
BEST IN TECH
A gadget using the technique absorbs some
energy from the signal it is modifying to
power its own circuits.
“We can get communication for free,”
says Gollakota. RFID chips for the contact-
less smart cards used in mass transit also
rely on backscattering, but they require spe-
cialized reader devices and can communi-
cate only within a few inches because the
reflected signals are weak and the reader
itself presents interference.
One version of the University of Wash-
ington technology, dubbed passive Wi-Fi, is
being commercialized through a spin-off com-
pany, Jeeva Wireless. It lets battery-free gad-
gets connect with conventional devices such
as computers and smartphones by backscat-
tering Wi-Fi signals. In tests, prototype pas-
sive Wi-Fi devices have beamed data as far as
100 feet and made connections through walls.
Doing that requires altering the software of a
Wi-Fi access point to generate an extra signal
for passive Wi-Fi devices to use, very slightly
increasing its power consumption.
Smith says that passive Wi-Fi consumes
just 1/10,000th as much power as existing
Wi-Fi chipsets. It uses a thousandth as much
power as the Bluetooth LE and ZigBee com-
munications standards used by some small
connected devices and has a longer range.
A device using passive Wi-Fi to communi-
cate—for example, a security camera—could
power its other circuits using energy har-
vested from the Wi-Fi signals it is backscat-
tering, or by feeding on other signals such as
TV and radio broadcasts.
The researchers believe that tiny passive
Wi-Fi devices could be extremely cheap to
make, perhaps less than a dollar. In tomor-
row’s smart home, security cameras, tem-
perature sensors, and smoke alarms should
never need to have their batteries changed.
41
10/18/16 5:10 PM
 Hello challenge, meet insights.
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Not all emerging technologies will alter the business landscape—but some do have the potential to
disrupt the status quo, improve the way people live and work, and enable new levels of innovation.
We can help you make sense of and harness today’s emerging technologies to deliver more value
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 MITMIT
TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
REVIEW
REVIEW
| TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
| TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST
BEST
IN TECH
IN TECH

Smartest
Companies
CONTENTS Each year we identify 50 companies that are “smart”
The List......................................................................................................................... 44 in the way they create new opportunities. Some of
23andMe.................................................................................................................. 46
this year’s stars are large companies, like Amazon and
Toyota.............................................................................................................................. 48
Alphabet, that are using digital technologies to redefine
Didi Chuxing..................................................................................................... 54
24M........................................................................................................................................ 56
industries. Others are wrestling with technological
Bosch................................................................................................................................ 60 changes: companies like Microsoft, Bosch, Toyota, and
Intel. Also on the list are ambitious startups like 23andMe,
a pioneer in consumer-accessible DNA testing; 24M,
a reinventor of battery technology; and Didi Chuxing,
a four-year-old ride-hailing app that’s dominating the
Chinese market. Still, despite the excitement of recent
advances in such fields as artificial intelligence and
genomic medicine, technology has failed to energize the
overall economy. In our opening essay, we explore why
that is so and what needs to change.
4343

BIT_2016_TR_50 43 10/18/16 5:18 PM

 BEST IN TECH
The List
Over the past year, these 50 companies have best
combined innovative technology with an effective
business model. The list is the product not of a formula
but of our editors’ judgment.
1. AMAZON
Call out a request and AI-powered Alexa
will play your favorite song or order you a
pizza. And Amazon Web Services just
keeps growing.
The Echo Dot, the most affordable device to feature
Alexa Voice Services, sells for $89.99.
2. BAIDU
China’s leading search engine is developing
autonomous cars, backed by a big research
and engineering team in Silicon Valley.
Baidu plans to employ more than 100 autonomous-
car researchers and engineers in California by
year’s end.
3. ILLUMINA
The world’s largest DNA-sequencing company
is moving beyond simply selling equipment
to expand genomic applications: a company
it’s launching, Grail, intends to develop a
blood test that would screen for cancer before
symptoms appear.
Revenue reached $2.2 billion last year, up 19
percent from the previous year.
4. TESLA MOTORS
While advancing autopilot technology in its
Model S and X cars, the company is taking
electric vehicles mainstream with its $35,000
Model 3 car, which already has 400,000
pre-orders.
According to founder Elon Musk, drivers have a 50
percent lower chance of having an accident when
driving with Tesla Autopilot.
5. AQUION ENERGY
Its innovative batteries for the power grid
make this startup unusually successful in
a tough industry.
Backers include Bill Gates, Shell.
6. MOBILEYE
A leader in making driver assistance
technology such as collision warning systems
for such clients as Tesla, General Motors, and
Volkswagen, among others, it is working on
advances that will enable fully autonomous
automobiles.
Six hundred employees are annotating the images
used to train its autonomous driving system.
44
BIT_2016_TR_50 44
7. 23ANDME
After a two-year moratorium,
23andMe has resumed selling
direct-to-consumer DNA tests that
assess risk for genetic diseases.
(p.46) The company has sequenced the DNA
of more than one million customers.
8. ALPHABET
Its DeepMind business inside Google
developed an AI program that beat one of the
world’s best players at the board game Go.
Alphabet’s autonomous cars have driven 1.6 million
miles so far.
9. SPARK THERAPEUTICS
Very strong trial data on its gene therapy for a
form of blindness implies that the treatment is
headed for approval.
Corporate collaborators include Pfizer, Genable
Technologies, and Clearside Biomedical.
10. HUAWEI
This Chinese telecommunications giant is now
the world’s third-largest smartphone vendor
thanks to strong sales in both premium and
entry-level devices.
Huawei shipped 27.5 million smartphones in
the first quarter of 2016, according to market
researcher IDC.
11. FIRST SOLAR
While rivals face bankruptcy, it has continued
to invest in research, increasing the efficiency of
its solar panels.
Profits reached $546 million in 2015.
12. NVIDIA
With deep learning driving demand for its
graphics-processing chips, it started selling
chips designed for AI.
Revenue increased 13 percent in the most recent
quarter, to $1.3 billion, compared with $1.15 billion
a year ago.
13. CELLECTIS
Last summer a hospital in London used
Cellectis’s gene-editing technology to heal a
child with otherwise untreatable leukemia.
Though not profitable, the company has over $300
million in cash, enough to last through 2018.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
14. ENLITIC
A number of Australian radiologists are now
using the company’s deep-learning software to
analyze x-rays.
Enlitic claims its algorithm read chest CT images
50 percent more accurately than experts in its
own test.
15. FACEBOOK
Its Oculus Rift technology is the first truly
high-quality virtual-reality headset for
consumers.
Rift sells for $599.
16. SPACEX
The company is making spaceflight cheaper
with rockets that can land and be reused.
SpaceX attempted to land a rocket on a barge four
times before succeeding.
17. TOYOTA
Dramatically rethinking its
future, the carmaker has
committed $1 billion to an
automation institute.
Roboticist Gill Pratt is CEO of the
(p.48)
Toyota Research Institute.
18. AIRWARE
Building an operating system for commercial
drones, as well as a traffic control system that
could increase drones’ usefulness.
Airware’s founder and CEO also leads an
investment fund that supports businesses creating
technologies for commercial drones.
19. IDE TECHNOLOGIES
Its large-scale desalination process is winning
big contracts in China and Australia.
By October IDE will be producing 26 percent of the
water supply in Santa Barbara, California.
20. TENCENT
Asia’s largest Internet company, which
owns the popular WeChat messaging app,
is expanding into the enterprise market and
investing in other technology companies.
Tencent’s largest business segment,
mostly games, accounts for 78 percent of
its revenue.
21. DIDI CHUXING
Its acquisition of Uber’s Chinese
operations cements its position
as the dominant ride-sharing
company in China.
(p.54) Its drivers complete 14 million rides
a day.
22. OXFORD NANOPORE
It’s begun selling a DNA sequencer the size of
a smartphone that may move genomics out of
the lab and into the field.
Illumina, once an investor, is now suing the
company for patent infringement.
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
23. 24M
Created a more efficient lithium-
ion battery that could reduce
the cost of energy storage for the
electric grid and electric vehicles.
(p.56) The company claims it can reduce
the cost of lithium-ion batteries by
50 percent.
24. ALIBABA
E-commerce site is now the world’s largest
marketplace and will benefit from the growth
in mobile video ads.
Merchandise sold through Alibaba in its last fiscal
year had a gross value of $485 billion.
25. BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB
Uses of its life-saving immunotherapy,
Opdivo, has expanded to lung cancer,
advanced renal-cell carcinoma, and
Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
One-third of patients with advanced melanoma
survived for five years in a study of Opdivo.
26. MICROSOFT
Its neural-network research is leading to
applications such as simultaneous language
translation in Skype and social augmented-
reality experiences in its new HoloLens
headset.
A Microsoft network that won a global image
recognition contest in 2015 used 152 layers of
virtual neurons.
27. FANUC
World’s largest maker of industrial robots
is incorporating machine learning.
A Fanuc robot needs eight hours to learn a task
with 90 percent accuracy.
28. SONNEN
Its smart batteries, which include software to
manage energy use and can store energy for
later, are transforming the electricity market
in Germany.
Electricity on its system is 25 percent cheaper than
on the grid, according to the company.
29. IMPROBABLE
Its virtual-world simulation platform is used
to create VR software and test driverless cars.
Andreessen Horowitz is a major backer.
30. MOVIDIUS
Its computer-vision chips make mobile devices
and drones smarter.
Drones using Movidius technology can sense
obstacles to avoid collisions.
31. INTREXON
The Oxitech division of this biotech holding
company genetically engineers mosquitoes
that could reduce the spread of Zika.
Acquisitions increased sales from $8 million to $174
million in five years.
BIT_2016_TR_50 45
32. CARBON
Its new kind of 3-D printing is dozens of times
faster than rivals’.
Use of its 3-D printers costs $40,000 a year.
33. BOSCH
Advanced manufacturing
facilities it is developing rely
on connected sensors and
sophisticated software to
improve factory efficiency.
(p.60)
Took in record revenue of $80
billion in 2015.
34. T2 BIOSYSTEMS
Its flexible magnetic-resonance test spots
pathogens earlier than other methods; it has
been approved for the detection of a fungus
that causes deadly sepsis.
Thirty-five hospitals now use the company’s bench-
top diagnostic system.
35. EDITAS MEDICINE
Plans to begin testing a powerful new form
of gene repair in humans within two years.
Raised $94 million in its February IPO, and the
stock is up 85 percent since then.
36. NESTLÉ
Food giant has jumped into microbiome
research, working to develop “healthy gut”
products.
At a slow time for its core food business, its
nutritional therapies division has reached $2 billion
in annual revenue in its first five years, and more
strong growth is predicted.
37. RETROSENSE THERAPEUTICS
Has begun first human trials of optogenetics,
using light-triggered genetic changes to
restore some vision to people with retinitis
pigmentosa.
Has raised $12 million from foundations and
private investors as well as the Michigan Economic
Development Corporation.
38. LINE (SUBSIDIARY OF NAVER)
The Japanese messaging app is quick to add
innovative features, such as group calls for up
to 200 people.
Monthly active users number 218 million.
39. TRANSFERWISE
This money-transfer service, with a peer-to-
peer model for sending money abroad, aims
to charge lower fees than traditional players.
TransferWise helps users exchange a total of $750
million per month.
40. VERITAS GENETICS
Attempting to sell low-cost genome tests
directly to consumers.
Whole-genome sequencing, including interpretation
and counseling, costs under $1,000. The supply is
limited to 5,000 customers in 2016.
BEST IN TECH
41. FIREEYE
With clients like JPMorgan Chase, Sony
Pictures, and Target, it’s creating a new model
for computer security on a large scale.
New products focus on securing public and
private clouds and detecting targeted e-mail
attacks.
42. SEVEN BRIDGES
Its software makes it possible to analyze one of
the world’s largest genomic data sets.
Eleven thousand patients have contributed 33
cancer types and subtypes to its Cancer Genomics
Cloud.
43. SLACK
The workplace communications app burrows
more deeply into workplaces. Now you can
use your Slack login for all the software your
company uses.
Daily active users number three million.
44. COUPANG
South Korea’s largest and fastest-growing
online-only retailer is innovating in mobile
commerce and same-day delivery.
Coupang’s most recent valuation was $5 billion.
45. IBM
Preparing for an AI era by acquiring huge
data sets to train its software.
Over 100 clients have built Watson into a product.
46. SNAPCHAT
Building out its advertising business by
partnering with Viacom to sell ads and with
Nielsen for marketing campaign data.
Ten billion videos are seen on the app daily.
47. AFRICA INTERNET GROUP
This e-commerce company is the continent’s
first tech company to be valued at more than
$1 billion.
Operates in 26 African countries.
48. LITTLEBITS
Maker of electronic building blocks has
accelerated its growth with new funding, new
investors, and new distribution.
Basic kits sell for $99 to $299.
49. INTEL
The chip maker is experimenting with
reprogrammable processors for deep neural
networks and marketing a fundamentally new
kind of computer memory.
Spent $16.7 billion to buy Altera, a maker of
programmable logic devices.
50. MONSANTO
Using RNA interference to create alternatives
to conventional GMOs.
Invested more than $1.5 billion last year in
research on new biotech traits, genomics, and
more.
45
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 BEST IN TECH
23andMe
The consumer genetic-testing startup has amassed one of the world’s
largest databases of DNA. Now it is sifting through it for clues to new drugs.
Welcome to You.” So says the
genetic test kit that 23andMe
will send to your home. Pay
$199, spit in a tube, and several weeks
later you’ll get a peek into your DNA.
Have you got the gene for blond hair?
Which of 36 disease risks could you pass
to a child?
Run by entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki,
the ex-wife of Google founder Sergey
Brin, and until 2015 housed alongside
the Googleplex, the company created a
test that has been attacked by regula-
tors and embraced by a curious public.
It remains, nine years after its intro-
duction, the only one of its kind sold
directly to consumers. 23andMe has
managed to amass a collection of DNA
information about 1.2 million people,
which last year began to prove its value
when the company revealed it had sold
access to the data to more than 13 drug
companies. One, Genentech, anted up
$10 million for a look at the genes of
people with Parkinson’s disease.
That means 23andMe is mone-
tizing DNA rather the way Facebook
makes money from our “likes.” What’s
more, it gets its customers to pay for
46
BIT_2016_TR_50 46
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
By Antonio Regalado
the privilege. That idea so appeals to The company almost didn’t survive
investors that they have valued the still-­ to build its database. In 2013, the U.S.
unprofitable company at over $1 bil- government forced 23andMe’s flag-
lion. “Money follows data,” says Barbara ship health test off the market when
Evans, a legal scholar at the Univer- it charged, in one of the angriest let-
sity of Houston, who studies personal ters the Food and Drug Administration
genetics. “It takes a lot of labor and cap- has ever sent to a private company, that
ital to get that information in a form the company’s gene predictions were
that is useful.” inaccurate and dangerous for those
GENETIC BIG DATA
Despite a government ban on its flagship health product,
23andMe has used ancestry tests and consumer surveys to build
up one of the world’s largest troves of DNA and personal data.
1 million customers
FDA crackdown
800,000 bans 23andMe
from marketing
health test
600,000
DAVID BISKUP; DATA FROM 23ANDME
400,000
200,000
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
who might not fully understand the
results.
Wojcicki apologized and contin-
ued offering more limited ancestry
tests. But she never really changed
her idea. By last fall, the govern-
ment agreed to allow some health
information back on the market—
for example, letting customers know
whether they’re carriers of risk
genes like the one that causes cys-
tic fibrosis. Wojcicki has vowed she
“will not sleep” until the full results
(which once included estimates of a
person’s risk for diabetes, macular
degeneration, and breast cancer) are
available again.
To some, 23andMe’s strategy is
controversial for the way it treats
personal data as a commodity. But
“prescient” may be a better word.
Even the U.S. government is catch-
ing up. President Obama’s Precision
Medicine Initiative began inviting
citizens to join its own one-­million-
strong database this year. And just
like 23andMe, it must find ways to
entice the public to join.
For now, though, 23andMe’s bio-
bank is the world’s largest repository
of DNA samples that also contains
extensive health information, will-
ingly provided by customers who
answer survey questions like “Do
you like cilantro?” and “Have you
ever had cancer?” 23andMe says its
customers supply it with as many
as two million new facts each week.
These surveys are proving valuable
to drug investigators. This year the
company found genetic variations
strongly linked to whether custom-
ers consider themselves early risers,
offering a clue about how to develop
drugs that modulate alertness.
When it receives a spit sample,
23andMe examines about 650,000
locations in its customer’s genomes.
That’s not as detailed (or expensive)
as generating a complete, letter-by-
letter genome map. Yet the tech-
BIT_2016_TR_50 47
BEST IN TECH
nology captures the big picture of
HOW IT WORKS which genes a person has. It allows
People who sign up for 23andMe submit 23andMe to tell you, for instance,
a spit sample. The DNA in stray cheek that your eyes are probably blue
skin cells is analyzed for some 650,000 rather than brown.
genetic markers. These markers reveal
To gain the volume of infor-
which common version of each human
gene a person has, about 20,000 genes
mation necessary to study specific
in all. Such “genotypes” may explain diseases, 23andMe has recruited
many physical traits and disease risks, patients by giving the test away for
although not all. free. One person who joined the
database is Amy Caron, who was
WHAT YOU LEARN diagnosed with lupus, an autoim-
Inherited Disease Risk
mune disorder, at age 22. Caron
Thirty-six genes that put your children at risk agreed to submit her DNA as part of
for inherited disease, including: a study of lupus financed by Pfizer.
Very little is known about the dis-
- Niemann-Pick - Usher syndrome
disease ease, and filling out surveys “is a
- Sickle-cell anemia
- Cystic fibrosis safe, low-risk way to get involved
- Bloom syndrome
- Tay-Sachs disease and contribute,” she says.
In spring 2016, 23andMe
Traits also opened a drug lab, where it
Twenty-two genes that explain your
will begin testing some of its own
appearance or characteristics, including:
treatment ideas. It’s the first time
- Cheek dimples - Asparagus-odor the company has done work at a
- Cleft chin detection
lab bench rather than a computer
- Unibrow - Bald spot
screen, says Joyce Tung, the com-
- Earlobe type - Bitter-taste
perception pany’s vice president of research. To
- Widow’s peak some observers, finding drugs is the
only way 23andMe can justify the
Wellness
Six genes that reveal differences related value investors have given it, since
to food, exercise, and sleep, including: the company has never turned a
profit from its tests.
- Sensitivity to - Lactose
alcohol intolerance Another reason 23andMe can’t
- Preference for - Muscle stand still is that genetic technol-
caffeine composition ogy keeps advancing, and it keeps
getting cheaper. That means lots of
Ancestry
companies are offering low-priced
The overall composition of your genes
reveals a person’s ancestry, including: gene tests. One even promises to
fully decode a person’s genome for
- Countries of origin - Percentage of
Neanderthal $1,000. Yet unlike 23andMe’s test,
- Relatives who
share DNA genes these must be ordered by a doctor, in
order to avoid regulations covering
Banned in U.S. direct-to-consumer medicine.
The U.S. still bars certain genetic findings Wojcicki still believes the pub-
from being provided directly to consumers,
lic is able to deal with the sort of
including:
complex information that can be
- BRCA breast - Risk of gleaned from DNA “without a mid-
cancer gene Parkinson’s
disease dleman in a white coat delivering it,”
- Blood-thinner
sensitivity - Response to as she recently told the Wall Street
- Risk of Alzheimer’s hepatitis C Journal. Instead, it’s 23andMe that’s
disease treatment in the middle.
47
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Toyota
The world’s largest automaker is finally getting serious
about self-driving technologies.

By George Anders
MICHAEL KIRKHAM

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
oyota spends $10 billion a year
T on research, more than any
other automaker except Volks-
wagen. That pays for endless incremen-
tal improvements in everything from
lithium batteries to seatbelt design, but
such tweaks may not be enough any-
more if Toyota is to remain the world’s
top seller of cars.
The development of autonomous
vehicles now threatens to change the
very essence of driving. In the race to
BIT_2016_TR_50 49
develop that technology, Toyota lags
behind several of its fellow carmak-
ers and Silicon Valley upstarts such as
Google and Tesla Motors. It’s possible
that a generation from now everything
from roadway design to driver certifi-
cation will be radically reshaped by the
ubiquity of semi- or fully autonomous
vehicles, and carmakers without the req-
uisite technology will be as imperiled as
the sellers of silver-halide film in the age
of the digital selfie.
BEST IN TECH
Determined to make up for lost
time, Toyota’s 60-year-old CEO, Akio
Toyoda, is spending $1 billion for a new
Toyota Research Institute with offices
in Michigan, Silicon Valley, and Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, that will focus
on autonomous cars and robotics. He
has recruited Gill Pratt, a top robotics
researcher, to run the institute, giving
him authority to hire hundreds of engi-
neers and scientists. At the same time,
Toyota is striking up partnerships with
49
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 BEST IN TECH
Stanford, the University of Michigan,
and MIT to rethink cars’ capabilities,
even if provocative new approaches
might take a decade or longer to show
up in dealer showrooms.
It’s clear that Toyota, like most
established carmakers, isn’t making
an all-out bid to match Google’s efforts
to build fully autonomous vehicles.
Instead, Toyota envisions drivers and
software sharing control for years to
come. Pratt is championing “guardian
angel” technology that could find the
best evasive strategies in an instant if
trouble looms.
Similarly, artificial-intelligence
researchers at Stanford who are work-
ing with Toyota are testing out inward-
Car technology’s long
adoption curve may give
Toyota the time it needs.
50
BIT_2016_TR_50 50
looking cameras that could help assess
drivers’ alertness. If drivers get drowsy
or stop paying attention to the road,
then automated safety systems could
help keep the car safe while nudging the
driver to get back on task.
As cars take on more and more tasks,
just how smart can they get? Fei-Fei Li,
a Stanford computer science professor
who is heading her department’s $25
million alliance with Toyota, says her
team is applying a wide range of AI tech-
niques to driving-related challenges. As
she cheerfully acknowledges, “Our work
might be relevant to the cars of 2018, or
2028, or anywhere in between.”
One area of interest: defensive driv-
ing. Is it possible to teach a car’s soft-
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Toyota is testing
a “Teammate
Concept” car that
could do some
highway driving on
its own by 2020.
ware to anticipate trouble that could
emerge from an obscured side street, a
wobbling bicycle, or an angry motorist
who is switching lanes in a dangerous
way? Teams of Stanford researchers are
testing out approaches. One initiative,
led by John Duchi, an assistant profes-
sor of statistics and electrical engineer-
ing, is starting with known hazards,
such as erratic bicyclists, and then try-
ing to build prediction software that
could make smart decisions in similar
situations. Another team, led by Li, is
relying on 3-D vision and pattern rec-
ognition to identify high-risk group-
ings. These include pedestrians staring
at smartphone screens, or children play-
ing catch near a roadside. Put a human
driver behind the wheel, and it’s easy to
distinguish an alert pedestrian from a
badly distracted one. Ask software and
sensors to be equally discerning, and
COURTESY OF TOYOTA
“it’s a very difficult research problem,”
Li says.
A few years ago, Li developed soft-
ware that could almost unfailingly iden-
10/18/16 5:18 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
tify objects in photos, even if they were
in odd poses or in front of confusing
backgrounds. Now she is building
on those techniques to analyze road-
way photos. Her goal: to ensure that
a car’s software can detect the differ-
ence between a pedestrian at the curb
making eye contact with drivers and a
pedestrian listening to music through
earbuds and gazing downward at a
smartphone.
Li’s group is also creating ways that
self-driving cars can share informa-
tion as instantaneously as possible. On
highways, for example, it should be
possible to safely compress the spac-
ing between cars, helping traffic flow
more smoothly, as long as vehicles at
the back of a convoy can be apprised
of any surprises that the front car has
already identified. Even in city traf-
fic, crashes could be avoided if cars
could instantly communicate with one
another about hazards that might be
invisible to one vehicle but easily rec-
ognizable from a different perspective.
Getting data
In 2012, when Google was testing Toy-
otas that it modified to drive them-
Inside the Teammate car. Toyota and its
research partners are trying to make driving
safer and more pleasant, but huge challenges
in artificial intelligence have to be worked out.
BIT_2016_TR_50.indd 51
selves, the automaker turned down an
offer from Google to coöperate on the
technology because it was reluctant
to share manufacturing know-how.
Google has instead taken steps toward
an alliance with Ford. Even as recently
as 2014, CEO Toyoda said he wasn’t
inclined to take autonomous technology
seriously until a self-driving car could
beat the best humans in a 24-hour test
on a top German racetrack.
By now, Google and several auto-
makers have built up large stockpiles
of video and sensor data from years of
testing autonomous cars and selling
models with some autonomous fea-
tures, such as lane-departure warnings
and blind-spot detection. Having less
information to feed into their machine-­
learning systems could put Toyota’s soft-
ware researchers at a disadvantage.
Both Pratt and Li have been calling
for car companies to share data from
autonomous vehicles in the belief that
pooled knowledge will help all com-
petitors make faster progress and gain
public trust. After all, self-driving cars
could be far safer. More than six million
motor-vehicle crashes take place each
year in the United States, killing about
BEST IN TECH
33,000 people. As much as 90 per-
cent of those accidents can be traced
to human error. Still, it’s unlikely that
data-rich companies will want to relin-
quish control of their own hard-won
knowledge that—for now, at least—
provides them with a competitive
edge.
Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the
General Motors/Carnegie Mellon
autonomous-driving lab, puts GM, Nis-
san, and the German Big Three (Daim-
ler, VW/Audi, and BMW) in the upper
echelon of global car companies mov-
ing toward some degree of autonomous
driving. “Toyota seems to be lagging
behind,” he says. “But with the creation
of its research institute, it might catch
up quickly.” One of Pratt’s first hires
at the institute was a former Google
robotics director, James Kuffner, as
chief technology officer.
In the university partnerships,
Toyota isn’t the only car company that
could benefit; other manufacturers will
eventually be able to consult published
findings, Li says. Still, while the pieces
come together, Toyota will enjoy special
access and collaboration. And car tech-
nology’s long adoption curve may give
Toyota the time it needs. Lots of battles
still lie ahead in winning regulatory
approval and customer loyalty, regard-
less of whose early technology is most
promising. History shows that break-
through technologies such as airbags
and advanced transmissions can take
20 years to gain mass acceptance after
their marketplace debut.
Toyota also figures to move faster
now that its boss has repudiated his ear-
lier doubts. In May the CEO urged all
his employees to embrace the “momen-
tous change” associated with auto-
mated driving and robotics. Such new
technologies will be as transformative
to the company, Toyoda vowed, as was
his own grandfather’s decision in 1930
to create a motor-car division within
what was then a small loom-making
company.
51
10/24/16 12:53 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Didi Chuxing
Jean Liu explains how her ride-hailing company bested Uber in China
and why data is its biggest asset.

By Christina Larson

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

In May, Apple announced that it was investing $1 billion in What role has data played in developing
your new services?
Didi Chuxing, China’s leading car-hailing service, shining a
When passengers want to go, they want
spotlight on the Beijing-based startup. Didi, which arranges to go in five minutes. We need to be fast
16 million rides a day in cities across mainland China, was and efficient. Analyzing that data, we
facing a rivalry with San Francisco–based Uber at the time. have a very good idea, in a particular
city, what demand will look like in 10
But Didi won the battle easily. Over the summer it acquired
minutes. Even before the 6 p.m. rush
the Chinese operations of Uber (which reportedly had been hour, we can dispatch drivers in partic-
losing $1 billion a year in its unsuccessful effort to get drivers ular directions. We can predict at 6 p.m.
and riders to use its service instead of Didi’s). In an interview on a Wednesday how many people will
[hail cars] from a particular workplace.
with writer Christina Larson, Didi’s president, Jean Liu,
The only way you can match the sup-
attributed her company’s edge to its use of data. In its four ply with the demand is to do intelligent
years of operation, the company has gathered information like dispatching and demand prediction.
common pickup points and destinations, peak demand times,
Uber has been known, in part, for fric-
and frequent routes in 400 different Chinese cities. It’s used
tion with its drivers. Does Didi face simi-
the data for predictive analysis and to create new products lar challenges or r­ esentments?
such as Didi Bus, a bus-booking service that’s become a We provide business opportunities to
popular alternative to crowded public buses. 14 million registered drivers. If you
count just the drivers whose major-
ity income comes from Didi, that’s 2.5
million on a monthly basis. We actually
help drivers increase their income by
increasing the efficiency of their routes.
Why did you come to join Didi two years cient way to find passengers]; private In Beijing, a lot of the private car driv-
ago from Goldman Sachs, where you car services [like the Uber model] with ers [who find customers via Didi’s app]
were a managing director? higher-, middle-, and lower-end [vehi- earn four times the minimum wage.
I was born and raised in Beijing. I love cles and prices]; a bus service. That resolves the fundamental issue
the city, and I also get stuck [in traffic] for the drivers.
in the city. I studied computer science
for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, What are your biggest challenges?
[but] I went into banking after gradua-
tion. I stayed in finance for about a
14 million At this stage, we spend a lot of time
talking about how to recruit and retain
dozen years. My last investment oppor- Number of registered top talent.
tunity was Didi. Didi drivers
What’s the story behind the recent
How has the company changed in those Apple investment, and how will Didi use
two years? The bus is like an expanded carpool the money?
When I joined, there was only one busi- shuttle service: instead of taking a pub- Both of us [Apple and Didi] are invested
ness line—that was the taxi [service]. lic bus with many stops, and maybe no in technology; it just seemed very intui-
But the opportunity is so much bigger seats left, and uncomfortable, we offer tive. Both have a big overlap in our cus-
than just taxi-hailing. It’s really a world- a shuttle-­like service with typically just tomers in China. We have some ideas.
class dilemma—how to move around one or two stops. All the seats on the bus But bear in mind, this is a speed date:
800 million urban Chinese. are prebooked. We can [use our years of we got to know them in late April. A lot
China has a lot of urban density, data] to determine popular origins and of things are still in discussion. Going
but the public transit system really lags destinations, where commuters are basi- forward, maybe we could use voice
behind. Today our product line includes cally making the same journey in the function [technology] from Apple; a
ADAM DEAN

hailing taxis [working with existing taxi morning. With the scale of this network, big percentage of our users are using
companies to give drivers a more effi- we can pull people together. iPhones.

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

24M
The startup’s cheaper way to
make lithium-ion batteries could
make it cost-effective to store
energy from renewable sources.

By Elizabeth Woyke
Photographs by Adam DeTour

ithium-ion batteries power

everything from smartphones
to electric vehicles. They’re
well suited to the job because they are
smaller and lighter, charge faster, and
last longer than other batteries. But
they are also complex and thus costly to
make, which has stymied mass adoption
of electric transportation and large-scale
energy storage.
Yet-Ming Chiang thinks his startup
24M has the answer. The key is a semi-
solid electrode. In a conventional
lithium-­ion battery, many thin layers of
electrodes are stacked or rolled together
to produce a cell. “Lithium-ion batteries
are the only product I know of besides
baklava where you stack so many thin
layers to build up volume,” says Chiang,
who is a cofounder and chief scientist at
24M as well as a professor of materials
science at MIT. “Our goal is to make a
lithium-ion battery through the simplest
process possible.”

24M uses these batteries, which

are packaged in laminated
aluminum, as R&D prototypes.

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 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Chiang’s innovation, which was

1 2
developed in his MIT lab, is an electrode
formed by mixing powders with a liq-
uid electrolyte to make a gooey slurry.
The design enables 24M to increase the
amount of energy-storing material in a
battery and give it 15 to 25 percent more
capacity than conventional lithium-ion
batteries of the same size.
The new design is also faster and
cheaper to make. Typical large facto-
ries for making lithium-ion batteries
cost about $100 million to build, in
part because specialized machines are
needed to coat, dry, cut, and compress
the electrode film. Since its semisolid 1 A technician analyzes the powder
3
electrode doesn’t require these steps, that will go into the slurry that will
24M says, its batteries could be pro- become the battery’s cathode. The
process involves mixing powdered
duced in one-fifth the time and in much
materials (lithium iron phosphate,
smaller plants. graphite) with a proprietary liquid
If its technology succeeds, 24M electrolyte.
could be among the first companies to
2–3 The semisolid electrode has a
reduce the cost of lithium-ion battery dough-like consistency and can be
cells to less than $100 per kilowatt-­ deformed without failing or catch-
hour, from $200 to $250 today. That ing on fire. The company claims
is the point at which electric cars this high “abuse tolerance” makes
its design the “safest lithium-ion
could compete on cost with internal-­
battery ever made.”
combustion vehicles.
To hit that target by 2020, 24M must
scale up from its existing pilot manufac-
4 This machine,
turing line in Cambridge, Massachu- developed in
setts, to high-volume fabrication. The 2014 as part of
company plans to build a factory in 2017, 24M’s pilot manu-
probably in partnership with a large facturing line,
makes the bat-
industrial company, and launch its first
tery’s anode and
product in early 2018. It hopes utilities cathode sepa-
will buy its batteries to store electricity rately, then com-
from wind and solar farms and deliver bines them into
power during peak-demand hours. one cell. The pro-
cess takes less
The company is also talking to
than two minutes.
electric-­vehicle makers, but it considers
EVs a secondary focus. It’s understand-
able that Chiang would tread carefully
in that market. A123 Systems, a battery
company he cofounded, filed for bank-
ruptcy protection in 2012 after spend-
ing too much money building big battery
plants to supply carmakers. In contrast,
Chiang says, 24M’s manufacturing tech-
nologies are designed to be modular and
4
more efficiently scaled up if necessary.

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

5 6 7

5–7 First the machine dispenses

8
pieces of foil. Next it applies slurry.
Then the machine adds the bat-
tery’s separator—porous plastic
that prevents electrical short cir-
cuits—and joins the anode with its
cathode mate. This creates a unit
cell, which contains everything the
battery needs to operate but lacks
its final packaging.

8 Unit cells are stacked to increase

battery capacity. Technicians then
weld the cells’ tabs together to
create a “stack cell” and vacuum-
seal it inside an aluminum pouch.
Welding and packaging are two of
the few processes that 24M has
not automated on its pilot line.

9 Batteries wait
9
before and after
testing. It only
takes a few hours
to go from raw
materials to bat-
teries ready for
testing, accord-
ing to 24M. In
a conventional
lithium-ion fac-
tory that process
would take about
a week. 7

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 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Bosch
An old-school manufacturer is building smart
factories to remain globally competitive.

By Russ Juskalian
Photographs by Laetitia Vancon

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
2 sary maintenance hours or even weeks
3
1 The Bosch factory, with the
4
Alps in the distance.
2 Inside the factory.
3 A manufacturing engineer,
Daniel Kirchmann, works on
the code for automatically
analyzing the performance of
assembly-line machines.
4 A sign reads “Industry 4.0,”
European shorthand for
advanced manufacturing.
BIT_2016_TR_50 61
BEST IN TECH
half-dozen young, mostly
A male engineers sit in a bright,
open office digging through a
mountain of code. Multi-monitor work
stations sit on desks strewn with lap-
tops, tablets, and headphones. This is
not a tech startup, however. It’s one
room in the Bosch automotive plant
near Immenstadt im Allgäu, Germany.
Today these factory workers are culling
immediate production inefficiencies and
developing systems that they hope will,
by 2017, allow the factory’s machines
to diagnose their own problems, order
replacement parts, and anticipate neces-
in advance.
Through a bank of large windows
opening from the computer room
onto the shop floor, row after row of
machines hum a percussive melody as
they turn out small parts—fuel injec-
tion nozzles, electronic safety control
systems, mechanical brake systems—
destined for car companies including
BMW, Volkswagen, and Tesla.
Atop each machine is a stoplight
showing its efficiency status, and large
overhead monitors nearby display real-
time production information. Opera-
tors with tablets tap into data being
captured by more than 100 sensors on
each machine. Managers see down-to-
the-minute values for everything from
electricity to compressed air. They can
break out individual machines, even
individual tools. Everything traceable
is tracked by RFID tags. The displays
show not just numbers in charts but also
visually accurate, cartoon-like images of
the actual machines and factory floor.
For Bosch there is an urgency to
making its already efficient production
system even more fully automated. With
275,000 employees around the world,
this 130-year-old producer of assembly-
line machines, refrigerators, and much
more must move toward connected
manufacturing to remain competitive.
High labor and energy costs make loca-
tions like this plant expensive to operate.
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 BEST IN TECH
It’s a shift executives say is every
bit as disruptive as last century’s mass-­
production revolution. Failing to keep
up would be like missing the change-
over from film to digital photography,
says Stefan Assmann, Bosch’s senior vice
president of connected industry. “Kodak
could be a warning for companies to
really do this transition,” he says. “The
main risk is not to work on [the tran-
sition], and to think that the good old
times will continue.”
Signs of the company’s efforts are
everywhere. Inside the cafeteria, the
cashiers have been replaced by RFID-
tagged plates and cups. Outside, robotic
mowers buzz the Bosch symbol—an
armature within a circle—into the grass
as they trim the lawn.
On the factory floor, productivity on
key assembly lines has increased 20 per-
cent per year since 2012. And by 2020,
Bosch estimates, technologies like con-
nected assembly lines, predictive main-
tenance, and machines with a certain
degrees of self-awareness will result in
$1.12 billion (1 billion euros) in addi-
tional sales, alongside a similar amount
in operational savings. “There’s only
one point,” says plant manager Rupert
Hoellbacher of the push to make this
and the other 10 Bosch plants he leads
leaner, more connected, and smarter:
“To make money.”
As we sit in a small conference room
at the factory, Hoellbacher explains that
the limits of conventional production,
even with robots on the assembly line,
are becoming evident. There’s only so
much you can squeeze out of a machine
when you need to measure and adjust
to minute variations in heat, cycle time,
or vibration frequency with a sensitiv-
ity and speed beyond what humans can
achieve.
To meet the company’s productivity
goals, whole assembly lines must moni-
tor themselves with software capable
of parsing complex data at supercom-
puter speeds in order to devise the most
efficient operating processes, anticipate
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
breakdowns, and prepare solutions.
Making that work smoothly will be a
big challenge, but already, most of the
machines in Hoellbacher’s factories are
connected and transmitting informa-
tion to Bosch’s data center in Stuttgart.
By the end of 2016 that will be
6,000 machines, at 11 plants, from
which data is collected by the second,
with each machine’s day summarized
and analyzed in a 20-page automated
report. Bosch has 250 factories around
the globe, and the company’s plan is to
introduce the same technology to all
5
of them.
On the plant floor, Arnd Kolleck,
who’s in charge of the IT effort, is talk- 6
ing about a Bosch product that offers a
glimpse a little further into the future:
iBooster. The device, which the com-
pany sells to automakers, adjusts the
braking pressure in regular brakes or
regenerative braking systems, which
are commonly used to convert kinetic
energy to power in hybrid or electric
vehicles. It can also build up brake
pressure without a driver’s input, antic-
ipating anything from a gentle slow-
down to an emergency stop before the
driver even thinks about stepping on 5 Monitors display information
the pedal. about the energy management
First produced in 2013, iBooster is of every machine in the plant.
installed in over 350,000 vehicles. Ear- 6 A worker on the final
lier this year it was updated with a new assembly line for two safety
feature that connects via the car’s Wi-Fi systems manufactured at
to a driver’s home network and sends the plant: automatic braking
diagnostic and braking details to Bosch. systems and electronic
stability ­programs.
Now “we know more about how and
when a driver brakes than the driver 7 Rupert Hoellbacher manages
does,” says Kolleck, before quickly 11 Bosch plants.
explaining that the data is aggregated 8 Machines finish fuel injection
and anonymous. nozzles.
Using this information, Bosch can
rapidly prototype new hardware and
software for future versions of iBooster
that better fit specific driver profiles
and client requirements. It can also
mine the data for other autonomous
driving applications or products—
including those used on its own fac-
tory floors, where robots that specialize
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11 12

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
9 10
9 The interior of
manufacturing machines on
the assembly line.
10 Ovens treat metal injection-
molded parts with heat.
11 Goods are automatically
scanned when they pass
this RFID gate.
12 A board shows current
performance on the shop
floor.
BIT_2016_TR_50 65
in parts delivery and production will
increasingly move around on their own
and interact in close physical proximity
with human workers.
“What we will learn in inner-city
traffic we can also realize … for inter-
logistics in a factory,” says Assmann.
With knowledge derived by adding sen-
sor technologies to cars and collecting
the resulting data, “we can make robots
have eyes, ears, and feelings.”
Assmann has ambitions for this data
even beyond Bosch’s internal applica-
tions. Increasingly, he says, the company
will sell its know-how in logistics, data
processing, and manufacturing as a ser-
vice to others.
BEST IN TECH
Two challenges loom over Bosch’s
smart-factory project and these broader
ambitions. The first is finding enough
workers with the skills to run increas-
ingly data-driven manufacturing sys-
tems. The second will be creating
industry standards so such systems will
be able to work together.
The financial stakes are far too high
to let either of these obstacles get in
the way of progress, however. In Ger-
many, labor and energy costs are up, and
increased automation and efficiency are
how businesses like Bosch will stay prof-
itable in the future. As Assmann puts
it, embracing connected industry isn’t
optional—“it is a must.”
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 BEST IN TECH
35
Innovators
under 35
The people in our 16th annual celebration of
young innovators are disrupters and dreamers.
They’re inquisitive and persistent, inspired and
inspiring. No matter whether they’re pursuing
medical breakthroughs, refashioning energy
technologies, making computers more useful,
or engineering cooler electronic devices—and
regardless of whether they are heading startups,
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
working in big companies, or doing research in
academic labs—they all are poised to be leaders in
their fields.
Hundreds of people were nominated for this
group. After MIT Technology Review’s editors
narrowed the list, outside judges evaluated the
quality and potential impact of the finalists’ work,
guiding the selections you’ll find here.
10/24/16 12:05 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Judges
Polina Anikeeva
Assistant Professor of Materials
Science and Engineering, MIT
Zhenan Bao
Professor of Chemical
Engineering, Stanford University
Emily Cole
Chief Science Officer, Liquid Light
JUSTIN TSUCALAS, RC RIVERA, DAMIEN MALONEY, DAMIEN MALONEY, TIMOTHY O’CONNELL
David Berry
General Partner, Flagship Ventures
Edward Boyden
Co-director, MIT Center for
Neurobiological Engineering
Yet-Ming Chiang
Professor of Materials Science
and Engineering, MIT
James Collins
Professor of Medical Engineering
and Science, MIT
NEXT YEAR Suggest candidates for the 2017 list at technologyreview.com/nominate
BIT_2016_TR_35 67
BEST IN TECH
John Dabiri Rana el Kaliouby Rachel Sheinbein
Professor of Civil & Environmental CEO, Affectiva Managing Director,
Engineering and Mechanical Makeda Capital
Engineering, Stanford University Jennifer Lewis
Professor of Biologically Inspired Leila Takayama
David Fattal Engineering, Harvard University Acting Associate Professor of
CEO, Leia Psychology, UC Santa Cruz
Hao Li
Tanuja Ganu CEO, Pinscreen; Assistant Jennifer West
Cofounder, DataGlen Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Engineering,
University of Southern California Duke University
Javier García-Martínez
Director, Molecular Carmichael Roberts Jackie Yi-Ru Ying
Nanotechnology Laboratory, Entrepreneur and General Partner, Executive Director, Institute
University of Alicante, Spain North Bridge Venture Partners of Bioengineering and
Nanotechnology, Singapore
Julia Greer John Rogers
Professor of Materials Science Professor of Chemistry and Ben Zhao
and Mechanics, Caltech Materials Science & Engineering, Professor of Computer Science,
University of Illinois UC Santa Barbara
Christine Hendon
Assistant Professor of Electrical Umar Saif Daphne Zohar
Engineering, Columbia University Vice Chancellor, Information CEO, PureTech
Technology University, Punjab
Eric Horvitz
Managing Director,
Microsoft Research
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Visionaries
By looking at things a bit differently from everyone else,
they find powerful new uses of technology.
Featuring

Jean Yang / Evan Spiegel / Nora Ayanian / Maithilee Kunda /

Kevin Esvelt / Jonathan Downey

Jean Yang
Carnegie Mellon University
Why don’t computers
keep our personal data
secure by default?
When programmers create a
feature for an app or a website,
even something as simple as
a calendar, they should code
in protections so the personal
information that the feature
needs to access—such as your
location—doesn’t slip out onto
the Internet. Needless to say,
they sometimes fail, leaving
our data to be exploited by
hackers. “Just like there are
many ways to sink a boat,” says
Jean Yang, “there are many
ways to leak information.”
That’s why Yang created
Jeeves, a programming lan-
guage with privacy baked in.
With Jeeves, developers don’t
“Just like there cally. “It is a double hull for
information leaks,” Yang says.
are many ways She has uploaded the
to sink a boat, code to open-source libraries
for anyone to use. And this
there are many fall she begins as an assistant
ways to leak professor of computer science
information.” at Carnegie Mellon, where
she can try to get her ideas to
necessarily have to scrub per- spread further. “Giving people
sonal information from their tools to create technology is
features, because Yang’s code incredibly empowering,” she
essentially does it automati- says. —Patrick Doyle

At the center of Snapchat—the disappearing-
photo social network valued at $20 billion, used
by 150 million people—sits an exotic-car-driving,
engaged-to-a-supermodel 26-year-old genius.
Or jerk. Or both—it’s hard to tell. Evan Spiegel
is kind of a recluse. The guy behind this new
media empire follows only about 50 people on
the mobile app he helped create. (One of them
is the magician David Blaine.) He declined to
speak to me, which is fitting, because what
Snapchat is, what Spiegel understands bet-
Evan Spiegel ter than anyone, might be the opposite of
Snapchat an interview with a magazine.  tisers that publish snaps in dedicated chan-
The cofounder of Snapchat is often compared to Facebook,
Snapchat figured out and Spiegel to Mark Zuckerberg. Which makes
that people wanted sense, especially since Facebook tried to buy
LEONARD GRECO; STEVE JENNINGS/GET T Y
send them to your friends. Snapchat, Spiegel
has said, is based on the idea that “ephemeral
should be the default.” 
In its six years of existence—an epoch in
startup time—the company has outlasted rivals
like Poke and Ansa and Gryphn and Vidburn
and Clipchat and Efemr (I swear I’m not mak-
ing these up) and Wink and Blink and Frankly
and (I promise you) Burn Note and Glimpse
and Wickr. It reaches 41 percent of U.S. 18-
to 34-year-olds every day and generates
revenue from media companies and adver-
nels. What did Snapchat do right that others
didn’t? One thing you immediately notice upon
downloading the app is how much it requires of

something different from
social media.
Snapchat for $3 billion before releasing its own
knockoff versions that promptly fell into irrel-
evance. And both founders are college drop-
outs (Spiegel from Stanford, Zuckerberg from
Harvard). But Facebook is a company built on
making your personal data public and deliv-
ering targeted ads; the whole point of Snap-
chat is to delete your images or videos after you
you. You can’t just sit back and watch—you, too,
must snap. The home screen practically begs
you to take a picture or shoot a video. Photog-
raphy once was all about capturing a moment
forever; Spiegel’s great insight was that now
the best way to make people pay attention is to
capture that moment, share it, and watch as it
disappears. —Ryan Bradley

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Nora Ayanian
University of Southern California

To build better machines, a roboticist goes

far outside her field for guidance.

Nora Ayanian calls robots people. It’s not some weird affecta-
tion; it helps her with her work.
She’s a computer scientist who thinks machines should
work together to get things done. Let’s say a farmer wants to
have drones autonomously survey crops and take soil samples.
You couldn’t program each drone with the same set of com-
mands, because each would have a different task and would
have to solve different problems as it navigated. You know
what is good at solving problems on the fly, in a group that
draws on various skills from different individuals? People. 
So Ayanian studies robot coördination by studying people.
One way is by having groups of humans play a simple video
game that limits their senses and stifles communication. They
need to figure out how to do “something meaningful” together,
as she puts it, such as arranging their on-screen figures into a
circle. Ayanian watches how people coöperate on such tasks
with as little information as possible. 
Why not just create a dictator
Distributed robot—one machine that sees the
and diverse whole field and directs other drones?
teams are Well, Ayanian counters, what hap-
pens when the dictator robot runs
always out of power? Or crashes? Distrib-
better at uted and diverse teams, she says, are
always better at problem-solving,
problem- once they learn to work together.
solving. —Ryan Bradley

“My research began in graduate school
when I was working on artificial-intelli-
gence systems and read Thinking in Pic-
tures by Temple Grandin, a professor of
animal science who talks about how her
do amazing things because of her visual
thinking abilities, it seemed to me that
the same should be true of AI systems.
“I’ve been taking what we learn from
people on the autism spectrum who

DAMON CASAREZ; COURTESY OF MAITHILEE KUNDA; LEONARD GRECO

autism gives her this unique visual way
of thinking compared to most people.
“I thought: That’s interesting. Most AI
systems are not ‘visual thinkers’ like her.
Maithilee Kunda Most AI systems use variables, numbers,
lists, and so on, and they reason using
Vanderbilt University
mathematical and logical operations.
People on the autism These systems are ‘verbal thinkers.’
spectrum are inspiring her What if you had an AI system that used
novel approach to creating data made up entirely of images and
artificial intelligence. reasoned only using visual operations,
like rotating images around or combining
images together? If Temple Grandin can
have interesting visual abilities and build-
ing that into AI systems. It’s early, but I
expect that they ultimately will be very
valuable. If we want to help students
learn to solve difficult problems, then we
ought to have several AI tutors that can
show students different ways of solv-
ing the same problem. If we want to help
doctors find patterns of disease out-
breaks, then we ought to have multiple
AI analysts that can sift through the data
using different styles of pattern finding.”
—as told to David Talbot

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Kevin Esvelt His Job What’s at Stake His Solution

Works at MIT’s Media Wiping out ­mosquitoes, He’s designed safer
MIT
Lab to develop ways and maybe malaria. gene drives that can be
A scientist who of influencing how “Unimaginable controlled.
is developing ­ecosystems evolve. amounts of suffering
new gene-editing occur in the wild, and The Reviews
techniques also The Back Story evolution doesn’t care,” Raising awareness
warns of their Visited the Galápagos he says. about the potential
Islands at age 10. “I threats of gene drives
potential.
knew evolution would The Dilemma is “a home run for
impact what I wanted Are gene drives ­bio­security,” says the
to do.” safe enough to ever FBI.
use in the open,
His Burning Issue or will they have Hobbies
Gene drives, a new ­dangerous ­unintended Risky ones. Unicycling
technology that could ­consequences? and hang-gliding.
be used to quickly
spread traits among Esvelt’s Take —Antonio Regalado
wild creatures such as No gene drive able
mosquitoes. to spread globally
should be released, he
argues. Or even tested.
­Scientists need to
­disclose their plans.

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Jonathan Downey Airware has raised more

Airware than $70 million in venture
capital to make it easy for
The creator of control software for companies to do things
drones has foreseen the advantages with drones.
of autonomous aircraft for years.

2002– As an engineering and computer sci-

2006 ence student at MIT, Downey starts
a group that builds drones and com-
petes against other colleges.

2005– While working for Boeing, he devel-

2010 ops flight-control software for an
autonomous helicopter funded by
the Pentagon.

2011 Founds a startup called Airware

out of frustration with what he calls
“inflexible and costly” autopilot sys-
tems for unmanned aircraft that
made it hard to add new capabilities.
Also spends five months flying tour-
ists in a turboprop plane between
Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.

2012 Airware ships its first control soft-

ware to drone manufacturers.

2014 General Electric invests in Airware,

saying drones could help make it
safer and cheaper to maintain indus-
trial equipment such as power lines.

2015 Airware launches several products

intended to help big companies
use drones. For instance, software
designed by former game develop-
ers lets companies take aerial pho-
tos of sprawling facilities as easily
as you would click on a map. State
Farm uses Airware’s technology to
inspect roofs after weather damage.

2016 U.S. regulators remove rules that had

tightly limited what companies could
do with drones, clearing a path for
many more companies to use Air-
ware’s services.

2025 An industry group, the Association

for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, pre-
dicts commercial drones will have
created $80 billion in business value
DAMIEN MALONEY

and 100,000 jobs by this time. “We

will not be able to imagine doing our
jobs without them,” says Downey.
—Tom Simonite

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Inventors
These innovators are building the stuff of the future, from
a smart sweatband to tomorrow’s memory technology.
Featuring

Alex Hegyi / Evan Macosko / Wei Gao / Muyinatu Lediju Bell /

Adam Bry / Kendra Kuhl / Desmond Loke / Jiawei Gu / Dinesh Bharadia

Alex Hegyi
PARC

A new type of camera could let

smartphones find counterfeit drugs or
spot the ripest peach.

No matter how good your smartphone camera is,

Hegyi’s prototype is a modified
USB camera. Software lets him
it can show you only a fraction of the detail Alex
Hegyi can with the one he’s built at Xerox’s PARC
in Palo Alto, California. That’s because Hegyi’s cam-
era also records parts of the spectrum of light that
you can’t see.
Since Hegyi’s camera logs a wider range of wave-
lengths, it can be used for everything from check-
ing produce at the grocery store (fruits increasingly
absorb certain wavelengths as they ripen) to spotting
counterfeit drugs (the real ones reflect a distinctive
pattern). In the near future, Hegyi hopes, his technol-
ogy can be added to smartphone cameras, so anyone
can make and use apps that harness so-called hyper-
spectral imaging.
Such systems have been around for years, but
they have been big and expensive, limiting them to
non-consumer applications like surveillance and
quality control for food and drugs. His version,
which is much simpler and more compact, relies on
a black-and-white USB camera. He adds a liquid
crystal cell, set between polarizing filters, in front
of its image sensor. He also created software, which
he runs on a connected tablet computer, to process
the images.
Three to five years from now, Hegyi thinks, your
phone could be revealing information that isn’t
available in the visible spectrum of light. With such
a tool, he says, “consumers themselves don’t have to
DAMIEN MALONEY

look at images in a new light,

revealing novel details. know anything about wavelengths—they can take a
picture and the display can say ‘counterfeit’ or ‘real.’”
Or it might say the peach is ripe. —Rachel Metz

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Hegyi’s
camera
records
parts of the
spectrum
that you
can’t see.

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 BEST IN TECH
Evan Macosko
Harvard Medical School
A breakthrough in
probing how cells create
complex tissues and
organs.
Problem
To truly understand the human
genome, we need better insight
into how individual cells differ. While
every cell in a person’s body has
basically the same DNA blueprint,
there’s great variation in the way that
genetic information is actually acted
on, or expressed, at any given time.
It’s the reason one cell becomes a
neuron that plays a role in memory,
while another cell becomes part
of a person’s toenail. Even a given
organ, like the brain, encompasses
different types of cells, and individ-
ual cell types, too, have variations.
Inadequate knowledge about how
genes are expressed in different
cells is greatly hampering progress in
genomic medicine.
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Solution
Evan Macosko has helped invent a tech-
nology called Drop-Seq, which allows
a researcher to look at thousands of
cells, one by one, to determine how
each is carrying out its genetic instruc-
tions. Such analysis of a single cell can
be done with existing tools, but it is typi-
cally painstaking, expensive work that
involves dropping individual cells into
tiny wells. “If you get two cells in a well,
you’re screwed,” says Macosko.
To greatly speed up the process,
Macosko figured out how to take each
cell he wanted to analyze, break it apart,
and attach the expressed genes to a
tiny bar-coded bead. Once material from
each cell is labeled, the genes can be
analyzed rapidly—all for a cost of just
seven cents a cell.
Macosko says he and his team have
nearly finished profiling hundreds of
thousands of cells spanning most of the
mouse brain. Next stop: the 86 billion
neurons and innumerable other cells that
make up the human brain. By analyz-
ing the great variation in the cells in our
brains, he hopes to identify the rogue
cells that are malfunctioning or interfer-
ing with normal function in disorders like
schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s.
—Michael Reilly
Wei Gao
University of California, Berkeley
The engineer has built
sweatbands that monitor
your health.
“I grew up in a small village in
Xuzhou, China. When I was a
child I saw a lot of people around
me dying of different diseases.
Many people don’t realize there’s
a problem until it’s too late. I
thought, in the future I should
design a wearable electronic device
to monitor health and tell us
what’s going on and what’s going
wrong before it gets bad.
“Our body is generating data
all the time. There are so many
wearable devices now—the Apple
watch, the Fitbit—but they mainly
track physical activities or vital
signs. They can’t provide informa-
tion at the molecular level.
“It came into my mind: what
about sweat?”
This year, Gao made a sweat-
band that combines sensors with
electronic processors and a Blue-
tooth transmitter on a flexible
printed circuit board. If you wear
the band, it wirelessly transmits
data about what’s in your sweat to
a cell phone running an app.
Gao’s device has sensors that
interact with chemicals includ-
ing glucose and lactate, causing a
detectable change in their electri-
cal current. Other sensors change
their voltage in response to sodium
or potassium. A recent addition
includes sensors that can pick up
on toxic heavy metals excreted in
the sweat.
The challenge now is to figure
out whether and how these mea-
surements correspond to mean-
ingful changes in health. So Gao
is working with exercise physiolo-
gists on clinical studies to look for
LEONARD GRECO
correlations that will help spot
signs of trouble before it’s too late.
—Katherine Bourzac
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“Our body is
generating data
all the time ...
It came into
my mind: what
about sweat?”
DAMIEN MALONEY

Gao wears his sweatband,

which uses sensors on a
flexible circuit board.

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Her imaging
solution could
particularly help
people who are
obese, because
fat tissue
can distort
ultrasound
waves.

JUSTIN TSUCALAS

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Muyinatu
“At the company I cofounded, ­Skydio, capable of
Lediju Bell we looked at all the things people more. It shows
Johns Hopkins University wanted to do with drones and realized up in the way
that the products are primitive com- it behaves and
Creating clearer imaging
pared to what’s possible. Today the typ- responds in different
to spot cancer earlier ical consumer experience is you take it situations.
and more accurately. out of the box and run it into a tree. “We aren’t saying a lot about our
“We’re building a drone for consum- product yet, but it’ll be a high-end con-
ers that understands the physical world, sumer device smart enough to fly itself
When biomedical engineer
reacts to you intelligently, and can use as well as or better than an expert pilot.
­Muyinatu Lediju Bell was an that information to make decisions. It Devices that understand the world and
undergraduate at MIT, her has cameras positioned in a way so that can respond to you and take actions
mother died of breast cancer. computer vision can track its motion will open up things that don’t exist
Bell thought her mother might and understand the 3-D structure of the today. A flying camera that can be any-
have survived if she had been world. It also understands ‘This is a per- where around you would be a very pow-
diagnosed sooner, so she decided son,’ ‘This is a tree.’ We’ve demonstrated erful thing. Drones are likely to be the
to investigate what makes some the ability to fly autonomously in close first widely deployed category of mobile
ultrasound images blurry, a proximity to obstacles such as trees robot. As they start to get out into the
safely and reliably, and to follow some- world and people start to interact with
problem that limits a doctor’s
one walking, running, or cycling. them, it’s going to lead to some inter-
ability to screen for and diagnose
“On a week-to-week basis you can esting places.”
cancer and other diseases.
see the thing getting smarter and being —as told to Tom Simonite
As a doctoral candidate at
Duke University, Bell developed
and patented a novel signal pro-
cessing technique that produces
clearer ultrasound images in real
time. The solution could particu- Adam Bry
Skydio
larly help diagnose problems in
people who are obese, because Building drones that
fat tissue can scatter and distort can navigate the world
ultrasound waves, delaying the and serve as airborne
detection of a serious disease. assistants.
“I think it’s unfair that a long-
standing technology does not
serve a huge group of people that
should be able to benefit from it,”
she says.
Beyond ultrasound, Bell is
now working to improve another
type of noninvasive medical
imaging technique. Called pho-
toacoustic imaging, it uses a
combination of light and sound
to produce images of tissues in
the body. She is especially inter-
ested in using it for real-time
visualization of blood vessels
during neurosurgeries to lower
the risk of accidental harm to the
carotid artery, which supplies
blood to the brain. Her lab at
DAMIEN MALONEY

Johns Hopkins plans to launch a

pilot study of the technology in
patients in 2017. —Emily Mullin

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 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Kendra Kuhl
Opus 12

She developed a simple reactor

to turn carbon dioxide into useful
chemicals.

Growing up in rural Montana, K ­ endra
Kuhl watched the namesake ice formations
of nearby Glacier National Park shrink.
“We could see global warming happening,”
she says. The sight drove her professional
ambitions. “I liked the idea of putting
atoms together in new ways that are poten-
tially friendly to the environment,” she says.
That’s just what Kuhl hopes to do
through the startup she cofounded in 2014.
Opus 12 is working on a reactor that will
take the carbon dioxide emitted by power
plants and make useful chemicals from it.
At Cyclotron Road, a startup incubator
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labo-
ratory, Kuhl shows off one of Opus 12’s
prototypes, a small reactor with an input
for carbon dioxide and an output spigot
connected to an instrument that analyzes
the products. The key to the technology is
the design of the reactor, which incorpo- Kendra Kuhl’s reactor
rates a family of catalysts she collaborated uses novel catalytic
nanoparticles (black
on during her graduate work at Stanford
square in the bottom
University. Sandwiched inside the metal photos). The reactor
reactor chamber is an electrode that uses a (bottom, far right)
membrane coated with the catalysts. They has inputs for carbon
enable the carbon reactions to occur at low dioxide and outputs for
the chemicals.
temperature and pressure, without requir-
ing large amounts of energy.
Opus 12 is not the first company to
work on converting carbon dioxide into
widely used chemicals. But its improved
catalysts and scalable reactor design set the
company apart, says Kuhl. Still, the com-
pany has far to go before it can begin com-
peting with traditional chemical suppliers.
By the end of 2017, Opus 12 plans to build
a reactor with a stack of electrodes that
can produce several kilograms of product
a day. —Katherine Bourzac

The urgency is increasing as created a version of phase-change

Desmond Loke
Singapore University of
Technology and Design
Throw away your RAM and
flash drive. Here’s a better
Moore’s Law, which for so long gov-
erned the blistering pace at which
silicon transistors shrank, begins to
peter out. If we can’t fit many more
transistors on a RAM chip, we need
to find a fast, cheap new nonvolatile
memory technology that can store
vast amounts of data.
One promising alternative to
the combination of RAM and flash
is phase-change materials. This
new type of memory stores data not
by turning electric current on and
off in transistors but by switching a
memory that is as fast as RAM
chips and packs in many times
more storage capacity than flash
drives.
For years, researchers have been
unable to get the speed at which a
material changes from an orderly
crystal to amorphous glass—the 1
and 0 states—any faster than about
50 nanoseconds, whereas RAM
chips take less than a nanosec-
ond to switch transistors on or off.
But by applying a small, constant
charge to the material, Loke found
WINNI WINTERMEYER; COURTESY OF DESMOND LOKE

type of memory.
Computer designers have long
desired a universal memory tech-
nology to replace the combination of
RAM—which is fast but expensive
and volatile, meaning it requires a
power supply to retain stored infor-
mation—and flash, which is non-
volatile but relatively slow.
type of material called chalcogen-
ide glass between amorphous and
crystalline states. Potentially, it is
fast like RAM and nonvolatile like
flash. Since 2010, Desmond Loke
and his colleagues have solved sev-
eral critical problems holding up its
commercialization.
As a result of the advances,
the Singapore researcher has now
he could reduce switching time
to half a nanosecond. He and his
coworkers also reduced the size of a
memory-cell bit to just a few nano-
meters. And he figured out how to
vastly reduce power consumption
and allow cells to be stacked in
three dimensions to pack in even
more memory capacity.
—Michael Reilly

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

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 BEST IN TECH
Jiawei Gu
Baidu
The AI expert designs
interfaces that let
technology assist rather
than annoy.
When we meet at a café in Bei-
jing’s 798 Art District, a creative
hub in China’s capital, Jiawei Gu
has turned off the notification pings
from Tencent’s WeChat, China’s
ubiquitous messaging app, on his
smartphone. When he glances
quickly to check the screen, he has
“more than 17,000 unread mes-
sages.” The way we interact with
information technology is broken,
he says. “I don’t want to be captive
for checking buzzes,” Gu says.
Gu is Baidu’s go-to engineer for
designing better models of “human-
computer interaction.” One exam-
ple, DuLight, is an AI interface that
helps blind or vision-impaired peo-
ple. A camera mounted on a head-
set or a user’s phone can scan bills,
train schedules, labels on boxes,
or just about anything; the objects
or words are then identified, using
deep-­learning algorithms and the
processor on a mobile phone, and
translated into speech that the user
hears through an earpiece. “The
facial recognition function is also
getting really good,” says Gu.
Gu’s vision of the future is one
in which people can enjoy the ben-
efits of technology without being
captive to cords and notification
buzzes. “I want to bring humans
back to an unplugged age,” he says.
—Christina Larson
82
BIT_2016_TR_35 82
Dinesh Bharadia
MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory
A seemingly impossible radio
design will double wireless data
capabilities.
Dinesh Bharadia invented a telecom-
munications technology that everyone
said would never work: he found a way to
simultaneously transmit and receive data
on the same frequency.
Because the signal from broadcasting
a radio transmission can be 100 billion
times louder than the receiving one, it
was always assumed that outgoing sig-
nals would invariably drown out incom-
ing ones. That’s why radios typically send
and receive on different frequencies or
rapidly alternate between transmitting
and receiving. “Even textbooks kind of
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
His radio could
be a godsend
for telecom
companies and
consumers.
assumed it was impossible,” Bharadia
says.
Bharadia developed hardware and
software that selectively cancel the far
louder outgoing transmission so that a
radio can decipher the incoming mes-
sage. The creation of the first full-duplex
radio, which eventually could be incorpo-
rated into cell phones, should effectively
double available wireless bandwidth by
simply using it twice. That would be a
godsend for telecom companies and con-
sumers alike.
Bharadia took a leave of absence
COURTESY OF JIAWEI GU; ADAM DETOUR
from his PhD studies at Stanford so he
could commercialize the radio through
the startup Kumu Networks. Germany-
based Deutsche Telekom began testing it
last year, but since Bharadia’s prototype
circuit board is too large to fit in a phone,
it will be up to other engineers to minia-
turize it. —Ryan Cross
10/18/16 5:24 PM
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 BEST IN TECH
Entrepreneurs
Meet seven people who hope to turn innovations into
disruptive businesses.
Featuring
Ari Roisman / Stephanie Lampkin / Christine Ho / Meron Gribetz /
Samay Kohli / Heather Bowerman / Kelly Gardner
Ari Roisman
Glide
Why the future of communication
could be on your wrist.
Ari Roisman clearly covets human con-
nection. Minutes after meeting me, the
32-year-old CEO of Glide gladly settles
into a conversation about the role of Juda-
ism in his life and how he gave up a prom-
ising career in clean energy to move to
Jerusalem. “My entire consciousness of this
world is that it is a gift,” he says, intently.
Since 2012, Roisman has been striving
to create a more human alternative to text
messaging. Rather than typing short mes-
sages on tiny smartphone keys, sometimes
adding emojis in a desperate stab to impart
84
BIT_2016_TR_35 84
nonverbal emotion, you can use Glide’s app
to send video messages with a single button
push. To illustrate, Roisman shows a Glide
message he sent to his mother, featuring
his daughter singing at a kindergarten
event with the seriousness of a brain sur-
geon. Mom quickly responded with a video
of herself laughing at the performance. “If
we’re going to be glued to these devices, at
least we should be connected in a way that
is more authentic,” he says.
A few million people are using Glide,
he says, but that’s a pittance in social net-
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Roisman believes video
messaging will flourish on
watches, whose screens
are too tiny for typing.
working, especially as Instagram and
Facebook pour millions into their own
video-messaging plans. Glide laid off 25
percent of its staff this spring.
Roisman says he scaled back on mar-
keting and customer service to ensure his
startup’s staying power. He wants the com-
pany to focus on a technology he says will
make visual messaging the primary mode
of communication: the smart watch. He is
DAMIEN MALONEY
convinced that having a small screen just
a wrist away will do for video messaging
what the PC did for e-mail. —Peter Burrows
10/24/16 12:05 PM
 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

When Stephanie Lampkin

Stephanie Lampkin applied for an analytics job at
Blendoor a major tech company, she was
offered a position in sales instead.
She sees a way to make Silicon To her, this was evidence of bias;
Valley’s workforce look more she had a degree in management
like the rest of society. science and engineering from
Stanford and had held other engi-
neering positions. Whether or not
her race or gender played a role
(she is African-American), there’s
evidence that recruiters often
make initial judgments that have
little to do with qualifications.
A 2014 study concluded that
a foreign-sounding name on a
résumé could hurt the applicant’s
chances of even get-
ting an interview.
So Lampkin
declined the sales job
and sat down to code
Blendoor, a job-search
platform that hides the
candidates’ names and
photos during the initial
stages of the process. So
far more than 5,000 peo-
ple have signed up, and
the platform is being used
by recruiters at Twitter,
Airbnb, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft, and Intel.
Lampkin hopes Blendoor
chips away at the lack of
diversity in Silicon Valley.
“We’ve identified the greatest
need with large tech compa-
nies,” she says. But while early
users tend to be women and
minorities, she says, “we want
this to become a de facto
recruiting tool for everyone.”
—David Talbot
TIMOTHY O’CONNELL

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 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Christine Ho
Imprint Energy

Her startup is commercializing

thin, flexible, printable batteries
that she developed at UC
Berkeley.

You say we’ll want Imprint Energy’s

zinc batteries for wearable electronics,
health-monitoring patches, and small
sensors. Why can’t we put existing bat-
teries into such devices?
A lot of these batteries need a lot of plas-
tic housing or metal housing. They need
protective circuitry. Because you’re doing
everything you can to tame a very, very
wild and reactive system. What’s inter-
esting about Imprint’s approach is we’re
using an inherently more stable chemis-
try that doesn’t need that hermetic seal-
ing. [That results in] the packaging being
much more simplistic and thinner. What’s
nice about zinc batteries is the materi-
als are really cost-effective and easy to
acquire. They’re also nontoxic.

Why isn’t zinc already widely used to

power electronics?
There’s usually a very nasty corrosive
electrolyte used [with it]. Especially for
on-body applications, you don’t want
to put in something nasty like that. The
other thing is, zinc is not traditionally a
rechargeable system.

How did you get around those issues?

Ho says devices
Batteries are stacked; they look like a
using Imprint Energy’s stacked sandwich. The middle layer, like
batteries could the jelly in the jelly sandwich, is called
appear by 2018. The the electrolyte. What I realized was that
company is working
if we eliminated that and replaced it with
with manufacturers
­to screen-print
something that is stable with the zinc sys-
batteries on sheets tem and rechargeable, we could open up
like this one. a whole new market space. I looked at
lots of different materials, literally throw-
ing everything in a bucket and hoping
that it worked. We started to get some
really interesting results with one of these
material sets we were looking at. We could
TIMOTHY O’CONNELL

basically take this material and cast it into

a solid film. So you could cut it, you could
stretch it and whatnot, but inside it had
ions that moved. —Rachel Metz

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Meron Gribetz
Meta
An augmented-reality
dreamer tries to turn his
vision into a business.
Meron Gribetz has a hard time
sitting down when he’s talking
about his augmented-reality
startup, Meta. Grinning, he
stands or paces as he explains
that he had always wanted
to create a way to bring digi-
tal information into the real
world to make it easier to
absorb. Then in 2011, sunlight
shimmering through an air-
plane window hit the lens of
DAMIEN MALONEY
BIT_2016_TR_35 87
his sunglasses and made him
realize how he would do it.
Since then, he’s managed
to raise $73 million in fund-
ing to go up against rivals like
Microsoft and its HoloLens
device. Why the excitement?
This year, Gribetz unveiled
the company’s latest headset,
the Meta 2, which sells for
less than a third of what the
HoloLens headset is going
for. It lets you do things like
grab and prod 3-D imagery
with your hands, or conduct a
video call with another Meta
user, who can hand you a vir-
tual object that you can then
inspect from any angle.
$949
PRICE OF THE META 2
Both the Meta and the
­ oloLens are aimed at soft-
H so deeply in AR’s promise, in
ware developers, who will
have to come up with appli-
cations. But Gribetz, who was
raised in Israel by American
parents, is aggressively opti-
mistic about the technology
because he thinks it will let
us ditch devices like laptops,
smartphones, and tablets for
BEST IN TECH
one super-mobile package.
Within five years, he imagines,
AR headsets will be reduced to
a strip of glass over your eyes
that’s “nearly invisible.”
Meta is building software
meant to be more intuitive
to navigate than windows
and icons. Gribetz believes
fact, that he’s pushing his own
employees to stop using com-
puter monitors and mouses
with their laptops by next
spring; instead, the company
will rely on Meta 2 and its
hand-tracking capabilities to
help them get their work done.
—Rachel Metz
Gribetz models the Meta 2
headset, which weighs about
a pound and a half.
87
10/18/16 5:24 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Two of GreyOrange’s
Butler robots, which
are designed to be
warehouse workhorses.

Samay Kohli nologies developed by Samay even larger after Amazon

Kohli and his team at the bought the warehouse auto-
GreyOrange

Look out, Amazon: after

greasing the wheels
of India’s e-commerce
boom, this executive eyes
overseas expansion.
Homegrown e-commerce
companies in India are slash-
ing prices and delivery times
as they battle to serve the
country’s burgeoning middle
class. Many of these compa-
nies are able to do it because of
warehouse automation tech-
robotics firm GreyOrange.
GreyOrange sells swarms
of “Butler” robots, which store
products and bring shelves to
human workers, and “Sorters,”
which automatically scan and
sort packages of any size or
shape. The company boasts 92
percent of India’s warehouse
automation market, a sector
that Kohli thinks “can become
humongous.”
With offices in Hong Kong
and Singapore, the company
isn’t content serving India
25%
PORTION OF
GREYORANGE’S
REVENUE THAT GOES
TO R&D
alone. It plans to expand into
the Middle East and China
this year, and within two years
Kohli expects to be exporting
warehouse robots to Europe.
He hopes to get a first-mover
advantage over other robot-
ics startups chasing the same
opportunity—one that became
mation company Kiva Sys-
tems in 2012 and brought its
technology in house rather
than selling it to Amazon’s
e-­commerce rivals.
Kohli and his cofounder
Akash Gupta launched the
company in 2011, after devel-
oping, while in college, what
they believe to be India’s first
humanoid robot. Seeing Chi-
na’s e-commerce boom, they
spotted “an industry ripe for
disruption,” says Kohli.
—Edd Gent

Problem
“There are significant differences in the
ways that men and women experience
many diseases and drugs, and until this
problem is solved, women will be forced to
make do with therapies that may be of lim-
Solution
Bowerman is CEO of a startup, Dot Labo-
ratories, that is developing a cheap and
easy way to test female sex hormone lev-
els and track them online. A patient spits
into a tube at specific times and mails the COURTESY OF SAMAY KOHLI ; COURTESY OF HEATHER BOWERMAN

ited benefit,” says Heather Bowerman.
For example, hormones cause plaque
to form differently in the arteries of men
and women. Yet drugs to treat cardiovas-
cular disease are tested disproportionately
on men, and as one consequence, their
death rates from that illness are declining
Heather Bowerman faster than women’s. Detailed hormonal
Dot Laboratories data could help doctors tailor drugs and
treatment regimens so that they work bet-
Cheap hormone tests could begin ter for women.
to address gender disparities in
health care.
tubes to Dot Laboratories. The company
then delivers data on hormone levels in an
app for the woman or her doctor to review.
It’s still in a beta test; the company plans to
publish data on the efficacy of its methods
and release the diagnostic product in 2017.
Developing more drugs that take hor-
monal changes into account will take time.
Even so, Anula Jayasuriya, a doctor who
invests in life sciences companies, says
such tests will help end the “sex bias in
basic research and clinical medicine.”
—David Talbot

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM BEST IN TECH

Your company makes a test that

can measure protein levels in sin-
“Life sciences gle cells. Why is this important?
startups can Proteins are the functional molecules
of the cell. Measuring them is vital to
be incredibly understanding and targeting disease.
expensive. We But they’re much more challenging
did it with only to measure than DNA because they
can’t be amplified—you have to mea-
$1.8 million.” sure the molecules that are actually
in the cell.
Measuring proteins in single cells
could help us understand a tumor.
Are all the cells in a tumor going to
be targeted by a drug, or do some of
them lack the drug target? Which
cells will metastasize?

Who uses your test?

Right now we’re focused on the
research market. Before we started
our product development, we
interviewed over 100 biomedical
researchers to find out what appli-
cations people were interested in,
and designed our hardware to meet
that need.

You say you followed the “lean

startup” model, which comes from
the software industry. Why did you
adopt it?
You see a lot of academic publica-
tions that are innovative, but they
never make it out of the lab. One bar-
rier is the willingness of investors to
fund early-stage biotech companies.
Life sciences startups can be incred-
ibly expensive. We did it with only
$1.8 million in private and public
funding and seven employees. We
were acquired by ProteinSimple [a
division of a public company called
Bio-Techne] in March 2016, after
two and a half years.

Are you already antsy to start

another company?
I’m an entrepreneur at heart,
Kelly Gardner and in the Bay Area it’s hard not
TIMOTHY O’CONNELL

Zephyrus Biosciences
This bioengineer figured out how
to handle a key challenge facing
biotech startups.
to be distracted by shiny things.
But it’s important for me to make
sure this technology is successful.
—Katherine Bourzac

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 MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
Pioneers
Pushing the edge of science, these innovators are creating
new approaches to tackling technology challenges.
Featuring
Aleksandra Vojvodic / Jia Zhu / Yihui Zhang / Qing Cao /
Oriol Vinyals / Ying Diao / Vivian Ferry / Sergey Levine
Aleksandra
Vojvodic
University of Pennsylvania
A computation whiz
speeds up the search
for catalysts that will
make green chemistry
possible.
Using enzymes honed over
hundreds of millions of years
of evolution, plants readily
split water into oxygen and
hydrogen that’s used to fuel
metabolic reactions. Humans,
too, could use hydrogen as a
fuel and a way to store energy
from intermittent renewable
sources. But we don’t have mil-
lions of years to figure out how
to make practical catalysts.
Aleksandra Vojvodic uses
supercomputers to design new
RC RIVERA; COURTESY OF JIA ZHU
BIT_2016_TR_35 91
catalysts for water splitting
and other reactions. The idea
behind her work, she explains,
is to “circumvent the trial and
error of nature”—and of the
chemistry lab.
Splitting water requires
two catalysts, one for making
hydrogen and the other for
making oxygen. “The things
that work efficiently are usu-
ally rare or expensive,” says
Vojvodic. That’s where com-
putational chemistry comes
in. To predict the behavior
of a catalyst, Vojvodic makes
computer models that relate
a material’s functions to its
structure using the rules of
quantum mechanics. Chem-
ists know what functions
the catalyst needs to have,
and they know how different
kinds of atoms and structures
Jia Zhu
Nanjing University
What to do if there is no
clean water around.
Water is everywhere; safe
drinking water is not. So Jia
Zhu has created a thin metal
sheet capable of floating on
the surface of a body of water,
are likely to behave. Vojvod-
ic’s computer experiments, at
the SLAC National Accelera-
tor Lab, have yielded oxygen-­
producing catalysts that match
or outperform those made of
expensive materials.
Researchers have been
using powerful computers to
try to design better catalysts
for years, with varying degrees
The idea behind
her work, she
explains, is to
“circumvent the
trial and error
of nature”—
and of the
chemistry lab.
absorbing lots of sunlight and
using the energy to generate
steam that condenses into
clean water. “It only needs two
things. The first is water—no
matter what kind of water you
have—and the second is the
sun,” says Zhu.
The device could be used
to desalinate seawater or treat
polluted water: after the water
BEST IN TECH
of success. But today’s super-
computers are now capable
of doing much more complex
calculations. And Vojvodic has
been exceptionally talented at
taking advantage of computing
power; identifying new ways
to represent electronic proper-
ties, chemical structure, nano-
structure, and other properties
in mathematical calculations;
and writing programs to
carry them out. Working with
experimentalists, she and her
coworkers have recently made
extremely efficient water-
splitting catalysts that her
modeling work predicted. The
researchers are now eyeing
other catalysts, including ones
that can convert nitrogen and
other abundant molecules into
useful chemicals.
—Katherine Bourzac
is turned into steam, what’s
left are salts or solidified con-
taminants that can be easily
collected.
He also envisions other
ways to put the ingenious
apparatus to use. “The steam
doesn’t have to be condensed,”
he says, suggesting that it
could be used to produce
power. —Yiting Sun
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10/18/16 5:24 PM
 BEST IN TECH MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

Qing Cao
IBM Research

His inventions are helping IBM in its

decade-plus quest to replace silicon
transistors with more efficient carbon
nanotubes.

2001 IBM researchers devise a way

to produce arrays of carbon-­
nanotube transistors.

2002 IBM researchers show that nano-

tube transistors can carry more
than twice the electric current of
top-performing silicon transistor
prototypes. This is interpreted as
the first evidence that nanotubes
can outperform silicon transistors.

Using a macroscale
2006 The first integrated circuit using
model, Zhang a single carbon nanotube is built
shows off his at IBM.
clever trick for
making complex 2008 During his doctoral studies at the
nanostructures. University of Illinois, Qing Cao
invents a way to print circuits of
nanotubes on flexible plastic sub-
Yihui Zhang strates.
Tsinghua University
2013 At IBM, Cao develops a technique
Pop-up nanostructures make it far easier to that applies mechanical force to
fabricate very tiny shapes. push purified nanotubes in water
together into high-­density, neatly
Yihui Zhang likes to invite visitors to his office to stretch a piece of highly elas- ordered arrays.
tic silicone that has a soccer-ball-like structure attached to it. Once the silicone
is pulled taut from four corners, the three-dimensional structure becomes a 2015 Cao overcomes a fundamental
roadblock to commercially viable
two-dimensional pattern that looks like a wheel with many adjacent hexagons
nanotube transistors. He devises
and pentagons in the center. When the silicone is relaxed again, the flattened
a way to connect metal wires to
pattern pops back into its three-dimensional shape.
carbon nanotubes by welding
With this trick, Zhang has solved the challenge facing many researchers: metal atoms to the nanotubes’
how to fabricate complex three-dimensional nanoscale structures. Although ends.
the demonstration is done at the macro level, the idea works with nanostruc-
tures, too: easily created two-dimensional patterns can be attached to a sub- 2016 IBM incorporates carbon nano-
strate stretched taut and then buckled into tubes into its in-house semicon-
Easily created three-dimensional structures as the substrate is ductor research line to figure out
relaxed. This process works with a wide range how to refine and scale up the
two-dimensional of materials such as metals and polymers. technology.
patterns buckle The technique could be used to create
2020– IBM aims to have its nanotube
into three- nanostructures for a variety of uses. Ultimately,
2025 transistors ready to replace sili-
Zhang hopes to develop a database or algo-
dimensional rithm that allows researchers to easily map
con transistors. The company
estimates that nanotube tran-
structures as the three-dimensional structures they want sistors will perform two to three
GILLES SABRIE

onto two-dimensional precursors. “It’s a tool,”

the substrate he says. “People from different disciplines can
times better than silicon and
require half as much power.
relaxes. build their own innovations.” —Yiting Sun —Elizabeth Woyke

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Cao at IBM’s Watson Research

Center. At bottom right he holds a
silicon-based wafer with carbon-
nanotube devices.
JACKSON KRULE

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JESS KOHL

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Oriol Vinyals
Google DeepMind
Showing computers
how to learn might seem
like a game, but it’s also
serious business.
When he was 15 years old,
Oriol Vinyals became obsessed
with StarCraft, a video game
in which three factions vie for
control of the map—like chess
if it were played not only with
black and white pieces but also
with red ones. Vinyals soon
became the top-ranked player
in Spain. “I almost knew the
game would return later in my
life,” he says. “I was fascinated
by the artificial-intelligence
problems it presents.”
It was more than a decade
before Vinyals’s premoni-
tion came to pass. While he
was studying at UC Berkeley,
he helped to create an AI bot
that was able to play StarCraft
unassisted. The bot, forebod-
ingly dubbed Overmind, rep-
resented a triumph in machine
learning.
Later, while he was work-
ing on the Google AI team
creating new techniques for
language translation, inspira-
tion struck. Vinyals decided to
see whether a computer could
accurately write a descrip-
tion of an image. It’s a form of
translation, albeit from pixel
to caption. “I remember it
so well,” he says. “I changed
a single line of code: instead
of translating from French, I
changed my code to input an
image instead.” The next day,
Vinyals showed his program a
photograph of a busy market
stall, the ground beside it lit-
tered with bananas. The cap-
tion read: “A group of people
While he was standing in the market buying
fruits.” “It worked!” he recalls.
working on “It wasn’t just saying ‘People on
the Google AI the street.’ It was reading the
image with sophistication.” The
team, creating technology, now being incor-
new techniques porated into Google Image
for translation, Search, allows computers to
caption images and show them
inspiration to people who enter relevant
struck. search terms.
Vinyals and his coworkers
have developed a technology
now used in Gmail called Smart
Reply, which automatically sug-
gests short replies to e-mails.
And now, having joined the
team at Google DeepMind in
London, he has come full cir-
cle. There, he is working to cre-
ate computers that can teach
themselves how to play and win
complex games—not by hard-­
coding the rules but by enabling
them to learn from experience.
—Simon Parkin

A polymer
solar cell
printed on
glass.

Problem
Ying Diao Flexible solar cells that are cheap to make
University of Illinois could be “printed” on many surfaces, even
windows. But the polymers that would be
She knows how to print
required have so far been lackluster at con-
perfect plastic solar cells.
verting sunlight to electricity. One reason
is that unlike more efficient solar materials
such as crystalline silicon, polymer-based
SETH LOWE
Solution
Ying Diao is creating printing techniques
that bring order to the otherwise chaotic
assembly of plastic molecules. She has
made organic solar cells with double the
efficiency of previous ones. Diao came up
with a microscopic “comb” that controls
the flow of the molecules and lets them

materials have a messy molecular structure assemble into orderly structures during
that looks like cooked spaghetti. printing. —Ryan Cross

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Vivian Ferry If solar cells

University of Minnesota
could grab
She uses nanocrystals to more light,
trap light and increase the
efficiency of solar cells. they would
generate more
With her hands cloaked in electricity
aquamarine rubber gloves,
­Vivian Ferry, an assistant pro-
and make
fessor of chemical engineering solar power
and materials science, picks up a
cheaper.
lipstick-size test tube filled with
clear liquid. When she shines
UV light through the tube, its
contents turn a glowing shade of
fluorescent orange. Tiny crystals
suspended in the liquid explain
the vial’s fiery glow: they absorb
high-energy blue wavelengths
and emit lower-energy reds.
Existing solar cells tend to
absorb limited wavelengths of
light, letting most of the sun’s
energy pass through uncap-
tured. If solar cells could grab
more light, they would generate
more electricity and make solar
power even cheaper. So in addi-
tion to the luminescent crystals,
Ferry turned to tiny mirrors
made of nanostructured met-
als that can trap specific wave-
lengths and steer light toward
the solar cell.
For now, Ferry makes her
luminescent nanocrystals with
cadmium selenide and cadmium
sulfide, neither of which is ideal
since cadmium is a toxic metal.
But her improvements—and
subsequent drops in cost—stand
to become so significant that the
technology could still work well
using substances that are more
abundant and less toxic.
—Emily Sohn
HUNT AND CAPTURE

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Sergey Levine
University of California, Berkeley
He teaches robots to
watch and learn from
their own successes.
While serving a nine-month
stint at Google, Sergey Levine
watched as the company’s
AlphaGo program defeated
the world’s best human player
of the ancient Chinese game
Go in March 2016. Levine, a
robotics specialist at the Uni-
versity of California, Berke-
ley, admired the sophisticated
feat of machine learning but
couldn’t help focusing on a
DANIEL BERMAN
notable shortcoming of the
powerful Go-playing algo-
rithms. “They never picked up
BIT_2016_TR_35 97
any of the pieces themselves,”
he jokes.
One way that the creators
of AlphaGo trained the pro-
gram was by feeding 160,000
previous games of Go to a pow-
erful algorithm called a neural
network, much the way similar
algorithms have been shown
countless labeled pictures of
cats and dogs until they learn
to recognize the animals in
unlabeled photos. But this
technique isn’t easily applica-
ble to training a robotic arm.
So roboticists have instead
turned to a different tech-
nique: the scientist gives a
robot a goal, such as screwing
a cap onto a bottle, but relies
on the machine to figure out
the specifics itself. By attempt-
ing the task over and over, it
eventually attains the goal. But
the learning process requires
lots of attempts, and it doesn’t
work with difficult tasks.
Levine’s breakthrough was
to use the same kind of algo-
rithm that has gotten so good
at classifying images. After he
gives the robot some easy-to-
The robot
observes how
the data from
its vision system
maps to the
motor signals
of its hand.
BEST IN TECH
Sergey Levine has
demonstrated that his
algorithms can help
a robotic arm teach
itself how to manipulate
various objects.
solve versions of the task at
hand—instructing it to screw
on the cap, for example—the
robot then retrospectively
studies its own successes. It
observes how the data from
its vision system maps to the
motor signals of the robotic
hand doing the task cor-
rectly. The robot supervises
its own learning. “It’s reverse-­
engineering its own behavior,”
Levine says. It then can apply
that learning to related tasks.
With the AI technique,
previously insoluble robotics
tasks have suddenly become
approachable, thanks to the
massive increase in training
efficiency. Suddenly, robots are
getting a lot more clever.
—Andrew Rosenblum
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Humanitarians
They are taking unconventional routes to bring about a
healthier, cleaner, and more adaptable world.
Featuring

Sonia Vallabh / Ehsan Hoque / Ronaldo Tenório /

Jagdish Chaturvedi / Kelly Sanders

Sonia Vallabh
Broad Institute

A devastating personal diagnosis led her to

become a scientist on the trail of a cure.

Five years ago, Sonia Vallabh
graduated from Harvard Law
School and went to work at a
small consulting company. But
a stunning medical diagnosis
made her change course com-
pletely: she learned she has a
genetic mutation that causes a
deadly brain disease. Today she
and her husband work in a lab
at the Broad Institute of MIT
and Harvard and have pub-
lished research showing a pos-
sible pathway to a treatment. As
she told the tale at an event on
precision medicine with Presi-
dent Obama in February:
“At the heart of my story is a
single typo in my genome.
“We all carry around thou-
sands of typos in our DNA, most
of which don’t matter much to
our health—but my typo is an
unusually clear-cut case. It’s a
single change in a particular gene
that causes fatal genetic prion
disease, where patients can live
50 healthy years but then sud-
denly fall into deep dementia and
die within a year. And there’s no
just married my husband, Eric
Minikel. My mom, healthy at 51,
had single-handedly organized
our beautiful wedding. Then,
all of a sudden, we were watch-
ing her waste away before our
eyes. We had no name for what
we were seeing. It was only from
her autopsy that we learned
there was a 50 percent chance
I’d inherited the genetic muta-
tion that killed her.
“Knowing the
hard truth
has given us
a head start
against our
formidable
“We decided right away I’d
get tested. We wanted to know
what we were up against. After
months in agonizing limbo, a
geneticist confirmed our great-
est fear: The same change that
was found in your mother was
found in you.
“Knowing the hard truth has
given us a head start against our
formidable medical enemy. We
waged a campaign to educate
ourselves—taking night classes,
attending conferences, and even-
tually taking new jobs in research
labs. We retrained as scientists
by day and applied what we were
learning to understanding my
disease by night. Four years later,
we’re devoting our lives to devel-
oping therapeutics for my disease.
“We know the road ahead is
uncertain—no amount of hard
work can guarantee there will be
a treatment for me when I need
one. We are going to do every-
thing we can, hand in hand with
creative allies from every sector,
to build this bridge as we walk
across it and develop a treatment
LEONARD GRECO

treatment—at least, not yet. that could save my life, and the
“In 2010, I watched this medical lives of many others.”
disease unfold firsthand. I had enemy.” —Antonio Regalado

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Vallabh and
her husband,
Eric Minikel, in
the lab where
they are in a
race to solve
puzzles of
prion disease.

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 BEST IN TECH
Ehsan Hoque
University of Rochester
If you want to be the life
of the party, practice by
talking to a machine first.
A deaf person walks into a bar.
That isn’t the beginning of a
joke, but a potentially frustrat-
ing situation—unless the bar-
tender happens to know sign
language. That’s where Hand
Talk comes in. It translates
spoken words into sign lan-
guage that an avatar then con-
veys on a smartphone screen.
For now, Hand Talk can
only translate Portuguese
into Libras, the sign language
used in Brazil—the home of
the program’s creator, Ron-
100
BIT_2016_TR_35 100
Can computers teach us to be
our best selves? Ehsan Hoque,
a researcher at the University
of Rochester, believes so. He
has created two computer sys-
tems that train people to excel
in social settings.
One program has a virtual
businesswoman that can rec-
ognize your expressions and
statements so she can nod,
smile, and prompt you with
further questions as you chat
with her. At the end of the con-
versation she’ll give you feed-
back about your interpersonal
6 million
NUMBER OF MONTHLY
TRANSLATIONS ON
HAND TALK
aldo Tenório. But Brazil alone
has at least 10 million deaf
people, one million of whom
have downloaded Hand Talk’s
mobile app.
The users hold up their
smartphone to a hearing per-
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
performance, including your
body language, intonation,
and eye contact.
Hoque also designed a
pared-down mobile version,
free for anyone with Internet
access to use. There’s no ani-
mated character; instead, it
records video and sends you
a write-up about your social
skills, noting the speed of
your speech, the pitch and
loudness of your voice, the
intensity of your smiles, and
whether you overused certain
words.
A mobile app gives deaf people
a sign-language interpreter they
son, who sees a message on
the screen that says “Speak to
translate.” As soon as the per-
son starts talking, an animated
avatar named Hugo begins
signing.
Turning the audio into ani-
mations of gestures requires
laborious programming
because everything has to be
exactly right, all the way down
to Hugo’s facial expressions,
which also carry meaning in
sign language. Tenório and
his team feed their program
All of Hoque’s research
comes back to his brother, a
teenager with Down syndrome.
Hoque is his brother’s primary
caretaker and has seen how
difficult social interactions of
any kind can be for him, espe-
cially in school. But Hoque
hopes his tools will be useful
to all kinds of people—indi-
viduals with Asperger’s, cus-
tomer service representatives,
nervous students with looming
class presentations, or even just
someone gearing up for a date
or an interview. —Julia Sklar
Ronaldo Tenório
Hand Talk
can take anywhere.
thousands of example sen-
tences every month and match
them with 3-D animations of
sign language. They constantly
COURTESY OF EHSAN HOQUE; COURTESY OF RONALDO TENÓRIO
push these improvements out
through app updates.
Tenório plans to roll out
different versions of the ava-
tar in the future so users can
switch the gender or race
of their Hugo in an effort
to broaden the appeal and
accessibility of having a vir-
tual translator in one’s pocket.
—Julia Sklar
10/18/16 5:24 PM
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Jagdish Chaturvedi
InnAccel

This doctor can laugh about the

complex path he took to becoming
an innovator.

“I invented a low-cost ear, nose, and

throat—ENT—imaging device. So I
call myself the first ENTrepreneur!
Sorry—cheesy joke; I’m also an ama-
teur standup comedian. I love per-
forming. It’s how I de-stress. But I also
find comedy helps sharpen my obser-
vational skills.
“Those skills helped me invent
Entraview, which has helped 200,000
patients. As a trainee doctor I saw
many farmers with advanced throat
cancer. I discovered that expensive
imaging systems were only available
in major cities, so rural doctors relied
on outdated mirrors and headlamps.
I asked my boss why no one had
tried attaching endoscopes to small
off-the-shelf cameras. He said, ‘Why
don’t you?’
“Entraview was a big learning
curve for me. I worked with a design
firm but got too involved trying to cre-
ate a one-size-fits-all device. I’d nearly
exhausted my funds when my boss
said, ‘Go learn the right way to do this.’
“The Stanford-India Biodesign
program teaches Indian doctors and
engineers how to invent. Their pro-
cess showed me where I’d gone
wrong and gave me the connections
to arrange a pitch with Medtronic. We
simplified and focused on ears. Not
the original goal, but the path of least
resistance to market, and now the Top two images:
platform can evolve. Chaturvedi advises a
“I’ve since contributed to 18 patient’s relatives and
medical-­device inventions, and I’m now uses an early version
clinical lead at a med-tech incubator, of the Entraview to
InnAccel, where I help multiple start- examine a man’s ear
ups while still practicing medicine, to in Bangalore. Bottom:
keep me grounded with clinical needs. The prototype
attached to an off-
“India imports 75 percent of its
the-shelf camera.
medical tech. We have great inven-
tors, but most make the same mis-
takes because they don’t get the
SAMYUKTA LAKSMHI

innovation process. The first step is

finding the right team.”
—as told to Edd Gent

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Kelly Sanders
University of Southern California

A researcher in drought-ridden
California tries to better account
for the ways we use water.

Just about all power plants use water

in some way—primarily for cooling.
In fact, generating electricity accounts
for about 40 percent of all the fresh
water that is drawn from reservoirs,
rivers, and other surface sources in the
United States. Kelly Sanders, an assis-
tant professor of civil and environ-
mental engineering at the University
of Southern California, has developed
new methods of analyzing the complex
relationship of water and energy—and
is showing how both resources can be
managed more wisely.
Although power plants typically
return water to the source after it runs
through cooling systems, those with-
drawals and returns can be disruptive
to the environment. Many newer coal
and natural-gas plants reuse water in
their cooling systems so they do not
need to withdraw as much of it from
reservoirs and rivers, but in the pro-
cess they lose more water to evapora-
tion. And that means, as Sanders has
highlighted, that many newer plants
end up consuming more water overall.
She also looks carefully at the water
individual nuclear power plants use to
keep from overheating and causing a
meltdown. If the water source gets too
warm and must cool down before it
can be used, forcing the power station
to scale back production, are the costs
of the plant being miscalculated?
Having reframed how we mea-
sure water and energy usage, Sanders
is becoming influential in policy and
planning. She briefed Congress as it
considered the Nexus of Energy and
Water for Sustainability Act, which
takes initial steps to have the federal
government measure water usage
not just in gallons but also in units of
DAMON CASAREZ

energy. “We select our power based on

price,” she says, “but how do we define
what’s cheap?” —Ryan Bradley

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Sanders has
developed
better ways
of quantifying
the energy it
takes to supply
water—and
vice versa.

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30 Years Ago

Communication
Breakdown
A pair of experts mulled whether we’d
ever get machines to talk, let alone think.

Computers will not be first-rate teachers unless

researchers can solve four basic problems: how
to get machines to talk, to listen, to know, and
to coach. ‘We speak as part of our humanness,
instinctively, on the basis of past experience,’ wrote Pat-
rick Suppes of Stanford University, one of the pioneers in
computer-­aided instruction, in a 1966 Scientific American
article. ‘But to get a computer to talk appropriately, we need
an explicit theory of talking.’
Unfortunately, there is no such theory, and if our analy-
sis of human intelligence is correct, there never will be. The
same holds true for the problem of getting computers to listen.
Continuous speech recognition seems to be a skill that resists
decomposition into features and rules. What we hear does
not always correspond to the features of the sound stream.
Depending on the context and our expectations, we hear a
stream of sound as ‘I scream,’ or ‘ice cream.’ We assign the
space or pause in one of two places, although there is no pause
in the sound stream. One expert came up with a sentence that
illustrates the different ways we can hear the same stream of
sound: ‘It isn’t easy to wreck a nice beach.’ (Try reading that
sentence out loud.)
At this point the reader may reasonably ask: If computers
used as logic machines cannot attain the skill level of expert
human beings, then why doesn’t the public know that? The
answer is that AI researchers have a great deal at stake in
making it appear that their science and its engineering off-
spring are on solid ground. They will do whatever is required
to preserve this image.”

Excerpted from “Why Computers May Never Think like People,”

by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, brothers and coauthors of the book
Mind Over Machine, in the January 1986 issue of Technology
Review.

MIT Technology Review Best in Tech (ISSN 2474-6606), Reg. U.S. Library of Congress, is an MTR Special Publication published annually by MIT Technology Review, 1 Main Street, Suite 13, Cambridge, MA 02142-1517. Entire con-
tents ©2016. The editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Subscriptions to MIT Technology Review can be ordered at www.technologyreview.com.

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