Read Online Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff - Free Book Online
Authors: John Markoff
Ads: Link
attention for a variety of mobile robots. In 1998 at the Smithsonian in D.C., he showcased Minerva, a mobile museum tour guide that was connected to the Web and could interact with museum guests and travel up to three and a half miles per hour. He worked with Red Whittaker to send robots into mines, which relied heavily on SLAM techniques. Thrun also tried to integrate mobile and autonomous robots in nursing and elder-care settings, with little success. It turned out to be a humbling experience, which gave him a deep appreciation of the limitations of using technologies to solve human problems. In 2002, in a team effort between the two universities, Thrun pioneered a new flavor of SLAM that was dubbed FastSLAM, which could be used in real-world situations where it was necessary to locate thousands of objects. It was an early example of a new wave of artificial intelligence and robotics that increasingly relied on probabilistic statistical techniques rather than on rule-based inference.
At Stanford, Thrun would rise quickly to become director of the revitalized Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that had originally been created by John McCarthy in the 1960s. But he also quickly became frustrated by the fragmented life of an academic, dividing time between teaching, public speaking, grant writing, working on committees, doing research, and mentoring. In the wake of his 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge victory Thrun had also become more visible in high-technology circles. His talks described the mass atrocities committed by human drivers that resulted in more than one million killed and maimed each year globally. He personalized the story. A close friend had been killed in an automobile accident when Thrun was a high school student in his native Germany. Many people he was close to lost friends in accidents. More recently, a family member of a Stanford faculty secretary was crippled for life after a truck hit her car. In an instant she went from being a young girl full of life and possibility to someone whose life was forever impaired. Thrun’s change-the-world goals gave him a platform at places like the TED Conference.
After building two vehicles for the DARPA Challenge contests, he decided to leave Stanford. Page offered him the opportunity to do things at “Google scale,” which meant that his work would touch the entire world. He secretly set up a laboratory modeled vaguely on Xerox PARC, the legendary computer science laboratory that was the birthplace of the modern personal computer, early computer networks, and the laser printer, creating projects in autonomous cars and reinventing mobile computing. Among other projects, he helped launch Google Glass, which was an effort to build computing capabilities including vision and speech into ordinary glasses.
Unlike laboratories of the previous era that emphasized basic science, such as IBM Research and Bell Labs, Google’s X Lab was closer in style to PARC, which had been established to vault the copier giant, restyled “the Document Company,” into the computer industry—to compete directly with IBM. The X Lab was intended to push Google into new markets. Google felt secure in its Web search monopoly so, with a profit stream that by the end of 2013 was more than $1 billion a month, the search company funded ambitious R & D projects that might have nothing to do with the company’s core business. Google was famous for its 70-20-10 rule, which gave its engineers free time to pursue their own side projects. Employees are supposed to spend 10 percent of their time on projects entirely unrelated to the company’s core business. Its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page believed deeply in thinking big. They called their efforts “moon shots”: not pure science, but research projects that were hopefully destined to have commercial rather than purely scientific impact.
It was a perfect environment for Thrun. His first project in 2008 had been to create the company’s
At Stanford, Thrun would rise quickly to become director of the revitalized Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that had originally been created by John McCarthy in the 1960s. But he also quickly became frustrated by the fragmented life of an academic, dividing time between teaching, public speaking, grant writing, working on committees, doing research, and mentoring. In the wake of his 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge victory Thrun had also become more visible in high-technology circles. His talks described the mass atrocities committed by human drivers that resulted in more than one million killed and maimed each year globally. He personalized the story. A close friend had been killed in an automobile accident when Thrun was a high school student in his native Germany. Many people he was close to lost friends in accidents. More recently, a family member of a Stanford faculty secretary was crippled for life after a truck hit her car. In an instant she went from being a young girl full of life and possibility to someone whose life was forever impaired. Thrun’s change-the-world goals gave him a platform at places like the TED Conference.
After building two vehicles for the DARPA Challenge contests, he decided to leave Stanford. Page offered him the opportunity to do things at “Google scale,” which meant that his work would touch the entire world. He secretly set up a laboratory modeled vaguely on Xerox PARC, the legendary computer science laboratory that was the birthplace of the modern personal computer, early computer networks, and the laser printer, creating projects in autonomous cars and reinventing mobile computing. Among other projects, he helped launch Google Glass, which was an effort to build computing capabilities including vision and speech into ordinary glasses.
Unlike laboratories of the previous era that emphasized basic science, such as IBM Research and Bell Labs, Google’s X Lab was closer in style to PARC, which had been established to vault the copier giant, restyled “the Document Company,” into the computer industry—to compete directly with IBM. The X Lab was intended to push Google into new markets. Google felt secure in its Web search monopoly so, with a profit stream that by the end of 2013 was more than $1 billion a month, the search company funded ambitious R & D projects that might have nothing to do with the company’s core business. Google was famous for its 70-20-10 rule, which gave its engineers free time to pursue their own side projects. Employees are supposed to spend 10 percent of their time on projects entirely unrelated to the company’s core business. Its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page believed deeply in thinking big. They called their efforts “moon shots”: not pure science, but research projects that were hopefully destined to have commercial rather than purely scientific impact.
It was a perfect environment for Thrun. His first project in 2008 had been to create the company’s
Similar Books
