Blog : GE Global Research

$200 million open innovation challenge

Thomas Frey
Energy and Propulsion Technologies
Munich, Germany
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Last week, GE kicked off a $200 million open innovation challenge in Europe and I was lucky enough to get to sit in on the announcement and press event. GE and a number of partners are looking for breakthrough ideas to improve the Smart Grid and adopt the use of smart grid technologies. I personally think that this is an unique opportunity for GE to bring great ideas from the outside to within GE and that this will foster and stimulate further innovations. In my opinion, we can only achieve a massive penetration of renewables in the future with all the different facets of smart grid technologies.

Sitting in on the event, the most intriguing thing I heard was that GE is going to spend $200 million to partner with smaller companies, start-ups, inventors etc. to bring their ideas or technologies to life. I look forward to seeing great and innovative challenge submissions. Check out this video summary of the event posted to YouTube by EUX.TV — very exciting!

July 29th, 2010 | Global Research

TAGS: Munich, renewables, smart grid

Movie technology I’d like in real life

Ramasubramanian Sundararajan
Computing and Decision Sciences
Bangalore, India
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We go to the movies for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is vicarious wish fulfillment. For the more scientifically inclined among us, much of this aspect has to do with the cool gadgetry in the movies. It’s almost like a litmus test: which of the scenes in a Bond movie do you like best? The ones with Q or the myraid action sequences? If you fall into the former category, read on. Otherwise… well, humour me for a few minutes and read on anyway.

Much of the really cool stuff on display seems at first like science fiction. The flying car in The Absent-Minded Professor, the lightsaber in Star Wars, pretty much everything Bond has… However, it is interesting to see how many of these items have either become real, or aren’t far from it. The folks at Terrafugia, for instance, now have a flying car, even if its inner workings are a little more prosaic than a flubber-driven engine. The multi-touch interface in Minority Report no longer makes you gasp. (Jeff Han’s TED talk on surface computing, on the other hand, takes some getting over.) There’s an iPhone App that allows you to remotely control your car. Elsewhere on this site, there’s a truly engaging discussion on lightsaber technology.

Not everything is done yet, though. So here’s a wish list of things I’d like to see in reality:

The Batmobile. No brainer, I know. But what’s really cool is that it has a bike built into it that you could drive out when you’re stuck in traffic.
The computer in Iron Man. What I loved was the fact that when Tony Stark spoke to it, usually with his trademark sarcasm, it gave back as good as it got. Intelligent talking computers, I can imagine. But one with a dry sense of humour? Now that’s progress.
This one’s really from a book, but since it got made into a movie, it counts by my reckoning. The computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that spends seven and a half million years to compute the answer to the Great Question of Life, The Universe and Everything. With a faster processor and more RAM, I figure it could do wonders. (I figure I could put the hitchhiker’s guide itself on this list, but why deprive millions of locals of the entertainment they derive from clueless tourists?)
Again, a Hitchhiker’s Guide device. In that series, the Babelfish is a living being that you could insert into your ear and consequently understand any galactic language being spoken. I’m not sending any petitions to the J. Craig Venter Institute yet, but if someone could create such a device and make it understand programming languages as well… well, woohoo! doesn’t even begin to describe it.
The memory-wipe device in Men in Black. For those project reviews where you go in knowing you’ve spent a lot of money doing nothing.

Just as I would like to see things in the movies becoming real, I would like to see some reality injected into the movies, especially when it concerns computers. For instance, I’d dearly like to see a hacker debugging his code. Maybe five minutes of nail-biting tension while the hero’s sidekick (for some reason, the CompSci geeks are hardly ever the heroes) tries to figure out where he went wrong with memory allocations for his double pointers. I simply refuse to believe that they all get it right the first time around.

July 28th, 2010 | Computing & Decision Sciences

TAGS: cool stuff

Purdue talent at Global Research

Fernando DAmato
Electronic Systems And Controls
Niskayuna, NY USA
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I decided to post a short blog entry today because I wanted to share with you a link to an article you may not have seen unless you are a fellow Purdue Boilermaker such as myself! I graduated from Purdue in 2001 with a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics. I chose to go to Purdue because of its reputation as one of the a top Engineering Schools in the U.S. My education at Purdue provided a strong foundation in engineering principles and well as a thirst for innovation which are valuable tools in an industrial research environment like GE Global Research.

In the latest Purdue alumni magazine, one of my colleagues at GE Global Research was featured as one of the “Forty Under 40” young Boilermakers. Juan de Bedout, the Global Technology Leader, for the Power Conversion Systems technology organization earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. from Purdue and was selected to be a part of this featured group of alumni. Congratulations to Juan and the rest of the individuals recognized in the Purdue alumni magazine. Even if you aren’t a Purdue alumni, you might find the writeup interesting to learn the impact that you can have at GE at an early age.

Check out the article here.

July 27th, 2010 | Electronic Systems & Controls

TAGS: articles, Purdue

GE developing next generation of “thin-film” panels

All, just wanted to share a quick link to a video recently shot by Capital News 9 here in the local New York Capital Region. One of their reporters visited our thin film solar labs here in Niskayuna to talk to with Danielle Merfeld, our solar technology platform leader, about the work we are doing in thin-film.

As you may recall, we’re working in labs around the world to drive our efforts in thin-film solar technology. So this video doesn’t show you ALL of our solar labs but if you’d like to take a peak inside the doors of Niskayuna check it out! And if you want to learn more about our global work in solar, you can always refer back to my colleague in Bangalore, Kamala Raghavan’s blog entry “Shining the Light on Thin Film Solar” and the video slideshow that she posted.

http://capitalregion.ynn.com/content/headlines/511576/ge-developing-next-generation-of-solar–thin-film–panels/

July 26th, 2010 | Energy, Micro & Nano Structures

TAGS: renewables, solar

Stump the Scientist: Knots vs. Nautical MPH

The next “Stump the Scientist” question came from a reader who posted on his blog that he plays his own version of “stump the scientist” every week during Trivia Night at Junior’s (a local watering hole in Albany, NY). He challenged us to one of the science questions that stumped him in a recent week. As always, submit your questions in the comments or respond to us on Twitter @EdisonsDesk or with the hashtag #stumpthescientist!

Question from Edison’s Desk reader @NickFahrenkopf:

Here’s one from an “Science” category (and they can’t cheat by looking it up!) A knot is how many nautical miles per hour?

Well, Nick, here is our response: