After several iterations for editing the script and numerous organizational approvals, the date was set to do the recording. I was puzzled when the producer asked to block a five-hour period to complete shooting the raw material. When four team members with several large containers, lights and cameras showed up, I started to get really nervous. But the team was very professional, friendly and helpful, and the video recording ended after five hours with everybody exhausted but happy that it worked out OK.

The increased demand due to Insurance Reform, aging baby boomer population, and the limited supply of caregivers require a new way of thinking. I am happy that I was able to contribute to the GE Show highlighting the importance of managing hospitals more efficiently and providing care more safely though technology.

At the same time I feel uncomfortable that so many folks who contribute to the future state vision, the invention, and the development of these technologies are not recognized in this piece. This year only, about fifty GE Global Research researchers are involved in the technology development for improved hospital design, more effective management of  hospital capacity, and for assuring that patient care is delivered safely. At the same time, there are at least two-dozen GE Healthcare business leaders and employees who provide leadership and domain and technical support for these technologies. And, equally important, we have our validation partners like Yale, Tucson Medical Center, Calgary, Bassett, and Mount Sinai who help us better understand the “real-world” needs and test our technologies in their hospitals to make sure they are effective.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?)
4. 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.
5. 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.

It is a video of a restored Edison Electric car, located in our hometown of Schenectady, NY at the Edison Exploratorium.

It had a 26 volt GE Automobile Motor Patent 1889.

Here is the Charging Station (That is a slate circuit board!!!)

http://www.wvpubcast.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=14656

As well, you can visit the blog that the students used to document the trip:  www.wvusouthafrica.blogspot.com and an article from the WVU College of Business & Economics on the trip:  http://www.be.wvu.edu/news_events/africa_blog/index.htm

This is especially important in markets that will see ~20MM more insured patients placing demand on the existing hospital infrastructure. He indicated that real time location systems have been implemented before, however this was the first time with the help of the “rocket scientists” at the Research Center, to create a predictive model for capacity management.

Like a smart GPS, GE’s solution will integrate real-time positioning system information for patients with the other clinical process information and model future capacity bottlenecks utilizing the advance simulation modeling tool also developed at GE Global Research for hospital design and improvement It is expected that by 2011 the Gen I version of system will be operational at Mount Sinai hospital as the Alpha site to improve patient flow, reduce cost, and improve quality of the processes of care in their high census facility.

As Feynman presciently stated about the atomic scale, “there is plenty of room at the bottom” and communication is needed down there. There is a growing body of contributions from diverse fields that both leverages nanoscale properties and overcomes the communication barriers of the nanoscale environment. These include molecular motors, random carbon nanotube networks, calcium signaling, and quantum networking, to name but a few.  My book, Nanoscale Communication Networks focuses upon ad hoc communication networking at the nanoscale using all of these techniques and more.

It was fascinating to realize as I wrote this book that at the nanoscale, we are all interconnected in ways that many have never fully anticipated. The cells within our body must coordinate with one another to form a distinct human being; communication at the molecular and nanoscale enables this to take place. A single cell must coordinate its own organelles; and again, extremely small-scale communication takes place, some of it surprisingly mechanical in nature. Organisms can communicate with one another over surprisingly long distances at the nanoscale. How many of these techniques can we harness to enable human-engineered nanoscale communication; for example, to support nanorobotic communication and other rapidly advancing technologies? Characteristics of the communication channel at the nanoscale and molecular levels have been a key factor in the evolution of organisms and will be a key factor in enabling nanotechnology to advance.

I felt this book needed to be written because the applications are too significant and numerous to dismiss. One can imagine a human-engineered nanoscale in vivo Internet with the ability to communicate information to or from any area of the body, leveraging the body’s own signaling mechanisms,  in order to better diagnose and treat diseases directly at the subcellular level. Nanoscale in vivo communication has the potential to avoid the harmful and invasive approach today of implanting radiation emitting radios with the body.

I hope that you find the textbook useful and that it may inspire others to take this field far beyond this meager beginning. I am especially thankful to my many friends and colleagues at GE Global Research, with their diverse fields of expertise and talents in many different labs and technologies, for their encouragement and support.  I could not have put in the time and effort to accomplish this without their continued encouragement.

Here is a screen shot from Gapminder:

And here is one from a cool Google visualization site:

Because of this bottleneck, the amount of energy available at the “edge” has remained constant.  However, the amount of energy required to do basic sensing and computing is falling (relentlessly driven by Moore’s Law).  The lines that describe these phenomena are about to cross.  The dust is coming.  This New York Times article takes a very interesting look at the pace of this technology.  Very soon energy harvesting systems such as solar, vibration, thermal, and chemical systems will be capable of delivering enough energy to an edge sensing and computing system.  Nervous energy, potholes, body heat, even our own blood will power our edge computers.  The dust is indeed coming.

My question is: How will this fact change our lives?

Check out these videos of a Laser Cats themed video game that was put together by a few of my colleagues. These guys rock! They made a video game using a revolutionary new human interface device based on the WiiMote developed in part by Johnny Chung Lee.

Here is a “behind-the-scenes” of how they did it:

The laser cats video from this weekend’s SNL is below:

I spend my time developing systems that enable decisions. A classic information systems question that gets a lot of attention is “What’s happening?” “What’s happening with my stocks, “where is the next big Xbox sale going to be?” The answer to this question is the engine that drives the Internet today. The systems we develop comprise advanced computing platforms (The Brain), telecommunications networks (Cell, Satellite, Micro-Networks), and advanced decisioning architectures. These systems enable us to answer the next questions “What do we do next?” How many of our daily decisions can we offload to our machines (toothpaste, next TV show to watch, how do I get to the museum from here)? And more importantly, what are the decisions that we need to think hard about, the critical ones that we need to make for ourselves? How we answer these questions will affect how our world will be shaped over the next century and perhaps far beyond.

I recently learned about the DARPA Network Challenge and definitely thought that the whole concept was very interesting. A brief summary of the challenge is that 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons will be placed in random locations throughout the U.S. on Saturday. The first person to track down the exact locations of all 10 balloons and submit them to the DARPA Web site wins (and not a bad prize of $40,000!). The rest is up to you.

The DARPA Network Challenge Web site states that this is a competition that “will explore the roles of Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.”

Working in an area that I call social network science, the scope of this competition and the results that this may turn up are intriguing to me as well. I’m looking forward to watching how everything goes down!

The contest was announced in late October and there has already been a lot of buzz on the Internet. Using some of the free services out there, I found that the most recent 500 posts were made by 375 different websites. While one popular search engine reports there are nearly 500,000 posts with the terms “darpa”, “network” and “balloon” in them, a deeper diver reveals the number is probably closer to 14,000. There are a wide variety of sites posting on this story, from news sites like cnn.com and huffingtonpost.com, to defense sites like defensedaily.com, aggregators like digg.com, science sites like scientificamerican.com, to social networking sites like facebook.com, and to university sites like Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. There were even some sites put together just for the competition to either host teams and gather information or to take advantage of possible search engine traffic.

There are some interesting teams forming (found here). For example, see the pay structure from this team for recommending people and finding balloons at http://balloon.media.mit.edu/.

Good luck to all participants!

Last week was TECHfest, our annual internal event that allows my colleagues and I to put together posters and demonstrations that showcase the technologies and research initiatives we are working on across all scientific disciplines. It was a pretty exciting week for me, since I was involved with a demonstration of one of my group’s Social Network Science initiatives called ‘Buzz TECHfest’.

For this demo, we showed how organizations within Global Research and technologies were ‘connected’ using real-time network visualizations, term/tag clouds, various line charts, and technology groups. At our TECHfest table, we asked each person who stopped by to enter their organization name and what cool technologies they had already seen at TECHfest. We also had a Web site set up where employees could enter the same information from their own computers.

Based on their input, we recommended other organizations to check out as well as other technologies they may be interested in. We obtained inputs from employees at our global locations in New York, Shanghai, Munich, and Bangalore. All in all, close to 200 people participated. With no system crashes or visualization problems, the ‘Buzz TECHfest’ demonstration was a success!

Some of the top ‘cool’ technologies Global Research scientists entered into our TECHfest demonstration were Pulse Detonation Engine, Smart Grid, the GE Brain, the Biotic Man, Imaging, electric car and solar. From this set of technologies, it was interesting to see how distributed the different organizations’ opinions were across those tech areas (at Global Research we are broken up internally into different organizations based on technology focus areas). Smart Grid was mentioned by almost every organization since it has so many aspects where technology from different disciplines will be vital. Also, it was interesting to see how the different technologies were connected by the attendees’ interests. For people who study technology and social networks, these connections capture the knowledge of an organization that can be used to organize and manage information as well as suggest new intersections to explore. For example, one strong cluster of ‘interest’ was the GE Brain, RFID technologies, Services and the Electric Car – may be something interesting to explore! Perhaps we’ll start work on an electric car with artificial intelligence that we track with sensors while it performs repairs to another machine!

Presha and I made a conscious decision to make this book accessible to students and young professionals – a group that does a lot of reading, is socially conscious, and is often looking for ways to get personally involved in something that matters. The result is that we have mixed in a lot of personal stories – of folks impacted by AIDS who we met on our journeys – with the facts and conclusions. Hopefully, it does not come across as a “research” book, although it certainly is one. This decision also required us to seek alternative outlets for the more technical aspects of the research, such as quantifying the uncertainty in published HIV infection models, including those published by UNAIDS, the AIDS relief organization sponsored by the United Nations.

These models are typically published with little mention of their statistical uncertainty, or with estimates that are unrealistically low due to consideration of only a small subset of the actual sources of uncertainty. Organizations allocating money to combat AIDS may take the outputs of these models at face value, however, without understanding the implications of their uncertainty. The natural result is that billions of dollars of financial aid could be reallocated based on ‘noise’ in the models. The research I conducted with Harry Ma, also of the Applied Statistics Lab at GE Global Research, indicates that the actual model uncertainty is consistently higher than published values. Harry and I presented these results at the 2008 Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver (sponsored by the American Statistical Association [ASA]), and I presented them at the 2008 ISBIS meetings of the International Statistical Institute held in Prague.

Harry and I were delighted that ASA President-Elect Sally Morton attended our session in Denver, as well as Steve Pierson, Director of Science Policy for ASA. During the Q&A session, they encouraged more statisticians to get involved in this type of activity, and suggested the formation of a statistical counterpart to the well-known medical organization Doctors Without Borders. Such as group, Statisticians Without Borders (OK, I admit that statisticians are not particularly creative at marketing!), has since been launched. I have joined the group, and will be attending their meeting next week at the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington DC.

Relative to the book, Presha and I were particularly pleased that Dr. Helga Holst, CEO of McCord Hospital in Durban, South Africa, agreed to write the foreword. McCord is one of the leading hospitals in the world for addressing HIV – about half of their patients are HIV-positive, and they have ongoing collaborations with both the Medical School and the School of Public Health at Harvard. Helga gave us a tour of their facilities when we visited McCord during my sabbatical, and we have kept in touch since.

In summary, I want to thank GE again for giving me this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Link to the book website: www.hoerlneidermeyer.com.

Link to the publisher’s site, where it is available: www.xlibris.com/usewhatyouhave.html. Note, at the time of this writing, the book is only available on the publisher’s website, but it will soon be available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble, hopefully by mid-August.

As you know, the majority of the hospitals today face tough challenges in the delivery of care. Emergency Room waiting times can be excessive. Patient stays in the hospital are often long. And with the expected demand increase due to baby boomers and continued staff shortages and constrained budgets, hospitals are looking for innovative ways to improve theprocesses of care.

At the Research Center, we are partnering with GE Healthcare and some key thought leaders in the industry to develop new technologies that will help hospitals provide better care more consistently and more profitably.

Smart Room is the next generation in GE’s research program to help improve patient safety. This system is like a “guardian angel,” helping care providers avoid the things that can lead to hospital acquired conditions such as infection rates and falls. Our guardian angel in this case is GE technology. It is a unique integration of GE’s latest clinical workflow, artificial intelligence based reasoning, and various sensor technologies. The system will provide real-time monitoring capability and reminders for protocol adherence to assure patient safety. The system will also be able to capture key information for process improvement and education.

As part of GE’s Healthymagination initiative, we are very excited to be a part of the innovations such as Smart Room that will improve patient safety, reduce cost, and increase access for healthcare.

Cypher: The Matrix? Yeah.

Neo: Do you always look at it encoded?

Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head. Hey, you a… want a drink?’ — The Matrix

There are 6 billion people in the world. Every one of us is generating and consuming information at ever increasing rates. In contrast there are trillions of objects, both real and virtual, creating and consuming orders of magnitudes more information; sensors, automobiles, factories, websites, search engines, grocery stores, the list is nearly endless. To survive, we must connect to the cyber world in a way that humans can deal with. We must teach our machines to serve us.

Over the past decade the world has labeled, identified (RFID, UID), and integrated (Internet, SAT communication, GPRS, WiFi/WiMAX, Bluetooth, Zigbee) billions of physical objects into complex and dynamic systems. As ubiquitous sensors and microprocessors proliferate, the torrent of data has begun to overwhelm traditional IT structures. In 2007, the size of the digital universe (the amount of information created, captured, and replicated) surpassed the amount of physical storage available on the planet. Information is a commodity that we pay money to get, pay money to maintain, and pay money to get rid of. Many of us paid to buy our local newspaper yesterday, only to have to pay someone to remove it today. This enormous amount of available information, specifically because of its distributed and time sensitive nature, poses large problems but even larger opportunities.

One system designed to leverage the pervasive availability of information is the GE Brain. The GE Brain is a mobile, low cost sensing, processing, and communication hub that will serve as a platform for an artificially conscious distributed decisioning network. It has enormous processing and network capability for its small form factor and is a hardware and software interface between the cyber and physical worlds. Its wired interface is dynamically and plastically configurable to enable it to operate in a large number of environments connected to a variety of sensors and intelligent devices. The communications modules allow it to participate in many wireless networks simultaneously and seamlessly while the application processor and digital signal processors enable collection and distribution of knowledge. These attributes give the GE Brain a situational and contextual self-awareness that enables real time decisioning without constant direct oversight and it does this at the edge of the network eliminating the need for central control.

This intense link between the computational and physical worlds will differentiate this type of Cyber Physical System from traditional embedded systems and drive the development of intelligent, distributed, decisioning systems into the objects of everyday life. Everything from children’s toys, to automobiles, to wind turbines will have elements of pervasive decisioning systems embedded within them and these systems will engage the human race, and our creations, in new and extraordinary ways.

AgileTrac uses real-time technology to keep track of people and medical devices. The system gathers location data, which is fed into a system that produces next steps, status updates and notifications as patients and devices move through the facility.

My colleagues and I are developing a sophisticated “Hospital Operations Early Warning System” leveraging the real-time information from the AgileTrac system. Similar to a smart GPS system that warns drivers of upcoming traffic and suggests alternative routes, our sophisticated technology will help hospitals forecast potential bed or staff shortages before they occur and suggest actions that could mitigate these problems in advance. In this video, I discuss some of this innovative technology and how GE is working to develop “Hospitals of the Future” each and every day.

I work in the Prediction Algorithms Lab at the John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore, India. This week I participated in a GE Money-sponsored symposium on microfinance in London, as part of FINCA International’s launch in the UK, FINCA has been a key player in the microfinance world for almost 25 years, providing financial services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs, particularly women. FINCA is also GE Money’s partner under the Banking on Womenâ„¢ program, which seeks to empower the world’s women with financial knowledge, entrepreneurial training and access to microfinancing opportunities through its unique partnership with FINCA.

At the symposium, titled “Microfinance-Collaborating for Change”, I shared the results of a research pilot our team has been working on. We are collaborating with microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India, trying to infuse operational excellence into their loan process through innovative technology. Currently, we are conducting a research pilot with Ajiwika, a small MFI operating in rural Eastern India. The majority of their customers are women from remote villages living in extreme poverty. Similar to other MFIs like FINCA, their operations can be divided at three levels: field operations, operations at the branch and HQ operations. We selected one problem from each of these operations for our first phase of the research pilot:

1. The field operation constitutes two parts: one where the agents talk to potential customers, arrange awareness sessions for them and form groups. The other part is where the agents conduct transactions, answer customer queries regarding their existing loans, like “Current outstanding, Next due date”, etc. We designed and deployed a low-cost customized device to help the agents perform these activities in a more efficient and error-free way. With the use of this device in the pilot, the efficiency of the agents has increased by around 150% and they can now take care of more groups.

2. Operations at the branch: The branch manager (BM) needs to appraise loan applications. The appraisal process here differs from that of a bank because the information provided might not be as sophisticated as that of a regular banking customer. Contrary to the instant appraisal and loan disbursement process of a regular bank, the process in the MFI is manual and a bit more time-consuming. So we asked ourselves, can we come up with a system that provides a faster loan appraisal process? If so, can we make it somewhat decentralized, where the agents can do the appraisal for smaller loans in the field itself?

We came up with an approach! We have designed and test-deployed a system that learns the BM’s decision-making process and mimics it in future appraisals. The current impact is that the BM can now appraise the loan applications of 10-12 groups compared to 3-4 groups it took prior to conducting the pilot. The long-term benefit is that the system can also be used by the agents to appraise smaller-amount loans in the field itself (if allowed by the MFI).

3. HQ operations: As an MFI grows, it needs to have a system to control its branches. Due to a lack of infrastructure in remote areas, the Internet is not an option. So, we have installed a system in the branches that helps HQ to intervene and control the branches at appropriate times using limited mobile connectivity.

What is really exciting about this technology is that this project is a great example of how we are taking global technology and finding innovative ways to localize it to meet the needs of rural India. Well, we’d better get back to work. We still have much to do as we enter Phase II of the pilot. We’ll keep you posted on future developments as we move forward!

Hi All!

I have several exciting things to tell you about our work with Imagination Markets. For those of you that haven’t been following along, we’ve designed a version of information markets for use as an idea generation and decisioning tool. We call these markets “Imagination Markets.” They help us answer tough business questions such as “What new technology should we be investing in?” and “What new products should we be developing?” We start the market by posing a specific question, such as “What new technology should we be investing in?” Participants can then propose their ideas; these ideas are then represented as securities on a virtual financial market. Participants trade based on which idea they think best meets the business need — buying shares of the ideas they like and selling shares of the ideas they don’t like. As the market progresses over a 3-week period, feedback is given on the ideas presented (in the form of trades) and new ideas are suggested which may springboard of other ideas. At the end of the market, the ideas are rank ordered by the aggregation of the opinions of the participants (price). The highest priced ideas are directly pursued or pitched to the business leader as a future initiative. It’s a fun and effective way to get everyone involved in the innovation process and to tap our most valuable resources: our employees! We started with an initial pilot of Imagination Markets back in 2005. You can read about our pilot in the July 2007 issue of Information Systems Frontiers. Since that pilot, we’ve executed 10 Imagination markets across many businesses within GE.

Now that I’ve gotten you all up to date, let me tell you about our two recent happenings:

First, earlier this month, I gave an interview to InformationWeek talking about our original prototype and how we’re incorporating the tool into our overall Innovation process.

Second, and even cooler, is that we’ve recently executed our first GE-Wide Imagination Market! Until now, our Imagination Markets have typically been applied to a single business or, in one case, crossed several GE businesses. But earlier this month, we launched and completed a 3-week GE-Wide Imagination Market, hosted and championed by Beth Comstock, GE’s Chief Marketing Officer, and Patia McGrath, GE’s Global Director for Innovation and Strategic Connections. Over 1400 employees from across GE participated, representing over 170 business segments, from Asset Management to Water & Process Technologies, and practically everything in between. We had participants from 42 countries — from Australia to Venezuela. Over the 3 week market, the participants suggested over 220 business model innovation ideas, 56 of which were submitted onto the market. The top three ideas will be pitched to GE’s Marketing Council, which is led by Beth Comstock.

I’ll keep you up to date as things progress!

Hi, this is Roger Hoerl with the final blog entry on my Coolidge sabbatical studying HIV/AIDS. As noted in my previous update, I traveled for a month to Africa in August/September, spending time in Zambia, Uganda, and four regions of South Africa, after a brief stop at the Munich Research Center on the way. We visited numerous non-government organizations, orphanages, clinics, and AIDS activists, and met people suffering from AIDS along the way. By design, we tended to avoid the official government establishments, and focused more on interacting with people from all walks of life who are on the “front lines” of the battle against AIDS in Africa. As you can imagine, it was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience, while at the same time being somewhat disturbing. We obtained a tremendous amount of information, too much to possibly summarize here. Let me say only that all of us, my family, my research colleague – Professor Presha Neidermeyer of West Virginia University, and one of her students, came away convinced that the AIDS crisis will not be solved anytime soon, but can be solved. We believe that it will be solved one village, one person at a time.

After my return, I gave a presentation at GE Global Research in Niskayuna on our experiences in Africa. This was not a formal presentation of our overall research findings from the six-month sabbatical, but rather an informal sharing, via pictures, of the people we met in Africa, and the fascinating stories they told us.

Based on the trip to Africa, as well as our ongoing research, Presha and I have identified five macro issues that will need to be addressed to produce a solution to the AIDS pandemic:

1. The need for more economically sustainable plans by HIV/AIDS assistance agencies. Much has been done, but more thought needs to go into making these efforts economically sustainable over time, once deaths from AIDS are no longer front-page news.

2. The need for more holistic approaches to addressing HIV/AIDS. By holistic, we mean efforts that address the whole needs of the individual, including their overall health needs. We need to avoid “stove-piped”, disease-specific programs, because these have the potential to debilitate, rather then reinforce basic health care infrastructure, thereby doing more harm than good. For example, some AIDS relief organizations have hired so many local doctors to implement their initiatives that basic health care needs have gone unmet, with the natural result that infant mortality, maternal mortality (death in childbirth), and death from other treatable diseases have increased. Fortunately, there are many good examples of how to address AIDS while at the same time enhance basic health infrastructure.

3. The need for broader access to basic education. In our research it is clear that those who have received a basic education are much more likely to take appropriate steps to protect themselves, and to receive proper medical treatment if they are infected. Significant ignorance exists about what HIV and AIDS are, how you get them, and how you can be treated, not only in the developing world, but also in the US.

4. The need to empower women with basic human rights on a global basis. In some cultures, women still do not have control over the most basic and fundamental aspects of their lives, including their sexuality.

5. The need for bolder leadership among political, religious, commercial, and community organizations to create the cultural changes needed to fight AIDS. Because of the controversial nature of AIDS, too many leaders, in all walks of life, have been uncomfortable discussing AIDS publicly. Bolder societal leadership is needed to develop and implement concrete plans to prevent and treat HIV infection.

Of course, HIV/AIDS is not just an African problem. There is serious concern among researchers about epidemics developing in India and China. Recent literature indicates that AIDS is on the rise again among gay men in the US and Western Europe, after decades of consistent decline. Current statistics show that AIDS is the #1 cause of death among African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34 in the US. So while Africa remains the epicenter of the battle against AIDS, Presha and I are not limiting the scope of our research to Africa. This research continues (on nights and weekends now!), and we have a proposal for a book on HIV/AIDS and what can be done about it under review by Wiley. In this book, which we are currently writing, we will elaborate on these five macro issues, and how we believe they should be addressed. In addition, we will present a model we have developed to depict the continuum of approaches to social investment, from one-time charitable contributions to the development of economically self-sustaining enterprises.

On the purely statistical front, I am working with Harry Ma, my colleague in the Applied Statistics Lab, to perform sensitivity analyses of published HIV infection models – used by the World Health Organization and others to project the future path of AIDS – in order to quantify their uncertainty, and their sensitivity to model assumptions. For some reason, such quantification has not been published previously. We plan to present our results at the American Statistical Association meetings this August.

In summary, I would again like to sincerely thank the General Electric Company for providing such a unique opportunity. If this research can help prevent one person from dying of AIDS, the time, money, and effort spent will have proven well worth it. Thanks for your interest!