Intellectual Ventures Lab

You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.

Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.

Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.

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On January 14, 2010, Philip Eckhoff was honored by the Hertz Foundation.  He was nominated for contributions in the field of disease eradication modeling, which he worked on in his spare time while completing his doctorate at Princeton.  The prize is not regularly awarded, but offered only in the midst of noteworthy accomplishment related to applied science and engineering.  Jay Davis, the foundation’s president, presented a certificate of recognition.  Also expressing words of acknowledgment and appreciation were the foundation’s chairman, David Galas,  funder of the epidemiological modeling project, Bill Gates, and Intellectual Ventures CEO, Nathan Myhrvold.

The Hertz Foundation inducts some 15 promising grad students as fellows each year.  Generous thesis funding and support have made the Hertz Fellowship one of the most sought after and prestigious award of its kind.  In 2004, Philip successfully underwent the rigorous application and interview process that would jumpstart his Ph.D. research in Applied and Computational Mathematics.  The foundation also continues to recognize outstanding accomplishments of its alumni, for which was the purpose of this event.

Philip has been hard at work with a team at Intellectual Ventures Lab developing an original computer model that calculates how malaria spreads, as well as how it responds to various methods of suppression. The goal of this ambitious and unprecedented model is not just to understand and control the disease but to stamp it out completely.

Although the software tool can be readily expanded to simulate infectious diseases beyond malaria, enough laboratory and epidemiological data is not available in some cases to create a truly reliable eradication model today. However, our infectious disease model is an exciting step toward providing a tool for both greater understanding and more effective action against these diseases, and hope for a healthier humanity.

We are proud of Philip’s ground breaking work, congratulate him on receiving this high honor and offer him the best of luck in his continued research.

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In our efforts to fight malaria, the Photonic Fence has been getting all the attention lately, but this is just one of several ideas that we are actively working on to combat disease.  Another key malaria project is Epidemiological Modeling.  This is a highly detailed computer simulation that predicts how the disease spreads at local, regional and global scales.  The model takes into account many variables that affect transmission such as temperature, population, transportation, and the use of vaccines, bed nets and even innovations such as the Photonic Fence.

There are a wide variety of epidemiological modeling approaches that many groups use to study malaria. Ultimately, our work and other existing approaches are used to evaluate and predict effective strategies for malaria eradication. 

Mathematician, Philip Eckhoff, and computational scientist, Karima Nigmatulina, explain the project and software.

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TerraPower’s university collaborations contribute meaningful progress to the design of the traveling wave reactor. We’ve been proactive about introducing future generations of nuclear engineers and scientists to new advanced reactor technology, but this work is appealing to young computer science students as well. In November, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, visited four college campuses to talk with students about how new capabilities in computers will help solve the world’s complex issues. Mundie showcased the cutting-edge work taking place at Microsoft as well as some of TerraPower’s modeling work.

Mundie offered computer science students some insight into what the future of scientific research might look like. At the Intellectual Ventures Lab, we are shaping that vision.

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The evolution of computing impacts our ability to solve some the most complex issues facing the world. TerraPower’s modeling software is one example. Used to develop the traveling-wave concept, this software, has cut the time required to complete high-fidelity nuclear engineering calculations by several orders of magnitude. These computational analyses have enabled TerraPower to design a practical traveling-wave reactor which provides a new basis for innovation in nuclear energy.

Last week, Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures presented several of IV’s “malaria projects” to the audience at TED 2010. The Photonic Fence is one piece in a suite of inventions we are working on to help track, understand, detect, treat and eradicate malaria.  It has captured a lot of attention and we have received many questions about how it works. In response, we wanted to share some details on the mechanics of this project.

The following video of 3ric Johanson was shot the night before our TED talk at 3 AM in a hallway of the hotel. The hotel staff were good sports despite the death rays and bug boxes.

The Photonic Fence is not for sale today. IV does not produce products, but ideas. To that end, this prototype is a proof of concept. We are looking to partner with another company or organization to make this idea a reality. So stay tuned.

You can learn more about our other malaria projects here and stay tuned to the lab blog for future updates.

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Today Bill Gates talked about our nuclear reactor project, TerraPower, at TED 2010. As an investor in several promising energy projects, Gates said it is our responsibility to pursue technologies that achieve cheap energy with “zero carbon” emissions.

TerraPower determined a new type of traveling-wave reactor would be the best approach to meeting the world’s energy demand.  Our team decided to pursue nuclear energy after investigating many different technologies and solutions. With advances in computing power in just the past few years, we are able to make radical contributions to science that weren’t possible a few years ago. We believe the traveling-wave reactor concept provides the kind of innovation that society needs.

This video explains the traveling-wave reactor and how it works.

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These high speed photographic images of mosquitoes were captured by Intellectual Ventures Laboratory scientists using a Vision Research Phantom V12.1, shooting at up to 6,000 frames per second.  [read more about IV's malaria research]

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Understanding Mosquito Flight: Intellectual Ventures researchers study flight dynamics of mosquitoes to look for novel ways to attack them.  This video shows a technique called “Particle Image Velocimetry.” Tiny suspended water droplets, illuminated by a green planar laser, show the movement of the air around the mosquito’s wing.

Download video in high definition (58.9 MB)

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Mosquito in Flight: This video depicts an Anopheles stephensi mosquito in flight.  To capture this footage in focus, the mosquito was placed in a custom designed chamber that sensed when the mosquito flew through the focal plane.

Download video in high definition (19.3 MB)

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Mosquito Shootdown Sequence: Video clips showing mosquitoes being killed by lasers.  If played in real time, these segments would be roughly 1/10th of a second long.

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Modeling the Eradication of Malaria

Despite decades of attempts to control malaria, the disease still afflicts some 250 million people every year and claims the lives of about one million, mostly children. The parasite that causes malaria has shown stubborn resilience against the most power­ful antimalarial drugs, and the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite have similarly grown resistant to insecticides. Although there is great hope for an effective vaccine, none is yet available.

At Intellectual Ventures, we believe history shows that trying to control malaria is an insufficiently ambitious goal. We in the scientific and technical community should instead develop tech­nologies and strategies that can be used to completely eradicate the disease. Much of the progress we make toward eliminating malaria will also be directly useful in exterminating other infec­tious plagues of humanity, such as polio and tuberculosis.

Toward this goal, a team led by Dr. Philip Eckhoff is de­veloping a completely original computer model that calculates not only how malaria spreads in a particular part of the world, but also how it will respond to a deliberate suppression cam­paign. The goal of this model, more ambitious than any similar software ever attempted before, is not just to understand and control the disease, but to stamp it out completely.

Read more…

Why We Work on Solutions for the Prevention, Detection and Eradication of Malaria

Why are you inventing in this area?

Humanity faces significant global health challenges that have been difficult to solve through traditional methods.  Our hope is that through inventive thinking, we can find new ways to tackle some of these issues.

With regard to our malaria projects, we are actively pursuing several invention ideas that could help detect, prevent and eradicate the disease. We believe that introducing the right combination of these technologies—while keeping older approaches in place—will lead to a better chance of completely eradicating malaria.

But why malaria and not AIDS or other health issues?

We have a variety of global health projects underway. One reason we are focusing on malaria first is it is a disease that is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—including half a million children—reportedly died of the disease last year.

Read more…

TerraPower is making great progress on their nuclear reactor design by using supercomputing clusters for computational modeling work.  A calculation that takes all day to run on a desktop computer can run in one minute on our cluster.

This past year, the TerraPower team has been heavily involved in engineering work and design with a confidence and speed that would not be possible without the use of a computing cluster.  Rigorous modeling techniques present intricate insight into the physics of the online cultivation of fuel, that enables the unique fuel cycle of the Traveling Wave Reactor. Extensive computer simulations and engineering studies produced new evidence that a wave of fission moving slowly through a fuel core could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for well over 50 to 100 years without enrichment or reprocessing.  The hi-fidelity results made possible by advanced computational abilities of modern supercomputer clusters are the driving force behind one of the most active nuclear reactor design teams in the country. Read more…