Tech Awards 2009 – The Intel Environment Award Laureates

In my November 20th post I promised I would tell you about the Tech Awards Laureates. Travel and a very bad cold that kept my head in a fog prevented me from making good on my promise until now.

The Tech Awards were granted in five categories: environment, economic development, education, equality, and health. Each of the Tech Award Laureates received a beautiful trophy: a crystal globe on a silicon ingot and one winner in each category received a $50,000 cash award from the sponsors.

Today I will tell you about the winners of the Intel Environment Award.

Cows to Kilowatts

The top award in this category went to Dr. Joseph Adelegan’s ingenious Cows to Kilowatts project in Nigeria. Adelegan deviced a means to transform slaughterhouse wastewater into energy ranging from electricity to cooking gas.

Image: Environmental Health Perspective

Not only does the project prevent air pollution and diseases borne by untreated wastewaters, the technology uses a zero-emissions method to produce organic fertilizer and clean-burning methane for low-income farmers and families.

LeafView: An Electronic Field Guide

Dr. Sean White enthusiastically demonstrated the LeafView gadget that can take a picture of any leaf and then automatically identify it by using computer vision algorithms and its extensive electronic field guide database. White developed the human-to-computer interface together with Columbia University, University of Maryland, and Smithsonian Institution.

Photo: Columbia University

The tool then records the leaf and its contextual data, like GPS coordinates, to the living record of the world’s plants. Botanists are in a hurry to populate this database because the world is loosing species faster than it can record them.

Photo: Columbia University

White hopes to recruit more volunteers so that he can complete development of the iPhone application. The ubiquitous availability of this tool can contribute to the world’s digital herbaria more accurately and exponentially faster than ever before.

GRUPEDSAC: Ecotechniques Toolkits for Self-Sufficiency

I had the great pleasure of meeting Lilly Wolfensberger who accepted the award for GRUPEDSAC, the organization in Mexico who dispenses eco-friendly toolkits to rural families who live below the poverty line. The toolkits include, cisterns for collecting rain water, prickly pear natural paint and waterproofing resin, a solar dehydrator, a solar water heater, a wood-saving stove, a wind/solar generator, a rope pump, an electricity-generator bicycle, and a solar oven. The recipients of these toolkits also receive training and guidance to ensure that the communities can become self-sufficient while preserving the environment.

I hope to tell you about the other laureates as soon as possible.

Animusic's Pipe Dream

We are busy preparing for our Gratitude and Dreams party. In the mean time, I'll leave you with some entertainment: an ancient piece of computer graphics in the style originally developed by Pixar. Enjoy!

Inner Life of a Cell

I used to belong to an übergeeky organization called the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I haven’t thought about ACM in a very long time until my son sent me a link of a video he watched in his biology class. This video was developed at Harvard University. The animation conception and scientific content are by Alain Viel and Robert A. Lue and the animation is by John Liebler/XVIVO. It won an award at the 2006 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. SIGGRAPH is the Special Interest Group for Graphic Computing within ACM.

Click here to see the high-resolution video:

If your computer does not have the horse power for you to view the above video, here is the YouTube version, but it’s much lower resolution:

You don’t have to be a cell biologist to be at awe of this achievement. When I was studying biology at Berkeley back in the stone ages, we studied cell physiology mostly from two-dimensional illustrations and an occasional video of electron microscope images. This animation would have been immensely helpful! Maybe I wouldn’t have switched to computer science. Nah, computers would have found me one way or another.

For those of you interested to learn what exactly you are viewing here is the same video with the science dude narrating (as my son puts it):

It is pretty mind-boggling to think that these intricate systems are inside all living cells. I am in awe of the universe’s beauty on a grand scale and on a microscopic scale.