 |
Doris Kilbane
|
 Write for Electronic Design
|
Doris Kilbane is a contributing editor to Supply Chain Technology News, Logistics Today, and Operations and Technology magazines, as well as a freelance writer for Automatic Identification Manufacturers (AIM) association and various business software and technology companies. Previously, she was the managing
editor of Automatic I.D. News, now Frontline Solutions, for 10 years. Presently, she is also interim executive director for a volunteer program helping senior citizens called Faith in Action Medina County Caregivers.
Email address: doriskilbane@yahoo.com
|
|
57 results found for Doris Kilbane, displaying items 1 - 20
|
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
Robotics Move From Industry To Space To Elder Care
Retirement isn’t coming easy to 83-year-old Joseph Engelberger, widely known as the Father of Robotics. “There’s a lot that can still be done,” he says wistfully, despite already accomplishing so much in the robotic field. In fact, Engelberger and George Devol produced Unimate, the first industrial robot. While studying for his MS degree at Columbia University, Engelberger worked for Manning Maxwell & Moore as a physicist designing control systems for...
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
RAM Innovator Took A New Career—And Education—By The Horns
His pioneering work in digital computer technology gave the world reliable random-access magnetic-core memory that revolutionized computer speed and power. Nevertheless, Jay Forrester says his work today is “much more important.” “In 1956, I thought the pioneering days of computer innovation were pretty much over,” Forrester said. “The biggest multiple in improvements in computer speed, reliability, and logical design were from 1946 to ’56. Rapid...
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
Family Need Leads To A Better Hearing Aid And A New Industry
George Frye was happily working at Tektronix on high-speed sampling oscilloscopes in 1970 when his hearing-impaired mom needed some help. “Her old Zenith hearing aid was getting a little cranky, ” said Frye. She took him up on an offer to build her one. “Transistors had just come onto the market, so I believed I could build it using transistors.” Although it turned out to be a little more complicated than he anticipated, Frye persisted and eventually...
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
From Sneaking Into Computer Labs To Sneaking Out Java
James Gosling, inventor of the Java programming language and the virtual machine, skipped many of his high school math and physics classes. His teachers knew it, but they still gave him A’s. That’s because, said Gosling, they knew why he was missing the classes. He was working for the physics department at the University of Calgary writing software for satellites. “That attitude was a huge influence on me,” said Gosling. “They understood that learning...
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
Computers—A Revolutionary Medium For Boosting Human Thought
The printing press was one of the most influential inventions in human history. Could universal personal computing and worldwide networking be just as significant to human thought? In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established a research community to accomplish that grand goal. Quite a bit of this dream was realized in the 1970s by the extension of this community at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) sparked by ideas from...
December 1, 2008
[Hall Of Fame]
In AI, Robotics, And Any Field, Stand Alone To Stand Apart
If you want to make a difference, don’t follow the crowd, Marvin Minsky advises today’s students. Don’t go into the most popular field. “That could be a disaster. When I started to work on artificial neural networks, only four other researchers were involved with this field. But today, there are many thousands of them. Interesting discoveries come only every few years—so each researcher has less than one chance in 1000 of making significant contributions,” Minsky...
October 19, 2007
[Hall Of Fame]
Nolan Bushnell: Serious Thoughts About Fun And Games
Nolan Bushnell, popularly revered as the father of electronic games, is still inventing and dreaming of new ways for people to use technology for fun. In fact, he is forging a different direction from today's shoot 'em up, beat 'em down, tear 'em apart electronic diversions. He sees a generation of video games that foster fun, social interaction, and education. "Video games today are a race to the bottom. They are pure, unadulterated trash and I'm sad...
October 19, 2007
[Hall Of Fame]
Douglas C. Engelbart: The Mouse That Roared
For better or worse, your computer and its connections to information and other people worldwide were the vision of Douglas C. Engelbart. It all started as he contemplated his impending marriage while driving to work back in 1951. "I was excited about getting married and starting a family, but then I thought I had better focus on work," he said. "Suddenly, in my mind, I saw a big, long hallway going on into infinity with here and there doors on the right...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
Working With Stevie Wonder
When Stevie Wonder spotted Ray Kurzweil demonstrating the Kurzweil Reading Machine on the Today Show, he wanted to know more. So he called up the company that same day and paid a visit. He became the first customer of the Kurzweil Reading Machine in 1976. Six years later, Wonder challenged Kurzweil to create a musical instrument that could combine the strengths of both electronic and acoustic music. The result was that Kurzweil returned to work on computer-based...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
Company Founder—Many Times Over
Ray Kurzweil has been honored for creating the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech-recognition system in 1987. It was done under his Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) company, founded in 1982. Today, descendants of Kurzweil’s advances in speech recognition are used to create written documents for lawyers, doctors, and other professionals and in automated phone response systems. KAI is now part of Nuance. Kurzweil also has created several other...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
On The Cusp Of Immortality
Ray Kurzweil has written five books, including The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (co-authored with Terry Grossman, MD). The first discusses the accelerating rate of technological change. "The price-performance and capacity of information technology doubles in less than a year, which means an expansion by a factor of a billion in 25 years," says Kurzweil, in describing his...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
The Challenge Of Natural Language
Now that Ray Kurzweil has brought the reading machine down to pocket size, he wants to enhance it so it will tell a blind person what is in the environment. "It will be like a friend who describes what they see: There’s a cat on the sofa, your ex-wife is sitting next to the cat, and so on," he says. But that will take yet one more development. Kurzweil wants to be able to talk to computers in natural language. "They are not very good at this...
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006
[Hall Of Fame]
Ray Kurzweil: Inventor, Futurist, Life Changer
He successfully predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and a computer beating a chess champion. He invented the first print-tospeech reading machine for the blind, the first music synthesizer that could realistically recreate the grand piano, and omni-font optical character recognition (OCR). Now, Ray Kurzweil says we'll be able to eliminate fossil fuels in the next 20 years. And within the next several decades, mankind will live indefinitely. "We will...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
A Serious Concern For Our Future
Andrew Viterbi is seriously worried. Not enough U.S. students are entering the fields of science and technology, and that could gravely affect our leadership role in the world. "What brought down the Russian infrastructure was they just couldn’t keep up with us in what we were doing in defense technology," he says, comparing then to now. And with fewer and fewer students entering the fields of science and engineering, other nations are challenging...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
From Step To Step To Success
Andrew Viterbi explains his success as just following one step after another. "Most of what I did was a natural extension of what I did before," he says. "There were no eureka moments. I had the right background. At the right time, I was at the right place." His groundbreaking work in the cellular field, for example, grew out of the work he did after graduation on "very advanced spread-spectrum systems for satellite tracking at JPL,"...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
Viterbi: A Modest Man's Giant Accomplishments
In 2000, at 65, Andrew Viterbi retired from Qualcomm, where he had been chief technical officer and vice chairman. Since then, he has devoted his time to many philanthropic programs, serving on 10 different boards (both professional and philanthropic) and running the Viterbi Group, a venture capital company whose leadership he shares with his daughter, Audrey Viterbi. His philanthropic works are focused in education, from kindergarten through graduate school, healthcare,...
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006
[Hall Of Fame]
Andrew Viterbi: The Key To Communications, 40 Years Early
Andrew Viterbi simply wanted to fill in the blanks in several theories when he developed the Viterbi Algorithm. Little did he anticipate its widespread applicability in error-correcting codes in 2 billion cell phones, magnetic recording, most satellite TV receivers, a variety of cable TV systems, voice recognition, and even analyses of DNA sequencing. "When a machine understands your voice, some aspect of my algorithm is in there, improving the accuracy," he says....
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
The Man Outside The Lab
Born a cripple in Breslau, Germany (now Poland) on April 9, 1865, Charles Proteus Steinmetz never married for fear his children would be deformed as he and as his father were. But he loved children, so he adopted a young engineer whose subsequent family made him a beloved grandfather. This love of children subsequently expanded to include many more children in Schenectady, N.Y. At Christmas, for example, Steinmetz gave every orphan in Schenectady a present. The...
October 20, 2006
[Web Exclusive]
Lightning Strikes Steinmetz's Curiosity
Like Benjamin Franklin, Charles Proteus Steinmetz was drawn to understanding and studying lightning. Lightning, he said, was an example of electrical transients because it reflects changes in electrical circuits of very short duration. The result of these studies was his theory of traveling waves. It opened the door to his creation at General Electric of methods to protect high-power transmission lines from lightning strikes. His last major project at GE was part of this research....
Your Most Important Issue Of The Year 2006
[Hall Of Fame]
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: Genius, Forethinker
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was both an electrical engineering genius and a great forward thinker in educational and social issues. In the scientific field, Steinmetz is remembered for many electrically related inventions. He invented a commercially successful alternating-current motor, identified and explained the Law of Hysteresis governing power losses, developed a user-friendly method to manage and calculate values for alternating current, and invented...
 prev. page
[1]
2
3
next page 
|
|
