Xconomy
San Francisco —
I had lengthy deliberate a telephone name with Mary Lou Jepsen for this afternoon—a prep session for a chat I can be doing together with her every week from Monday night time at Xconomy’s Napa Summit, the place she is the featured dinner speaker. It was to be a traditional prep chat till I set to work this morning and discovered that CNET, Engadget, and Tech Insider had all reported that the know-how visionary was planning to go away her publish as government director of engineering for Facebook and Oculus, to concentrate on a brand new startup. It turned out she had talked about her plans final night time throughout a keynote speech on the Women of Vision Awards banquet in Santa Clara, CA—and the media retailers had all seized on the information.
“I was actually really surprised anybody picked that up,” Jepsen informed me (displaying she doesn’t absolutely perceive what an enormous deal she is). So I took benefit of the decision to ask her extra. Some of our speak was off the report, however a lot of it was on the report, together with fairly a bit about her new plans and the considering behind them.
Her imaginative and prescient is broad and sweeping: it runs from a brand new era of extraordinarily high-resolution, reasonably priced MRI machines for early detection of most cancers, coronary heart illness, and extra, to a far-out time (or perhaps not so far-out) when machines can learn individuals’s minds and other people can talk—with one another and perhaps even with animals—by way of ideas.
The concept “leverages the tools of our times,” Jepsen says, citing advances in every thing from physics to optoelectronics to shopper electronics to huge knowledge and A.I. that may be mixed to shrink the dimensions, enhance the performance, and decrease the price of MRI. “I could no longer wait. I’m still writing up the patents. But I am incredibly excited to strike off on this direction,” she says.
The startup, whose identify has not beforehand been launched so far as I can inform, is known as Open Water (it may be OpenWater, “not sure yet…either is OK for now,” she says). “Peter Gabriel gave me the name. He is a great advisor,” Jepsen says. In specific, she was impressed by this text he wrote for Edge.org, referred to as Open Water–The Internet of Visible Thought, through which he credited Jepsen for introducing him “to the potential of brain reading devices.”
Jepsen says she will’t speak about funding and extra particular plans for Open Water but, and that she is going to stay at Facebook till August. But listed here are some highlights of what she might say:
“What I try to do is make things that everybody knows are utterly, completely impossible—I try to make them possible,” Jepsen sums up. She does that by leveraging what she calls her “strange background” that encompasses physics, pc science, media know-how, artwork, electrical engineering, and extra. “That all comes together for me.” Indeed, you will discover extra in this companion piece on that background, which incorporates stints at Google X, One Laptop per Child (which she co-founded), the MIT Media Lab, Intel, her personal startups, and extra.
In the case of Open Water, a part of her motivation is her personal well being. “I’m a brain tumor survivor,” she says. She had surgical procedure to take away a mind tumor in 1995, and since then has taken drugs “twice a day every day for the last 21 years to stay alive.” That has led her to learn quite a bit on the aspect about neuroscience—and take into consideration find out how to advance the sector.
Part of the thought behind Open Water includes taking issues at “the hairy edge of what physics can do,” Jepsen says, after which “using my substantial capability in consumer electronics” to make them potential at shopper electronics worth factors. She says there’s a large potential within the manufacturing crops in Asia which might be primarily used to make OLEDs, LCDs, and such. Jepsen provides that these shopper electronics producers have been principally targeted on smartphones for the previous decade or so. But, she says, we’ve reached saturation in cell phones, and gross sales are declining. “What I see,” she says, are “the subcomponent makers being really hungry for what the new, new thing is.”
“My big bet is we can use that manufacturing infrastructure to create the functionality of a $5 million MRI machine in a consumer electronics price-point wearable. And the implications of that are so big.” She says each physician’s workplace on the planet might afford these wearable units and use them for early detection of neurodegenerative illness, most cancers, heart problems, inner bleeding, blood clots, and extra.
“It’s such a big idea, it’s what I wanted to do for a decade. It’s why I went to MIT [Media Lab]. It’s why I went to Google,” she says. “It turned out that Google really needed me to do some other stuff that was way more important to Google at the time. I’ve been incubating this since 2005…and I clearly see how to do it and how to realize it in a few short years.”
One think about advancing her concept was work revealed about 5 years in the past by a gaggle led by Jack Gallant at U.C. Berkeley, Jepsen says. The analysis group used a practical magnetic resonance imaging scanner to trace blood circulate and oxygen movement and picture the brains of individuals proven lots of of hours of movies. You can learn extra about it right here, however the primary level Jepsen confused to me was that the work (and subsequent work) has produced a library or database of types of how brains react to totally different pictures. A pc utilizing synthetic intelligence can then use such a database to principally take a look at MRI mind pictures in actual time and interpret what individuals are serious about or reacting to. This capability has been demonstrated at dozens of labs to gauge the mind’s reactions to phrases, music, math equations, and extra, she says. But the decision is poor and the method is dear, requiring individuals to lie nonetheless in huge chambers inside an enormous magnet.
“I was really struck by that, so I started thinking this is great, but we need to up the resolution,” she says. “It’s in my head, I’ve acquired this plan. I’ve obtained these innovations that I’m engaged on, and my subsequent step is to let…
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