ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied Minds

Cory Doctorow 10:17 am Tue Mar 15, 2005

Here are my notes from Danny Hillis's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Remixing Technology at Applied Minds." Applied Minds is a company that Hillis founded because he wasn't having enough fun as a Disney Imagineer and wanted to start a company where all he'd have to build is "1.0" designs that he could license out to GM and the like to develop the 2.0 of.

We have musicians, artists and even an astronaut around, which lets us exploit a real mix of talents and viewpoints.

Shows an amazing desert-exploration vehicle with a high-masted Infrared camera, the ability to inflated/deflate tires from inside, every legal radio band, etc. — a project for fun, called the Multimog.

Remixing toy: You can connect a car, a robot and a connector. They all work together. We've licensed this to a toy vendor, but the problem is that we have no way to know if they'll ever bring it to market.

Here's a cancer-simulator visualization that attempts to discover the chemical signature of which cancer drug works for which patient — lots of cancer drugs are only effective for five percent of patents, which makes them useless.

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