Seth Teller's Random Ideas

This is a collection of random ideas. All of them require more thought and engineering to be developed. If you love or hate any of them, please email me at teller@csail.mit.edu. (On the other hand, if you get rich from any of them, please send me a check.)

These are arranged in reverse-chronological order, i.e., newest ideas first.

2009, Protecting Athletes from Heat Death: At the start of each sporting event (e.g. marathon, triathlon, football game), have each participant swallow a small capsule with temperature and other sensing, and a radio to transmit its data. Station data receivers throughout the race course or along the sidelines of the playing field such that the players will frequently pass by some receiver. Have each capsule opportunistically offload its data trace when it can. Implement a filter-and-relay method to alert the competition organizers when the core temperature of any participant is about to exceed safe limits.

2009, Fine-grained Computational Economics: People have probably already thought of this, but in case they haven't: Instead of trying to come up with low-parameter models that predict economic activity, why not characterize individual people by an appropriate number of parameters -- salary, saving behavior, social context, etc. -- and run a simulation with many such individuals, chosen from a distribution matching that of the real world, to produce an emergent outcome? Think how revolutionary this could be if such a process were shown to "predict" historical economic information with high accuracy!

2009, Financial Transparency: Require all companies to maintain an RSS feed of every financial transaction they make. Use a naming scheme to assign a unique, persistent identifier to each financial instrument, along with metadata describing the parties, the date, time, valuation, etc. Third parties could then monitor, aggregate, archive, and analyze the feeds to look for discrepancies or bad actors.

2009, Anti-Bird Strike equipment pack for jet engines: Develop a microwave radar device as an after-market equipment package for jet engines. It would use radar to sense the presence (at speed) of birds in front of the engine. When birds were present, it would pulse them with radar, causing them enough discomfort that they would move out of the path of the engine.

2008, Anti-terrorist consumer devices: Secretly build GPS hardware into consumer-grade video cameras (I know, it's already being put into some cellphones and cameras). Secretly, say steganographically, encode the photographer's location and (true) recording time and date into any exported AVI, MPG file etc. Not as consumer-readable metadata, but as an NSA-readable bit overlay.

2007, Truly no-stick cooking surface: Combine a griddle with an air-hockey table, so the food floats on air as it is being cooked.

2006, Solar-powered condenser: Arrange for hot ambient air (e.g. in a drought region) to pass over a chilled surface, using solar power. Collect the resulting condensation drip in a cistern. A tiny unit could produce a few cups of clean water per day. The challenge of course is to do this very cheaply for developing regions. [Update: DARPA has issued a solicitation for research on such "water from air" devices.]

2006, Delayed development: Many children suffer brain damage from oxygen deprivation (drowning, freezing, commotio cordis etc.) at a young age, then age out of the period during which their brains have high plasticity. Perhaps this period of relative plasticity could be extended artificially in order to improve their chances of recovery.

2006, MEMS ship hulls: Paper a ship hull with a MEMS material (half-buried discs with rotation axis lying in the hull tangent plane?) to zero the effective viscosity between the hull and the surrounding water. Modulate the material's behavior to slow the ship rapidly.

2005, Group proximity sensors: For groups of children or tourists. Sensors form an ad hoc network, and measure distance to one another. Alarm sounds if any individual moves further than X meters from the group centroid or group leader.

2005, Voice-commandable wheelchair: Imbue a power wheelchair with sensors and computation to form a mental model of the world, and the ability to navigate through the world in order to reach the user's desired location. Useful for those with insufficient motor ability to move or joystick their own wheelchair. [Note: in collaboration with Prof. Nick Roy of the MIT Aero/Astro Department, and Dr. Bryan Reimer of the MIT AgeLab, I have begun to develop exactly this device.]

2005, Smart emergency exit doors: Put a sensor in the door frame to determine whether it is passable or not. Have a very loud speaker over the door directing people toward or away from it.

2005, Transcribed voice-based reminders: Enable your mobile phone to take voice dictation, the contents of which it would then transcribe and email to you. [Note: a company called "Jott" has since implemented this in 2008, with an 800 number and off-board speech transcription; the resulting text is emailed and SMS'ed to the user!]

2005, Automatic-reminder pill containers: Make pill containers/caps that remind you when your next pill should be taken. For example suppose you should take a pill three times a day. Then the cap could reset each time it is opened, and count down with an 8- or 6-hour timer, indicating when the timer has reached zero. At this time you would open it and take the pill, resetting the timer for another cycle.

2005, Passively powered bike helmet light: Power it from passive head motion; perhaps a weighted magnet bouncing around inside a coil?

2004, Queries as prediction: Data-mine the internet query stream in order to predict near-term future events. Query activity probably runs a few minutes ahead of stock trades, for example. Google and others are probably already doing this.

2004, Unsuccessful Internet searches: Consider the set of all failed Internet searches, i.e., searches that return no results. Suppose the search engine retained these for some months, then when similar queries were observed, offered to put the searchers in touch? Could be an interesting community-building mechanism. Another possibility would be to repeat the query at intervals, and notify the user when it produced results. [Note: Google has since implemented this idea as "Google Alerts".]

2004, Location-based reminders: Arrange for your phone/PDA to remind you of things based not (only) on the time, as with a calendar, but on your location. Examples: "next time I pass a hardware store, remind me to buy X," or "tell me when I pass a mailbox."

2004, MEMS shoe soles: Put ABS in your shoes. Have a sensor in your shoe that detects slipping, and within a few milliseconds, increases the friction coefficient of your shoe to stop the slip.

2004, Ice cube with constant surface area: Is it possible to design an ice cube shape that exhibits constant area as it melts? What shape should it be?

2003, Smart File Cabinet: Develop a sheet-fed scanner that, as it ingests pages of a document, also listens to your speech about the document. Thus you can describe the document as you feed it in. The scanner also performs OCR on the document. Later you can ask the device about any document you've scanned, keyed by contents or verbal description. [Update: one of my students developed a prototype of this device as his Master's thesis.]

2003, Hair-dryer in your dashboard: Why wait for your car engine to warm up to have heat? Simply put a hair-dryer's electric heating element in the air ducting and power it from the car's electrical system. Once the engine heats up, switch off the heating element. Assuming you can limit the fire risk, this would make the car much more comfortable while adding only a few bucks to its cost. It might even reduce energy usage by cutting pre-drive idling time.

More:

Page maintained by teller@csail.mit.edu.