Googling the Future of Education and Health Care

Google's director of research, Alfred Spector, says engineers must take on education and health care

1 min read
Googling the Future of Education and Health Care

Organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible is Google's overall goal, but the company's challenges don’t stop there, Vice President of Research Alfred Spector told IEEE Spectrum in a short conversation during the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, held at Google earlier this week. With education and health care representing a quarter of the U.S. GDP, the company sees a role in improving both.

YouTube, Spector says, is one way Google is changing education. “It’s phenomenal that we can make educational content avaiable to a billion people around the world, from self-help videos, for example, those that guide a repair of something, to quantum mechanics.” He points out that Google is working with the Kahn Academy, a nonprofit providing free online tutorials about a wide range of academic subjects, to support its efforts.

Health care, he admits, may be a tougher challenge. “It’s a complicated situation,” Spector says. “It seems obvious that we need to use more IT in health care, that it should lower costs and improve quality.” But it isn't so easy.

Google itself tried to provide Web services for health information, says Spector, but it didn’t catch on—and this kind of thing will more probably be driven by the hospitals. “But we still see enormous opportunities there.”

Follow me on Twitter @Tekla Perry.

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Asad Madni and the Life-Saving Sensor

His pivot from defense helped a tiny tuning-fork prevent SUV rollovers and plane crashes

11 min read
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Asad Madni and the Life-Saving Sensor

In 1992, Asad M. Madni sat at the helm of BEI Sensors and Controls, overseeing a product line that included a variety of sensor and inertial-navigation devices, but its customers were less varied—mainly, the aerospace and defense electronics industries.

And he had a problem.

The Cold War had ended, crashing the U.S. defense industry. And business wasn’t going to come back anytime soon. BEI needed to identify and capture new customers—and quickly.

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