Emerging Technologies for Emerging Needs

The National American Red Cross hosted the "Emerging Technologies for Emerging Needs" meeting. Excellent speakers talked on the topics of Augmented Reality, Robots, UAVs, 3D Printing and Wearable Technologies.

All the presenters were top-notch experts and the day was thought-provoking. The presenter that really sticks with me is Maria Escuela who presented on how she and her daughter led their Boy Scouts Venturing Crew, with the help of Johns Hopkins doctors, to produce, fit and distribute working prosthetic hands to 150 children in less than 6 weeks. This incredible achievement over the past 6 weeks is a credit to all involved for seeing the potential of 3D printed parts, arduino sensors, and ingenuity. I am so excited to see this real application of 3D modeling to help a young person's ability to play. This can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world. The close-knit worldwide networks of 3D printing enthusiasts, boy scouts, doctors and religious organizations will be expanding this worldwide extremely quickly.

There were so many other excellent speakers.

S.K. Gupta professor in Robotics from the University of Maryland shared multiple types of robots being invented at UMD. A robot that moves like a bird (Robo Raven), one that moved like a caterpillar, and one that moves like a horseshoe crab.

Patrick Meier shared the advances in UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for humanitarian purposes. UaViators.com His upcoming book is “Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data changes the face of humanitarian response” Digital-Humanitarians.com

AIDR - Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Relief

There were also excellent presentations on Augmented Reality from Deloitte and on wearables from Silica Labs.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to attend this inspiring event.