OTD Managing Director Vinit Nijhawan

Dear Reader,

The Office of Technology Development is accelerating BU spin-offs by investing in infrastructure elements: the Kindle mentoring program, Ignition Grants for faculty and Launch Award convertible debt funding and Business Incubation.

In 2010 we funded 11 Ignition grants ($500K), two Launch Awards ($350K) and currently have 86 mentors and 49 mentee projects being mentored. We have 15 companies in the incubator (including Good Start Genetics who just raised $18M). Furthermore we are creating a co-working space in the incubator with 10 desks available for individual entrepreneurs.

We have spun-off 21 companies who have either raised funding or are about to raise funding (see table below).  Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about any of these projects.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

Sincerely,

Vinit Nijhawan, OTD Managing Director

Check out the article and video (originally published in BU Today) below.

BU Today- Every day, our world grows more digital and more of our lives migrates to an electronic format. But Margrit Betke, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science, believes the networked world isn’t nearly as inclusive as it ought to be.

“The community of people with severe disabilities is not really well served by computer science,” Betke says. “Many people impaired by diseases like multiple sclerosis or ALS cant type Google searches. They cant play video games, and they cant click on a friend’s e-mail.”

So, in collaboration with James Gips, a Boston College professor of computer science, and several of her students, Betke has spent the last eight years developing a camera mouse that greatly expands accessibility to the digital world. The camera mouse software uses a computer webcam to lock onto and track a chosen section of the users face — a nostril or the tip of an eyebrow, for example — and then links that persons head movement to a cursor on the screen. Move right and the cursor goes right. Move left and it reverses direction. Pause for several seconds over a link and it clicks.

Betke and her fellow researchers have adapted a camera mouse to work with several popular programs, such as Microsoft Word. They’ve also created custom software that allows computer users with disabilities to type e-mails, edit photographs, create music, and fight space aliens, among other activities.

In spring 2007, after a failed attempt to build a company around the new technology, Betke and Gips decided to give camera mouse away online. These days, about 2,500 people download it every month. The researchers get frequent e-mails from people as far away as Australia and Uzbekistan, thanking them and asking for technical assistance.

“With software, there’s always an issue of maintenance,” says Betke. Requests to fix a software bug or make camera mouse compatible with the latest operating system always get highest priority. A request for a camera mouse version of Flight Simulator, on the other hand, becomes a candidate for a class project. Betke’s students also work as volunteers in places like the Boston Home, a nursing care center for adults with neurodegenerative diseases, whose residents have used camera mouse.

What’s next? Betke hopes to make camera mouse more adaptable to the wide range of mobility limitations, arranging navigation buttons to match a persons most controlled range of motion, for example, or accommodating the slow diminishment of a user’s skills.

“It’s a challenge that is facing all human-computer interface research,” says Betke. “We can adapt our own system with user profiles and all that, but to actually have the computer figure it out for us and help us along is a very different story.”

The award was started by the WEF in 2000 and recognizes start-up companies that have “the potential to inspire significant change in business and society.”

“The World Economic Forum is proud to recognize an outstanding group of innovative companies as Technology Pioneers for 2011. Their technologies and business models will have a durable and valuable effect in several industries and society as a whole. We look forward to their unique contributions to the mission of the Forum: improving the state of the world,” said Andre Schneider, Managing Director and COO of the World Economic Forum.

The rising global importance for energy efficiency was reflected as a record thirteen clean-tech companies were recognized this year.  Israeli start-up Takadu created a software program to monitor water distribution networks and help utility companies detect potential leaks or equipment failures and sequentially alert employees of the problems through email or SMS messaging.

The only place to look to when it comes to technology is the future. It’s exciting to learn about truly innovative technologies that may one day become household names. If history is any indication, these pioneers have a fighting shot: Google, Facebook, Paypal and Twitter are former winners…

Digital Lumens, a Boston-based start-up, was named a 2011 Technology Pioneer. Digital Lumens creates LED-based lighting systems that use sensors and controls to reduce customer energy use up to 90%.

For more information about the 2011 Technology Pioneers follow@techpioneers on Twitter or read the WEF blog.

Boston University professor Raj Mohanty founded Sand9, a company focused on developing high-precision micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology, in 2007.

The start-up, which spent its early years in OTD’s Technology Incubator, recently revealed the development of MEMS oscillator structures that match the performance of high-end temperature-compensated quartz crystal (TXCO) oscillators. This breakthrough will allow MEMS to compete with TXCO in the mass market for wireless 3/4G cellphones, global positioning systems, and WiFi.

Find out more information about Sand9 on their website or by contacting Sean Lee at OTD (seanlee@bu.edu)

Grinstaff accepting the IOTY award from President Brown

The Innovator of the Year (IOTY) Award was created to recognize a faculty member who translates his or her world-class research into inventions and innovations that benefit humankind.

“(Grinstaff’s) accomplishments in the past year include 15 peer-reviewed papers published, two invention disclosures, a patent filing, and more than $1 million invested in Flex Biomedical,” Brown told the crowd as he presented the award.

And that’s just the past year. Grinstaff has published over 60 manuscripts and co-founded three companies: Hyperbranch Medical Technology, Acuity Bio and Flex Biomedical, which started out housed in OTD’s Technology Incubator.

Congratulations Mark!

Find out more information about the IOTY Award here

As a researcher in Uday Pal’s mechanical engineering lab, Boston University Alum (Ph.d Mechanical Engineering ‘10) Soobhankar Pati developed environmentally-friendly procedures to produce metals like magnesium, calcium and titanium.

Pati’s research shifted from metals to clean energy. He, along with other researchers, developed a single-step, carbon-neutral process that uses garbage such as plastic bottles to produce separate streams of pure hydrogen and synthetic gas. The extracted hydrogen is then used by fuel cells to get energy.  Pati hopes to increase the amount of waste the device can consume to 2 tons over the next few years.

How Pati's waste-to-hydrogen model works

(watch the video and read the original article from BU College of Engineering Magazine here)

Flat-screen TVs played interactive presentations from university start-up companies as well as the Coulter Foundation, Fraunhofer USA, the Photonics Center, BU Biomedical Engineering, and the BU Clinical and Translational Research Science Institute.  Representatives from each group answered questions and chatted with guests.

Boston University President Robert A. Brown provided a keynote speech addressing the history and importance of research and development at the university level. He also presented Boston University Professor Mark Grinstaff with the 1st annual Innovator of the Year Award. The Innovator of the Year award was created to recognize a faculty member who translates his or her world-class research into inventions and innovations that benefit humankind.

OTD Managing Director Vinit Nijhawan highlighted his goals for the future of technology development at BU, including increased student participation in entrepreneurship and mentoring programs, more facilities for start-up companies, and greater support for university-developed research.

Outside on the patio the bright sun, tasty barbeque food, and great music from Joshua Tree Band made for a picture-perfect summer evening.

Our goal for TDRR was to create an event where technology professionals and the University community could come together to establish connections, foster discussion, educate and explore. From the positive comments we received, we can proudly say that we exceeded our expectations. We hope you all got as much out of the night as we did.  We’re already looking forward to next year: stay tuned for updates!

What did you think of TDRR? Leave a comment with some feedback so we can improve on next year’s event!

Welcome to Terrier Tech, a blog about technology, research and innovation at BU, from the Office of Technology Development at Boston University.

We’re using this blog not only to disseminate information, but more importantly, to highlight amazing and sometimes previously unrecognized research and technology developments at the university and through the individual work of faculty and students.

The Office of Technology Development provides a service to the Boston University community- faculty, students, alumni- the translation of their ideas into useful products and services. We provide this service through patent filing, licensing, mentorship, funding, and business incubation.

Thanks for checking us out! Comment, share with friends, and give us feedback.

-OTD at BU