The CNN 10: Thinkers

By Brandon Griggs, CNN

Every year, malaria kills more than 600,000 people in the developing world, the vast majority of them young children in Africa. The disease jumps from person to person through mosquito bites and can become a full-blown epidemic when it spreads to areas where residents have not built up immunity. It’s crucial for those fighting malaria to understand how and where the disease spreads, although data on such transmissions has been hard to find.

Until now. Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, has found a way to track the spread of malaria in Kenya by studying cell phone data. Her research, published in the journal Science, has the potential to help public health officials around the globe control outbreaks – not just of malaria but of other deadly diseases as well.

It started when Buckee and her husband, Nathan Eagle, moved to Kenya in 2006. She was doing research on malaria, while he was developing a cell phone-programming curriculum at the University of Nairobi. Before long, their work merged in unexpected ways.

“Nathan was analyzing call data records from Kenya to understand the business side of how people are using phones,” Buckee said. But she soon realized that the same data could be used to observe human travel on a population level. “This gives us, for the first time, a huge amount of information about the human dynamics that are responsible for spreading disease.”

Between 2008 and 2009, Buckee and other researchers mapped every call or text made by almost 15 million Kenyans to one of thousands of cell towers in 692 towns and villages across the country. They cross-referenced the phone users’ locations against a malaria map to discover clear patterns in the spread of the disease: namely, that it largely originates in Kenya’s Lake Victoria region and moves east, toward Nairobi.

Armed with this knowledge, health workers could send warning text messages to residents in affected areas, urging them to use mosquito netting.

Other countries have approached Buckee to see how her research might help them as well.

“This provides us with a tool to map human mobility that spreads all diseases,” Buckee said. “If there is an outbreak of influenza, for example, these types of data can yield accurate forecasts of where the disease will spread and how quickly. For policy-makers, that makes it a very powerful approach.”

By Heather Kelly, CNN

The way corporations approach innovation is decades out of date, says Regina Dugan.

The head of special projects at Google-owned Motorola Mobility is trying to change the way big companies come up with ideas by emphasizing urgency and not being afraid to fail.

"The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way,” she said. “It’s supposed to be hard.”

A mechanical engineer by trade, Dugan has unique experience with big technological innovations. Before coming to Motorola last year, she was director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government arm that develops cutting-edge technology -- including the precursors to GPS and the Internet itself -- for the Pentagon.

Dugan's approach to problem-solving starts with a taste for tackling difficult real-world problems with serious science.

It’s already bearing fruit at Motorola, where she has revealed glimpses of her team’s new boldness. Dugan showed up at a tech conference in May wearing a prototype of an electronic tattoo that can be used to authenticate a user instead of a password.

Applying the DARPA model for churning out breakthrough innovations to a large corporation is no easy task. Her Motorola team hires technical project leads for two years only, creating a built-in timeline for getting results.

Coming up with the ideas is the first challenge. But turning an experimental project into a viable commercial product requires a certain amount of discomfort, Dugan said, because engineers often don’t know until the last minute whether an idea is a winning concept.

"Solving the problem must matter. It must instill a sense of urgency,” she said. “And that urgency cannot be created in the abstract; it has to be real to inspire greater genius.”

By Doug Gross, CNN

You probably don't think your thermostat has a whole lot in common with your iPod. And that's why you're not Tony Fadell.

"They might look like totally different products to the consumer," said Fadell, the man some call the "father of the iPod" for his work at Apple designing that game-changing device. "But on the inside, they're very similar."

After a stint at Philips Electronics in the mid-1990s, Fadell formed his own company, Fuse. One of the products he hoped to develop there was a small disk-drive-based music player.

But when funding for the company fell through, he was lured to Apple and tasked with overseeing the design and production of what in 2001 would become the iPod.

At the time, Fadell was what Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson described as a "brash entrepreneurial programmer with a cyber-punk look." In the course of developing the iPod and helping design the iPhone, he became one of Jobs’ top lieutenants and even accomplished the rare feat of winning an argument with the mercurial CEO.

Now, through his own Nest Labs, Fadell has reinvented the humble home thermostat. His digital Nest device is handsome to look at, is Wi-Fi enabled and learns its users’ habits to increase efficiency. The programmable thermostat can be controlled remotely with a smartphone and claims to cut users’ heating and cooling costs by up to 20%. Nest devices have saved more than 1 billion kilowatt hours in energy, Fadell says.

Not content to stop there, Nest just introduced a next-generation smoke detector that issues vocal warnings during emergencies and can be turned off by a wave of the hand.

Disparate though they may seem, Fadell says, both the iPod and the Nest were born from the same place.

“Both of the products helped to fix some real frustrations I had in my life,” he said. “That’s really where the inspiration comes from: this frustration I have with products that really have meaning to me. I wanted to go off and fix them and make them better.”

The iPod came about because Fadell was a DJ and got tired of lugging thousands of CDs from gig to gig. Later, as a homeowner, he “was spending a lot of money on energy and had to look at this ugly box I didn’t know how to use,” he said.

Another key to innovation, Fadell said, is staying true to your vision. For example, in the late ‘90s when everyone was rushing to build websites, he focused on mobile products. Now, most Web developers are building mobile products.

And of course, he says, follow your passions.

“When I was younger and single, it was (about) music,” he said. “Now, when I’m married and have a family, I’m more concerned about all the energy we’re using and leaving the planet in better shape.”

By Doug Gross, CNN

Mary Lou Jepsen had a great idea recently, one of those “light bulb” moments when a way forward toward big-time innovation reveals itself.

Curious? So are we.

“I can’t tell CNN about it yet,” she said. “Ask me in a year.”

That’s not surprising. Jepsen, a pioneer in the field of computer displays, works at Google X, the company’s super-secretive lab that has birthed such projects as Google Glass and a driverless car. Its latest shoot-for-the-moon projects are rumored to range from fleets of robots to a space elevator.

“We aren’t necessarily unique in our pursuit of impactful progress, but our commitment and investment create an ideal environment in which we can take big, audacious bets,” Jepsen said.

“We aren’t afraid to ask questions from radically different perspectives, rethink solutions from the ground up and have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

As a pioneer in computer displays, Jepsen brings her own history of innovation to Google’s labs.

She worked on the world’s first holographic video system at MIT in 1989 before co-founding Microdisplay, where she specialized in creating small display screens more than a decade before most of us began walking around with one in our pocket.

“Hardware engineers weren't even considering the screen as part of the hardware at that time,” she said. “But I led a double life for so much of my life. I also trained and worked and supported myself as a visual artist. I couldn't fathom why the most expensive and most power-hungry component in a device, and all you see when you look at a device, could be considered so irrelevant.”

Jepsen also is co-founder of One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit that has put cheap, durable laptops and tablets in the hands of 10 million children -- many among the world’s poorest -- since 2005.

The idea was hatched in what was supposed to be a five-minute meeting with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. She says computing giants like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michael Dell told her it wouldn’t work.

“When I think about it and how crazy people thought we were to do it, I still get blown away,” she said, “and it encourages me to keep taking big risks where the impact can be as dramatic.”

Ultimately, she says, innovation is about asking different questions if you want different answers.

“This is obvious to many, but they continue to ask the same questions, almost (as if) in a rut,” she said. “Ultimately, I believe it’s about preserving our ability to continue to ask ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’ ”

By Doug Gross, CNN

Sugata Mitra is best known for Hole in the Wall, an experiment in which free public computers were placed in India’s slums for children to use.

But to sum up the range of studies he’s pursued, and contributed to, over the past three decades would take a while.

Literacy and education. Physics and energy. Computer engineering and electricity conductors.

Mitra is credited with at least 25 inventions, many related to computer literacy and cognitive development. He helped pioneer desktop publishing in the 1980s and is now working to create a cloud-based lab where children can connect with online mentors, tackle intellectual projects and learn from one another.

And to hear the professor at England’s Newcastle University tell it, none of these ideas came from a stereotypical “Aha!” moment when a light bulb flicked on.

“I can't think of even one,” said Mitra, the recipient of this year’s $1 million TED Prize for School in the Cloud, a planned online education network for kids in India. “When an idea does appear, it is as though it was always there, always obvious. And I think, 'Many people must have thought of this.’ ”

The best ideas come, he says, “when people wander aimlessly around ideas” rather than having rigid goals.

It was that sort of mindset that led to the Hole in the Wall experiment.

In 1999, Mitra embedded a computer into the wall of a Kalkaji, New Delhi, slum where children were allowed free access to it. Many kids learned quickly how to use the machine and then taught others. The experiment, which has been repeated in many places, suggested that children anywhere can learn to use computers easily and without formal training.

“I just did it to see what would happen,” Mitra said. “I did not know, or particularly care, if anyone else had done it. Maybe its lasting impact will be to change our ideas about children's minds and how those engage with vast clouds of information and ideas.”

Oh, and the whole “necessity is the mother of invention” thing? Not so fast, Mitra says.

“Necessity may be the mother of invention, sometimes, but it is not the mother of creativity,\ or of conceptual jumps,” he said. “For making real conceptual jumps, one needs to think in really different ways and to mix up things in one's head.”

By Doug Gross, CNN

Soon after becoming a dotcom billionaire with PayPal, Elon Musk set some rather ambitious goals for himself. He wanted to fix the biggest problem in the world -- and tackle perhaps the biggest problem in the universe.

That’s taken three forms: SpaceX, a private company that has conducted missions to the International Space Station; Tesla Motors, which builds high-end electric cars; and SolarCity, which designs and finances solar-energy systems.

The South Africa-born serial entrepreneur, who first sold computer code for a video game when he was 12, is CEO and chief technical officer of the first company, the CEO of the second and chairman of the third.

“What SolarCity and Tesla are about are solving what I think is the most pressing terrestrial concern, which is the sustainable production and consumption of energy,” Musk said in March at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

“What SpaceX is about is helping solve the biggest non-terrestrial problem, which is the extension of life beyond Earth.”

That’s right. The company’s ultimate goal, Musk says, is a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

Musk says the key to innovation is a willingness to take risks. He has an estimated net worth of $6.2 billion -- good for No. 61 on the Forbes 400 list – but says he was virtually “all-in” by committing his fortune to his three post-PayPal projects.

All of them were a bit of a gamble.

“When starting out Tesla and SpaceX, in both cases, I thought the odds of success were less than 50%,” Musk said this year. “So it’s not as though I was convinced that it would all work. I thought, ‘Well, it probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try because the outcome is important.’ ”

His has been a life of risk-taking. Musk moved to Canada at age 17 to avoid serving in the apartheid-era South African army. He left a Ph.D. program in physics at Stanford after two days to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Then, with success few could dream of, he bet it all on space, electric cars and solar panels.

Of his three ventures, SpaceX may be the most ambitious. Fueled by a childhood love of author Isaac Asimov’s science fiction, Musk said, he grew frustrated that there was no mission, by NASA or others, to get to Mars. So he dived in, knowing that setbacks, even tragedies, could result before the achievement of a goal he hopes he sees in his lifetime.

“We should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur,” he said. “If our forefathers had taken that approach, the United States wouldn’t exist.”

By Heather Kelly, CNN

In 2007, Stanford computer-science professor Andrew Ng stuck cameras in the back of the university’s classrooms and videotaped a bunch of professors giving lectures. He uploaded the videos to the Internet, and a little slice of Stanford was suddenly available to anyone for free.

In doing this, Ng, whose research focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, discovered a new passion for free online education. He played around with the concept by chopping the long lecture clips into more manageable 10-minute chunks, launching two open online courses and eventually co-founding online-learning site Coursera.

It took Ng four years of prototyping the technology for Coursera in his living room before he thought it was good enough to launch. Soon, the site was offering classes in a variety of disciplines by top professors at Stanford, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and other leading universities.

Now, Ng is on leave from Stanford to focus on Coursera full time. He doesn’t think Web courses can ever replace face-to-face learning on campus -- they still lack a sense of community and one-on-one relationships with mentors -- but he’s determined to improve the online-education experience.

One way he's tackling that is in a classic research manner. Education research has primarily been an anecdotal science, but Ng is trying to make it more data-driven. For example, Coursera can see students’ keystrokes, track how long they pay attention to lectures and even see which multiple-choice answers they choose on tests before changing their mind.

"The amount of data per student we can collect is unprecedented in education," he said. "We're starting to mine this data for insights about human learning."

Today, Coursera offers almost 500 courses by 85 universities in 16 countries. More than 4 million students have signed up.

In one early success story, Ng discovered that 2,000 students submitted an incorrect answer to a question in an online quiz. By looking at the data, he identified a common math mistake and added a custom error message for future students.

It was the kind of mistake that wouldn't necessarily have been corrected in an on-campus class, a fact that’s not lost on Ng.

"In order to get this highly personalized experience for students, what was needed was to teach a class for a hundred thousand students," he said.

By Heather Kelly, CNN

When you think of technological innovation, the U.S. government isn't what springs to mind.

And that's exactly why Jennifer Pahlka has her job.

Pahlka is spending a year as the deputy chief technology officer at the White House. She manages the presidential innovation fellows program, which brings in sharp minds from outside Washington to help improve the U.S. government's use of technology and make federal agencies smarter and more efficient. In this way, she brings a lean, startup-like style of thinking to intractable government bureaucracy.

“Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government,” Pahlka said in a well-received TED talk last year.

Pahlka has experience straddling the worlds of technology and government. She also founded Code for America, a nonprofit organization that connects tech professionals with local governments to improve basic services.

In one of its most famous successes, a Code for America software developer built an app that helped clear fire hydrants in Boston after they were buried in a massive snowstorm. Citizens could sign up through the app to “adopt” a hydrant in their neighborhood and dig them out after blizzards; in exchange, they got to name their hydrant. Through crowdsourcing, the app addressed a civic problem that the city’s beleaguered fire department couldn’t solve on its own.

"I work on the borders between things," explained Pahlka, who has also worked in the video game industry.

Reforming the machinery of government is a far cry from what Silicon Valley types are used to. Government change moves much slower, for one thing, because so many stakeholders are interested in each project.

But by encouraging tech-minded citizens to help tackle civic problems, Pahlka hopes to make the federal government function more like the Internet itself: open, collaborative and solution-oriented.

In this way, she might help accomplish something few have been able to do lately: easing Americans’ frustrations with Washington gridlock.

"When you do make something happen, it happens at an enormous scale," said Pahlka, who will return next year to running Code for America. "You're not just doing it for a customer base. … You're doing it for all the American people."

By Brandon Griggs, CNN

Bre Pettis is not the first person to pioneer 3-D printing, the emerging process of manufacturing items from digital models by programming a machine to print them, layer by layer, using molten plastic or other materials. But nobody has done more to bring 3-D printing into the mainstream as an affordable option for small-business owners, craftspeople or people just tinkering in their garage.

"I think we can safely say that if there is a 3-D printing revolution, he is the commander in chief," said Hugh Forrest, director of the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in introducing Pettis’s keynote talk there this year.

Pettis spent seven years as an art teacher in Seattle’s public schools, where he found that his students paid the most attention when he demonstrated how to make something. A lifelong tinkerer, he had heard of 3-D printers but couldn’t afford one; until recently, most models cost tens of thousands of dollars. So he figured out how to make one himself.

In 2009, Pettis and two friends raised some cash, founded MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn, New York, and began building primitive 3-D printers. Their first models were made from plywood. Back then, 3-D printing was almost unheard of, so Pettis often had to explain the concept to people.

“In the very beginning, when I told others that I made 3-D printers, they would look at me and scratch their head. It's always been a bit of science fiction,” he said. But early demand was surprisingly strong.

“We made what we thought was enough to sell over several months. Instead, they sold out in days,” he added. “That's when we knew we had something big.”

Today, MakerBot is a leader in making desktop 3-D printers that sell for $2,000 to $3,000 – within reach of many designers, entrepreneurs and consumers. The company is at the forefront of the burgeoning “maker” movement, which celebrates a creative, do-it-yourself culture. Some experts predict that $99 3-D printers soon will soon be as common in home offices as desktop scanners.

In this way, Pettis has helped usher in a new industrial revolution: No longer are people at the mercy of manufacturers. Instead, they can produce their own parts to repair broken appliances, toys or equipment. In recent years, people have used 3-D printers to make everything from jewelry to dental prosthetics.

One of Pettis’ favorite stories is about a South African man who lost four fingers in a woodworking accident and partnered via the Internet with a theatrical prop maker in Seattle to design a prosthetic replacement. They made a fully functioning “Robohand” on a MakerBot printer, the designs for which have been downloaded more than 36,000 times by people around the world.

“When you are a tinkerer or a maker and you want something,” Pettis said, “you make it yourself.“

By Heather Kelly, CNN

Buried inside vast amounts of computerized data are answers to big questions, both helpful and lucrative. Shyam Sankar is working to extract those answers to solve crimes, fight terrorism and save lives.

Sankar leads a team of engineers at Palantir, a data-mining company with a reputation for mystery: It was founded in part with funding from the CIA, and its work has been tied to the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance programs.

Indeed, Palantir helps the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department and other federal agencies fight crimes such as financial fraud by looking at large, sensitive data sets for anomalies and patterns. But Sankar has loftier goals in mind.

“I believe that a handful of computer scientists organized around a higher purpose can change the world,” he wrote on his blog.

Palantir’s philanthropy engineering team studies data to tackle such global problems as human trafficking, the spread of disease and the atrocities that can erupt suddenly in conflict-torn countries.

“The most valuable and elusive elements lurking within big data sets are often human: fast-moving targets such as terrorists, cyber criminals, rogue traders and disease carriers who tend to slip through the cracks,” Sankar wrote.

Private companies have hired Palantir to help them operate more efficiently. For example, Palantir works with health care companies to help them identify populations that are at risk for disease or other illnesses.

And Palantir’s data-crunching has helped responders find order in chaos after natural disasters. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a Palantir program helped aid workers map the locations of collapsed buildings and camps of the suddenly homeless. The company offered similar services to New Jersey officials after Hurricane Sandy struck last year.

Sankar is interested in the human pieces of these data puzzles and believes that technology should amplify human intelligence instead of trying to replace it.

Even with Palantir's powerful computers, all problem-solving starts with people’s insight and creativity, he said. No algorithm can replace that.

"That ability for the human to iterate on the problem is the crux of what we do," he said.