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 |  For a decade, John Carmack, cofounder of id Software, has revolutionized the computer game industry with immersive first-person shoot-'em-up games where players maneu-ver through 3-D worlds as characters on the screen. Since 1992 the self-taught programmer has attracted a devoted following of millions and has broken sales records with Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom I and It and the three part Quake series. His work raised the standard from simple games to complex, role-playing scenarios, which are so compelling that the U.S. Marines have used the games to train fighters.To make possible more realistic environments,Carmack has used leading-edge graphics hardware to create game engines,and he freely allows developers to improve them."A great many people in the industry got their start modifying our games,"he says proudly.Carmack—who also builds small rocket-powered vehicles—and his crew in Mesquite.TX, are working on a new engine that improves the depth and tex-ture of 3-D environments. His ultimate goal: achieve a level of rendering equal to those "of film and television graphics."
| | CARMACK | | JOHN | | AGE 31 | | ENTERTAINMENT | | ID SOFTWARE |
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| | |  Hydrogen fuel cells promise to break the world's fossil fuel habit without a puff of car -bon dioxide, and Joseph Cargnelli is helping them deliver. In 1995, from a small room above his family's machine shop inToronto, Ontario, the mechanical engineer and two associates launched Hydrogenics-The company made its mark producing test stations Cargnelli designed and assembled to put fuel cells through their paces.The test units accelerated the work of fuel cell developers and secured Hydrogenics'$84 million initial public offering in 2000.Today Cargnelli,vice president, is worth millions. But the roar of equipment still fills his shop floor office at a complex on Toronto's west side, where Hydrogenics is developing its own fuel cell engines. Last year, in a six-month span, Cargnetli's team prototyped a fuel cell generator and transformed it into a backup power supply to keep cell tower antennas and their networks alive during blackouts. This work clinched a partnership with General Motors. To Cargnelli, success just means one more step toward the hydrogen economy.
| | CARGNELLI | | JOSEPH | | AGE 32 | | ENERGY | | ENERGY |
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| | |  Howie Choset built himself a"snakebot" named Schmoopie, but that's not what sets him apart from colleagucs-The mechanical engineer and roboticist has developed motion-planning algorithms that ensure his autonomous, multi- jointed snakes not only sense and respond to objects in their path but explore every nook and cranny as they traverse a terrain.Other path-planning algorithms leave room for ambi-guity, but Choset's provides for complete cov-erage.As a result, the U.S. Office of Naval Research is funding Choset to build robots that search for buried mines. Choset has equipped his botswith mine detectors; when they sense a mine, they map its location,then maneuver around it-Choset is also working with Ford Motor to develop robotic car-painting techniques that will save production time. During it all, he has
developed the robotics minor at Carnegie Mellon University and says,"l would like to see this work get to the high-school and junior-high level and have students build robots to learn basic math and physics."Choset also hopes his algorithms and theories will one day be used in non-robotic applications, such as predicting crime patterns.
| | CHOSET | | HOWIE | | AGE 33 | | HARDWARE | | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY |
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| | |  Chemical biologist Benjamin Cravatt is devel-oping tools to illuminate the roles of proteins and enzymes in humans and animals. Cravatt and colleagues have synthesized dozens of fluorescent probes that chemically bind to enzymes in laboratory samples of healthy and diseased tissues, then light up when excited by a laser scanner.The technique can show which enzyrnes are more or less active in cancerous cells, which could herald a breakthrough for proteomics— the attempt to identify the structures and functions of human proteins. Cravatt's protein-activity- based approach represents an advance over methods that merely infer protein function
by comparing the abundance of proteins in samples. His technology also forms the basis ofActivX Biosciences in La Jolla,CA, which he cofounded in 2000 and now employs more than 40 people.Applications for the chemical probes include improving medical diagnostics, identifying new drug targets and facilitating drug tests."Helping with the development of a single drug would be huge,"the hyperkinetic researcher says/but we hope to do this many times over."
| | CRAVATT | | BENJAMIN | | AGE 31 | | BIOTECHNOLOGY | | SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE |
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| | |  Ignore the bare feetJosh Coates may look like an exuberant techie grad student, but he is a serious business player who has convinced investors to pony up $55 million for his 1999 San Francisco startup, Scale Eight. The chief technology officer has a paradigm-shattering idea that says the right software deployed over the Internet or local networks will let large cor- porations dramatically cut their data storage bills. Right now, data storage involves expensive, proprietary hard drives that are usually deployed at a few central sites; it's a $20 billion market set to grow inexorably as more computers produce ever more information. But Scale Eight challenges that inevitability. Coates says his software will let customers use networks to route data to scores of cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives, where they can be stored inexpensively
and securely.I'm trying to sweep hardware out of the way and thereby commoditize storage, really lowering the costs," says Coates, who counts Microsoft among his two-dozen customers. "Software has no bounds,"he adds-ifyou can think of it, you can do it in software."
| | COATES | | JOSH | | AGE 28 | | SOFTWARE | | SCALE EIGHT |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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