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 |  Beam mid-infrared light waves across a power plant's smokestack and you can mea- sure the flow of gaseous pollutants. Feed that data back to the plant and you can trim pollution and fuel consumption. It's just one opportunity created by the quantum cascade laser.Thelaser,inventedatBell Labs in 1994, had promise as the heart of a smaller, less expensive, more efficient apparatus for moni-toring smokestack emissions. But when Aus-trian physicist Claire Gmachi arrived at Bell Labs in 1996,thc laser still had one fatal flaw: a messy, broad-spectrum beam.Within a year,
Gmachi had the problem licked-She amplified one portion of the beam by sculpting the laser crystal into an echo chamber for photons. It was a major leap, and colleagues say the intense Gmachi has since delivered an average of two advances of similar impor-tance each year. She's also been experimenting with lasers tuned to identify telltale gases found in our breath that may indicate everything from asthma to heart disease. Now Gmachi is focused on carrying data in fiber optics, where rapid-pulse lasers could help sate our hunger for bandwidth.
| | GMACHL | | CLAIRE | | AGE 34 | | TELECOMMUNICATIONS | | LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES' BELL LABS |
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| | |  Vinay Gidwaney wrote the software that his Calgary,Alberta, high school used to teach his classmates word processing. Resellers expressed interest,and Gidwaney,only 16, started a small company to supply it. But he found himself spending a lot of time meeting customer requests. Youthfully impatient and eagerto reserve his time for writing code, he created software tools to automatically handle certain customer support tasks.Gidwaney soon realized he could develop versions of the software tools to sell to other companies, to enable them to provide live support to their customers over the Internet. So the Canadian started Control-FI in Calgary. Gidwaney, chief technology officer of the 40-person company, calls his tools "better than being there."That's because a remote customer can continue to work on her computer while Control-FI software is solving her support problem in the back-ground: no need for her to step away from the computer for a human technician. Several organizations now use Control-F1 to provide customer support, including Novell, Unisys and IBM.
| | GIDWANEY | | VINAY | | AGE 20 | | SOFTWARE | | CONTROL-F1 |
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| | |  Choosing a car color is hard enough. Imagine trying to make strategic purchasing decisions for a huge corporation. Robert Guttman's knack for software agents—autonomous, personalized programs that facilitate better-informed decisions—has made such buying chores easier. With an artificial-intelligence degree and four years at Motorola, Guttman arrived at the MIT Media Lab in 1996 to plan
the world's first agent-mediated marketplace experiment. His idea was to create software agents that could find certain goods for their masters at preferred prices, then negotiate and close sales on the buyer's behalf.The successful experiment left Guttman wondering whether similar agents could function in real-world mar- ketplaces. In June 1998, along with two MIT colleagues, Guttman founded Frictiontess Commerce in Cambridge, MA,to commercialize his technology. The software is now used by operations like the U.S. Army for large purchase orders of laptops, truck brakes, even lumber. With Frictionless's success secure, Guttman has left his post as chief technology officer—though he remains a board member—and Is shopping his talents around.
| | GUTTMAN | | ROBERT | | AGE 32 | | SOFTWARE | | FRICTIONLESS COMMERCE |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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