“You can dream anything. Dreaming is easy. But making games is very hard. It’s cross-disciplinary like no other medium, and you have to make sure you can actually make the game. It’s not enough to hand in half a game, which happens too often when you let them sort of just go wild.”
—Lee Sheldon, Associate Professor & Co-Director, GSAS Program in Communications and Media
Insights from RPI’s Lee Sheldon
The Business Review
“As I spend some of the upcoming weeks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California helping to analyze data from the Martian landscape that we will explore with Curiosity, I'll be thinking of how what we accomplish today sows seeds for future generations of scientists and engineers. If you, their parents, teachers and mentors, nurture their amazement and enthusiasm about exploring the unknown, we will get them to Mars.”
—Laurie Leshin, Dean of the School of Science
To Mars and Beyond
The Times Union
State of Education: Learning from the Curiosity rover
YNN
Selmer Bringsjord insists that the computer can’t be considered creative. “The machine is just doing what you've programmed it to do,” he argues. “If a machine is creative, the designer of the system — knowing the algorithms involved, data structure — is completely mystified by how the output came out — in my opinion, if that's not the case, then we're just cloning our own intelligence.”
—Selmer Bringsjord, Professor & Dept Head, Cognitive Science
The Computer as Artist
Studio360
“By changing the fungus, we can offer a product that will degrade in just 30 days if put into a compost pile, or last for over 30 years in an automotive application.”
—Gavin McIntyre, Rensselaer Class of 2007
Eco-Friendly Company Introduces Nature’s Packing Peanuts
Live Science
“Biology is driven by circadian rhythms at every level, and light is the main stimulus for synchronizing the circadian system to the solar day. By quantifying an individual’s light/dark exposure pattern, we can prescribe ‘light treatments’ promoting circadian entrainment, thereby improving health and well-being.”
— Mariana Figueiro, Program Director and Associate Professor in the Lighting Rsearch Center
Exposure to light could help Alzheimer’s patients sleep better
Stonehearth Newsletter
“Researchers in other fields have found a more immediate use for the technology. Philippe Baveye, an environmental engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, uses 3-D printing to make custom parts for a permeameter — a device used to measure the flow of water through soils. Although commercially available devices are fine for routine work, he has often had to design his own for more precise research — a task that previously required many hours on a lathe. Printing, he says, is much easier. Perhaps more importantly, Baveye can share his product just by publishing the design file. “The idea of being able to reproduce experiments described in the literature is taking on a new meaning.”
—Philippe Baveye, Professor and Kodak Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Science in three dimensions: The print revolution
Nature.Com
