Weekly Insider (A123 IPO & Lux Research)

The big news this week: the long-awaited nanotech and cleantech battery company, A123 a spin-out from MIT had a smashing IPO approaching $2 billion in market cap.

Here’s Lux Research’s take as covered by Nature:

University spin-out opens trading as a billion-dollar company. 

By Katharine Sanderson

More shares in battery manufacturer A123 were sold than initially expected.

One university spin-out company has suddenly turned investors batty for batteries. A123 Systems, a rechargeable-battery manufacturer founded in 2001 by materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, got a flying start to its life as a publicly traded company.

A123, based in Watertown, Massachusetts, first announced its intention to offer public shares in August 2008, with predictions that they would sell for between US$8 and $9.50. But yesterday, they flew off the shelves at $13.50 a share, with around 28 million shares being sold — 3 million more than expected. This bagged the company a cool $380 million ahead of its first day's trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange today. "It's very exciting news," says John Petersen, a lawyer specializing in energy-storage companies at law firm Fefer, Petersen and Cie in Barbereche, Switzerland. "I think the next 20 years are going to be times of immense prosperity for the battery industry," he says.

The cash boost comes shortly after A123 received a $249-million grant in August this year from the US Department of Energy to develop batteries for electric vehicles. The company has also raised more than $350 million in private investments. Add to this the money from the shares, a $69-million investment from General Electric and $100 million in refundable tax credits from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and A123 Systems becomes a billion-dollar company. The firm also applied for a $1.8-billion loan from the US government in January this year, with the intention of building a mass-production facility in Michigan.

"It's a very solid company poised to continue to grow," says analyst Michael Holman from Lux Research in New York. But, cautions Holman, "There are a lot of risks, particularly in the electric-vehicle market for A123."

A full copy of the article can be found on the Nature website.

Weekly Insider (Nod to Hod for Robotics)

The future really is here, its just unevenly distributed. Today’s courier is robotics researcher Hod Lipson of my alma mater Cornell University. Our recently published Forbes interview is below. Hod is learning a lot about consciousness and creativity by teaching robots to work. And if you thought the Roomba was a consumer electronics novelty, give a nod to Hod and what he’s working on.

Hod Lipson is director of Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Ithaca, N.Y. He focuses on novel ways for automatic design, fabrication and adaptation of virtual and physical machines. He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1999, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. His research focuses primarily on biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insights to biology.

Why don't we start with a quick overview of your research?
I am interested in robotics, specifically the questions of how we can make machines more adaptive to the environment, to other machines and to changes in themselves such as failures. Robotic systems today are superhuman in their accuracy, in their speed, in their ability to work 24/7 in hazardous environments and so forth. But, their inability to adapt to new situations is really their weak point. In contrast, biology is very good at adaptation.

So you think Darwin's mantra, survival of the most adaptable, applies to robots?
As environments and tasks become increasingly complex, it eventually boils down to adaptation, which is a key to sustained operation and to long-term viability. Traditionally in engineering, people focused on optimizing system performance and so-forth, but increasingly we need to shift the focus to the resilience of systems in the face of changing environments.

You recently published an exciting paper in Science summarizing some of your latest research. Could you give a quick overview of your results?
What we have done recently is created what we call a "robotic scientist." It's essentially an algorithm hooked up to an experimental system that performs experiments, collects data, and tries to distill the physics principles or physical laws that underlie the observed behavior. It doesn't just collect data, calculate correlations or make predictions--it actually tries to see if there is some simple underlying law that explains the apparently complex behavior. It doesn't quite replace scientists, but it's certainly a tool that I think will be necessary in order to make progress working on increasingly complex questions with large amounts of data, where laborious hand modeling falls short.

In a very primitive way, are you making robots self-aware and aware of their environments?
Well, the term "self-aware" is very touchy and controversial, but that's the direction we are heading. I think the ability of a machine to create a simulator of itself and its environment, and then use that simulator to plan and make predictions, is the beginning of what may be deemed self reflection, and I think it will be important in any kind of adaptive system. From a psychological point of view, you can argue that consciousness has to do with the ability to self-reflect and self-model. Of course, there is a huge gap between what we can do with machines and what primates and humans can do, but I think it's on the same path.

In taking inspiration from nature and Darwinian evolution and applying those lessons to robotics, what has really surprised you?
I'm always fascinated by the kind of solutions that you get when you allow something as open-ended as evolution to tackle a problem. What we have been doing extensively in robotics and other areas of engineering is using algorithms inspired from biological evolution to try to solve a challenging design synthesis problem. In other words, we have set of building block and we put them in a "primordial soup," so-to-speak. We then allow evolutionary processes of recombination and mutation to connect these pieces together, subject to some selection criteria, and let this evolutionary process brew for hundreds and thousands of generations until we get solutions that match our criteria of selection. We have been applying this to anything from designing robot bodies and brains to designing analog circuits and mechanical devices, and what's been really interesting to see are the kinds of results that come out of this process.

Can you give an example of a creative robotic invention?
In one case, we let it try to design a photonic structure, a structure that manipulates light at the submicron scale. The system came up with a new kind of design that we hadn't thought of before and that resulted in a publication in its own right. In another example, we let it design mechanisms to solve a particularly notorious challenge in mechanical design (making a machine that can create a perfect straight line--an engineering puzzle that took humans over a century to solve). Within about a day of computation, it came up with a number of different designs, some of them infringing on patents in this area.

We let it design some analog circuits, which usually take quite a bit of knowledge to design, and this algorithm, without any prior knowledge whatsoever about analog design, was able to create some really interesting designs, some again infringing on patents. What's most interesting is that when we added the requirement that not only must the design work, but it needs to be robust so that if you eliminate any of the elements it still works, and it was able to do that as well.

Most recently, in this robotic scientist challenge, we let this evolutionary process try to create models that explained the behavior of a double pendulum, which is a very complex and chaotic dynamical system. And just by looking at the behavior of this pendulum through a camera, it was able to generate Hamiltonians and Lagrangians (mathematical equations) that exactly explicate its behavior, something that would probably take someone with a major in physics to write down.

What have you learned about people and our own evolution in the process of working in robotics?
When you study robotics, it forces you to rethink, in a very quantitative way, the attributes we hold close and consider unique in our definition of what it means to be human. For example, what is creativity? If machines can create new things and ideas that infringe on patents, which humans have traditionally defined as being creative, what does that mean about creativity? When we have computers that can generate experiments and ask questions, what does that mean about curiosity? Traditionally, we use terms like creativity and self-reflection in a very loose way to cloak something we don't understand very well, but when you actually work with robots trying to emulate these very characteristics, it forces you to think about them in a very precise and quantitative way. Ultimately, I think it leads to deeper questions and better understanding of these concepts.

What innovations in robotics will change our lives 100 years from now?
We are heading toward increased automation, not just in terms of machines and robots performing automated tasks and chores, but automation in the design of those machines. That is, can we make machines that can make other machines? I definitely see an acceleration of these kinds of technologies showing up. It's a bit of a subtle point, but design automation gives you huge leverage to design other things faster. In parallel with that, I also foresee more automated manufacturing and personal fabrication taking over. I think personal fabrication is today, where personal computation was in the 1970s, and pretty soon we will see machines such as 3-D printers being used to fabricate things of increasing complexity at home and on-demand, replacing many traditional manufacturing technologies. And so this combination of robotic design and robotic manufacture is going to be one of the profound changes that we will see in the next couple of decades.

Weekly Insider (Heroes, Lifelong Learning & Inventor Dean Kamen)

Here’s the thing: education matters. That’s no zinger. Who doesn’t agree on that? But what do you do after tiring from nodding hypnotically to politicians’ pandering platitudes of “improving our schools”. I fell upon a shrine of serendipity—“randomness” and “optionality”, the twin pillars supporting the lectern of luck. And I met Jacob Mnookin. Jacob was starting the first ever charter school in Coney Island, Brooklyn—where I was raised and my family resides. We teamed up (I became Chairman), got chartered and open this August after a three-times oversubscribed lottery filled our founding 5th grade class. 80 incoming 5th grade students won the lottery. But most of the community has lost the proverbial ‘ovarian lottery’: born into poverty, out of wedlock and onto a uneven playing field they’re ill equipped for. Our mission is to right this.

I believe the two most important things that kids (especially inner-city kids) require for a successful education are (1) picking the right heroes and (2) developing a deep desire to learn. The first fosters the second. As a society, culturally we get what we celebrate. Celebrate celebrities, kids will seek to be socialites. Celebrate sports stars, kids will be aspirant “persperants”. Weekly gossip rags display celebrities riding bikes and eating ice cream, declaring “they’re just like us”. No. If we want to inspire greatness, it is not likeness, but distinction and achievement we should display. Besides: most great entrepreneurs that mint a fortune inventing the future don’t even know what they’re worth. The fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually stop to count them. One such fellow, similarly espousing the importance of education and doing a lot about it, is Dean Kamen.

Dean Kamen is an inventor, entrepreneur, and a tireless advocate for science and technology. As founder of DEKA Research & Development Corporation, he develops internally generated inventions and provides research and development for major corporate clients. Dean holds over 440 U.S. and foreign patents for innovative devices that have expanded the frontiers of health care worldwide. Some of his notable inventions include the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics, the HomeChoice™ portable peritoneal dialysis machine, the INDEPENDENCE® IBOT® Mobility System, and the Segway® Human Transporter. Among Dean’s proudest accomplishments is founding FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to motivating the next generation to understand, use, and enjoy science and technology.  Mr. Kamen was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002, is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2005.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME AN INVENTOR?
The alternative seemed so grim! I couldn’t imagine ever working for anybody, and I knew nobody was going to pay me to sit around and think of big ideas, so I decided to develop the skills to produce things that people would want. That way, people might be willing to part with their hard earned cash to let me do the things I really enjoy doing, like solving problems.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST INVENTION THAT CAUSED PEOPLE TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOU?
I built audiovisual systems in the early days of power electronics. At the time, these new power devices were revolutionary, allowing for thousands of times more power than you could get out of a little single transistor. I realized that I could take these high power devices and apply them in relatively simple engineered systems to quickly create things like light shows or control systems for big audiovisual displays. The new technologies allowed for very reliable, high performance shows, without the need for an enormous amount of equipment. I started building these when I was in high school and turned it into a whole business.
I personally think the entire horrible age of disco is a result of the achievements of the power semiconductor industry. An unintended, but very real consequence!

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BECOME AN INVENTOR? WERE YOU SELF-TRAINED?
I was always fascinated by math and physics. I liked the pure idea of looking at the world around you and trying to figure out the rules that make it comprehensible. We take the properties of our natural world for granted in many ways, but it is so repeatable and so consistent! Where do those properties come from? As a kid, I used to think about these things all the time.
Frankly, going to school and answering some trivial question in a textbook didn’t seem like learning or knowledge to me. So I spent a lot of time on my own trying to understand the laws of physics in the world around me. I learned that from the laws of physics, societies have developed the rules of engineering, and as long as those rules don’t violate those laws, you can achieve some pretty powerful results. That’s when I became fascinated with engineering, and I determined I would develop a skill set to become capable of producing things that everybody wants.

BRING ANY FAMOUS INVENTORS BACK TO LIFE – WHO WOULD YOU SPEND THE DAY WITH?
That’s an easy question. Archimedes and Galileo. Archimedes lived almost 2300 years ago, yet he had a better insight into the beautifully intricate and self-consistent rules of nature than most people do to this day. He was able to literally do what we now call calculus - figuring out the volume of solids like cylinders, cones, and spheres – without any prior knowledge. It took about 1,500 years for another great mind like his to come along in Galileo of Galilei. You look at what Galileo was able to do through just pure logic in understanding essentially the laws of motion, acoustics, mechanics, and optics- it is nothing less than astounding!
It’s almost inconceivable to me that these guys were able to have the clarity of thought and expression that they had, without the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants that we take for granted today. 

View my complete interview with Dean Kamen at Forbes.com.