Mit Coffee Mug

3D Dashboard Map - Navigation of the Future

This is a prototype of what the dashboard of the future may look like.

It's a 3D navigation system that can tell if you need a cup of coffee, order it for you, and direct your car to its pickup location.

It's called the Affected Integrated Driving Assistant, or AIDA 2.0.

According to this MIT scientist, traditional GPS navigators will soon be replaced by interactive devices that can process and filter information in real time.

[Carlo Ratti, Director, MIT Sensable City Lab]: 

"Today's navigators in your car sometimes are frustrating. You know, you decide to take a different route and the navigator will keep on telling you 'recalculating, please go back' so the question was can you have somebody as a navigator that is more like a friendly companion."

The first version of AIDA was a robot that built a profile of the driver. It learned his or her habits and made helpful suggestions about possible destinations.

The new version has replaced the friendly robot with an interactive 3D map. It can keep the driver updated on all kinds of data from traffic conditions to your best friend's twitter status.

MIT scientists say the new system works by hand gesture recognition, allowing drivers to manipulate the display by pointing a finger.

[Christian Kloeckl, Research Scientist, MIT]: 

"So you remember the scene back then when we were using paper cards, paper maps and sometimes when you are alone in the car you did this adventurous method of putting the map on the dashboard while you are driving trying to follow that. Well, that's difficult because the map use to fall off from the dashboard and that is the difficult bit. That's somwhow what we're trying to achieve with AIDA but in a more integrated way. Bring the digital map where we can overlay information closer to where we see the physical city." 

And even though cities are bombarded with real time data, the team says AIDA can filter information according to the driver's preferences.

But what happens if more than one person is in the car, let's say a man is driving with his wife in the passengers seat? Will AIDA know something as simple as 'the wife is ALWAYS right?

Real Patriots Drink Coffee, and That's the Truth

July 4, 2011 In honor of Independence Day 2011, this news article is taking a different tack than usual. The article featured today actually appeared in March of this year, but it’s very apropos for July 4 due to its theme as it connects George Washington to coffee which leads to MIT which leads to a fascinating 1920 story of coffee experimentation.

Besides being the anniversary of the USA’s independence from England, we can also celebrate the beginning of coffee’s rise to fame as the “national drink”. A few years before the Declaration of Independence, in 1773, the whole revolutionary process began with the Boston Tea Party. After all the tea was tossed in the sea, coffee drinking became a patriotic duty. The Continental Congress institutionalized coffee as “the national drink”.

The next step, of course, was to merchandise the new patriotic drink, and that occurred in the first coffee houses, where the leaders of the day met and ostensibly planned the revolution. After all, what else did the likes of Paul Revere, John Adams and George Washington discuss over their coffees? It was outside a coffee house where the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence was made. It was at a coffee house that people gathered to welcome General Washington to New York on his way to the inauguration. Later, it was a coffee house which morphed into the New York Stock Exchange. Beat that, Starbucks!

A relative of President Washington went into the coffee business and started George Washington Coffee. It was on an empty can from this coffee - sitting in the MIT Museum – that writer Amy Marcott read about the event reported in March.

That brings us to the amazing story about the National Coffee Roasters Association giving MIT Professor Samuel Cate Prescott $40K to brew the perfect cup of coffee. Coffee purveyors were in a bit of a bind because beginning in 1830, enemies of coffee started making claims that coffee was not good for one’s health. Coffee consumption fell off. So naturally the coffee association went to the go-to guy for food PR, Prof Prescott.

The professor threw himself into “The New Science of Automatically Controlled Coffee Making.” (You might be able to read this title on the folder in the photo.) In the end he perfected a formula for good coffee: “one tablespoon of coffee per eight ounces of water, just short of boiling, in glass or ceramic containers, never boiled, reheated, or reused.” He went on to publish that coffee “properly prepared and rightly used, gives comfort and inspiration, augments mental and physical activity, and may be regarded as the servant rather than the destroyer of civilization.

The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences

Muret-Sanders enzyklopädisches englisch-deutsches und deutsch-englisches wörterbuch: Deutsch-englisch von H. Baumann durch einen Nachtrag bis auf die heutige Zeit ergänzt von E. Klatt

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