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John Finan, thinking ahead
By his own account, John Finan was destined
to become an engineer. During his freshman year at University College
Dublin in his native Ireland, he entered an essay contest that
asked him to explain his choice of academic field.
"I wrote this essay about my conception, basically," says
Finan, now a fifth-year graduate student at Duke. "The idea
was that there were all these sperm racing up my mother's fallopian
tubes. I assigned them personalities that corresponded to different
professions. So there was a doctor sperm and a lawyer sperm. Also
among them was an engineer sperm.
"Along the way, the engineer sperm became fascinated with
the reciprocating motion of its tail. And it decided that a corkscrew
motion would generate more thrust. So it applied a corkscrew motion
and ended up arriving at the egg first. The idea was that I was
branded as an engineer from birth."
His creative thinking won him first prize in that contest, $500,
but it's his winning submission to a more recent competition that
has garnered Finan national acclaim, not to mention a BMW, $10,000
in cash, and an apprenticeship offer with one of the nation's leading
wireless communications firms.
Last summer, cell-phone giant Motorola announced its MOTOFWRD contest,
which challenged participants to project the future of "seamless
mobility," a company tagline that, in the words of its website,
involves "creating a new world of uninterrupted access to
information, entertainment, communication, and more." Entries
would be judged on three basic criteria: depiction of seamless
mobility, creativity of entry, and feasibility and sophistication
of ideas.
Many entrants took a big-picture focus, using their presentations
to make predictions about the future of wireless communications
in general. Finan took a different tack, focusing instead on one
specific innovative product that he believed could be the next
big thing: a "mood phone" that uses voice-recognition
technology to identify the emotions of the person on the other
end, and indicate them using different colored lights.
He presented his idea in the form of a short story. The protagonist,
Ian, suffers from mild Asperger's syndrome, a mild version of autism
marked by difficulty reading nonverbal cues. Ian's mood phone is
his key to getting along both in the workplace and in his home
life. Through Ian's eyes, Finan cleverly describes the phone's
transition from niche product to mainstream must-have, as features
like downloadable "celebration sparkles" win over the
high-school crowd and color conventions help onlookers avoid interrupting
important calls.
Finan came up with the idea after reading The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery novel featuring an autistic
child, and from discussions with colleagues about voice-recognition
technologies and mood-interpretation algorithms. The concept was
nurtured by his belief that the product could realistically become
a hit.
"This is not crazy 'Star Wars' stuff. There's no reason why
this couldn't go to market in two or three years as far as I'm
concerned," he says. "The other thing about cell phones
is that they're big money. One thing you learn in research is that
the things that are lucrative tend to develop quickly."
Motorola, for its part, has offered him a summer apprenticeship
to spend developing the technology. "I went to them saying,
'I know it's kind of wild, but maybe we can take certain ideas
away from it and run with them,' " he explains. "They're
like, 'No, dude, build the mood phone.' "
Finan, who is in the biomedical-engineering department, spent his
first four years at Duke studying brain injury and crash protection
and now works on cellular biomechanics in arthritis. He says that
those real-world applications are what he likes best about his
chosen field. "I love working with things, making tools for
people to work with. Not just imagining huge concepts, but actually
putting them to use."
That knack for solving problems and creating tools is why he got
into engineering in the first place. Well, that, and the twist
of a certain tail.
--Jacob Dagger
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