Neil Gershenfeld

And then the crazy thing that happened after that was Phil Rittmuller came running into my lab.

He worked with, this became with Honda and NEC, airbags were killing infants in rear-facing child seats.

Cars need to distinguish a front-facing adult where you'd save the life versus a bag of groceries where you don't need to fire the airbag versus a rear-facing infant where you would kill it.

And so the seat need to in effect see in 3D to understand the occupants.

And so...

We took the Penn & Teller magic trick derived from Josh's thesis from Yo-Yo's cello to an auto show.

And all the car companies said, great, when can we buy it?

And so that became Elicis.

And it was $100 million a year business making sensors.

There wasn't a lot of publicity because it was in the car, so the car didn't kill you.

So they didn't sort of advertise, we have nice sensors so the car doesn't kill you.

But it became a leading auto safety sensor.

Right.

So now to get back to...

MIT, I was spending a lot of outside time at IBM Research that had gods of the foundations of computing.

There's just amazing people there.

And I'd always expected to go to IBM to take over a lab.

But at the last minute, pivoted and came to MIT to take a position in the Media Lab and start what became the predecessor to CBA.

Media Lab is well known for Nicholas Negroponte.

What's less well known is the role of Jerry Wiesner.