Ten Young Geniuses Shaking Up Science Today

Meet PopSci's annual Brilliant 10--a selection of the brightest young researchers in the country. They're helping to keep us healthy, prevent disasters, and make green energy cheaper than coal. Lucky for us, our future is in their capable hands

Posted 10.19.2009 at 3:30 pm 6 Comments

André Platzer: John B. Carnett

Crash Test Anti-Dummy

Brilliant because: His software makes travel on planes, trains and automobiles safer

Name: André Platzer
Age: 30
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University

Every now and then, an innovation so vital comes along that it’s hard to imagine how we got along without it. Think seatbelts, antibiotics, fire hoses. Now add André Platzer’s KeYmaera, software that helps computer-controlled safety systems avoid catastrophic errors.

Now a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, Platzer grew up in Germany, where he became, of all things, an accomplished ballroom dancer. “I won a few tournaments,” he says. “But I was fascinated with computers, and that began to take up my time.” In 2006, as a professor at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, he began investigating how autopilot systems could fail. When he discovered that there were no models that could test more than a handful of conditions, he built KeYmaera. Prior to it, a collision-avoidance proposal for the Federal Aviation Administration would have told two close planes with intersecting flight paths to each hang a right turn, fly a half circle, and make another right turn to avoid a collision. When KeYmaera tested what would happen to the planes at varying airspeeds, altitudes and trajectories, it found that, in rare cases, the protocol could actually put planes on a collision course. Platzer fed alternative scenarios into KeYmaera until it verified a safer fly-around maneuver. His software has also made potentially lifesaving corrections to models of Europe’s high-speed train systems and adaptive cruise control in cars. “Before you spend $1 billion on a system,” he notes, “it’s good to make sure that it works.” —Bjorn Carey

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6 Comments

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lextir

10/24/09 at 11:11 am

I enjoyed the article, but was disappointed at first, because whomever posted (or wrote) it, did not bother to proof read it. The subject person featured, is introduced as "Michael Strand (also under the photo), but the whole article is about Michael Strano. I assume, for research purposes, the latter is accurate.

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Starwalker

10/24/09 at 1:56 pm

I know how!
When I was litle saw Star Wars too, but I was impress from the flying machines and now I'm able to make "Snow-Speeder" for example!!! And I have some ideas for new materials and way for fly including revolutionary engines...
Need only MONEY!!!

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Observer

10/24/09 at 7:09 pm

Lextir: These are called "typos" in the language of writers. "Typo" stands for typographical error. Errors are often defined as "common mistakes". Mistaking the name Strano for Strand by someone writing headings and captions, (as opposed to the individual who wrote the report and, hopefully, did research sufficient to get the subject's name right) is not impossible. They are similar, and Strand is somewhat more common that Strano. Nor does it require an arrogant and supercilious response. Somebody made a mistake. We humans, most of the rest of us being mere mortals, do that on occasion.

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Igot1forya

10/26/09 at 4:12 pm

Lextir, Observer is right. It was probably a typo. An example of poor proofing was kindly provided by Observer when he said, "We humans, most of the rest of us being mere mortals, do that on occasion."
If proofed, that statement would have benefited from hyphens rather than the use of commas to express his thoughts.

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MekhongKurt

10/29/09 at 8:50 am

Well, typos aside, I enjoyed it. As a university teacher of writing and myself a writer, I can observe that the choice in the instance cited between commas and hyphens is a toin coss, really; not all rules of punctuation and grammar were written on the backside of the 10 Commandments, after all! ;-) A little individual choice is stilly permissable, even in, say, the MLW Stylesheet and the Chicago Manual of Style.

While realizing these young people are genuinely exceptional, they do provide encouragement that not *all* of us are lazy sloths (as I tend to be, so I'm looking in the mirror!).

Part of the excitement about the areas in which these folks are working is that any of those areas could yield applicable results in the wider world at lightening speed. (Of course, it may turn out that none of them work out for years or decades to come, or maybe not at all.)

But consider something I read online just yesterday: about 10 of today's better work fields didn't EXIST -- just six years ago. (No, I didn't do the research to verify that.)

Then there's the exponential growth in knowledge; call it "Moore's Law Writ Large," if you will. A desktop computer I bought in 1997 had more processing power than the entire Mission Control in Houston had when we landed the first men on the Moon -- and that's from NASA, which happened to have an article using my exact computer as a comparison, not from the manufacturer. And that's stunning.

Further, the people who are the subjects of this article will undoubtedly inspire even younger young, bright sparks who will light their own torches.

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MekhongKurt

10/29/09 at 8:51 am

Sigh. Who am I to talk? MLA Stylesheet, not MLW!!!

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