Four Indians have been included in the prestigious MIT list of 35 innovators under 35 this year namely, Saurabh Srivastava, Rahul Panicker, Rohan Paul and Aaswath Raman. The annually published roster highlights the people behind emerging technologies that could potentially have a significant impact on our future.
Rahul Panicker is an engineer educated at Stanford University, who has started his own company called Embrace. The hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit firm manufactures an incubator for pre-mature babies that can maintain a constant temperature for 6 hours without electricity. It’s priced at 1% of what traditional solutions cost and can be operated by a non-expert.
Rohan Paul (pictured above) is the creator of the SmartCane, an affordable attachment for the blind to use with their regular canes. It utilizes ultrasonic ranging to detect obstacles and vibrations for feedback. He claims the aid helped prevent collisions up to 95% in 2012 and is currently being used by over 10000 people. He aims to put it in the hands of a million individuals in the future.
Aaswath Raman is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. He’s made a unique mirror which has been coated with a material to allow heat to escape into space. According to the MIT Technology Review, it’s currently in the prototype stage as of now, but could potentially be used in air-conditioners and refrigerators with a minimum amount of electricity. He’s already partnered with a company for its development.
Saurabh Srivastava, a researcher at Xerox India, is developing an interactive voice and gesture-based system in order to make digital tools accessible to those with only basic reading and writing skills. The initiative simply involves speaking into phones or using movements to communicate so that individuals with limited literacy to get information online.