To lure budget-weary U.S. lawmakers to into a session about saving federal research, organizers titled it “Deconstructing the iPad: How Federally Supported Research Leads to Game-Changing Innovation.”
Congressional sponsors of the forum, a trio of Republicans — U.S. Randy Hultgren (R-Il.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) — must have known they had their work cut out for them.
Computer World talked to panel moderator Luis von Ahn, a staff research scientist at Google who worked on the CAPTCHA project about what the iPad has to do with government innovation and whether the strategy worked.
Here’s what von Ahn said about the reasoning behind title:
“We took something that was a pretty big game changer, which is the iPad. (You could also consider the iPhone, he added.) It’s an amazing innovation. But if you look at every one of its components, the majority actually come from federally-supported research.
The fact that the chips can be so small, to sensors (such as) the GPS – all of it comes from federally-supported research. At lot of times, the research was just done to understand the physical world better. But at the end of the day an innovative company like Apple can take these things and put them together into a really game-changing product.”
von Ahn says the forum, held with closed doors so that people would speak openly, went well, but adds that “it’s hard to know ” whether it convinced cut-happy lawmakers to spare federal research.
If the iPad can change the “everything must go” attitude to the federal budget, it may well be a magical device.
Via Computer World
