Ken Gabriel, Why your Smartphone is Smart.

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

How insight with a stick and piece of string led to an engineering adventure taking in spacecraft, military guidance systems and the micro-mechanical devices we use every day in our computers and smartphones. Ken Gabriel now heads up a large non-profit engineering company, Draper, which cut its teeth building the guidance systems for the Apollo space missions, and is now involved in developing both driverless cars and drug production systems for personalised medicine. Ken himself has a career in what he might term ‘disruptive engineering’. His research married digital electronics with acoustics - and produced the microphones in our phones and computers. He has a strong track record in defence research and has also worked for Google, taking some of the military research methods into a civilian start up. This led to the development of a new type of modular mobile phone which has yet to go into production. He tells us why aiming for seemingly impossible goals is a good idea, and how a structured systems based approach can help channel engineering creativity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service.
0:28.0	Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales.
0:31.0	Amongst all the smart things your smartphone can do, there are plenty of feats of
0:36.1	engineering you probably take for granted, like how you expand an image by
0:40.4	moving your thumb and forefinger apart on the screen or the way it responds to the
0:44.4	different amounts of pressure you apply or even how the image changes from portrait to landscape
0:50.5	mode when you rotate the device. Well many of these remarkably
0:54.4	useful innovations were developed thanks to the work of my guest today.
0:58.5	He's an American engineer, inventor, and leader in disruptive technology.
1:04.3	We'll find out more about what that means later.
1:06.8	His work spans both defense and civilian microelectronics,
1:11.5	from the stealth bomber to the digital microphone.
1:14.6	Ken Gabriel may not be a name that's familiar to you, but I'm certain you'll have used some of
1:19.3	the inventions and concepts that he's most associated with.
1:23.0	If you have a laptop, a smartphone,
	...

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