In the News: Surgery from Afar; Forecasting Airfares

« Washington Engineer - August 2006

Researchers test remote robotic surgeon

: The surgical robot built by Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen’s biorobotics team ready for action during testing in the Southern California desert last month.

• Read the front-page Seattle PI story
• Watch BioRobotics Lab videos
• Visit the Surgical Technology section of the BioRobotics Lab website

A joint project between two UW electrical engineering professors and their biorobotics students and a University of Cincinnati surgeon grabbed headlines around the country when the team operated a remotely controlled surgical robot from more than 1,000 miles away.

Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen, in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering, have spent the past several years designing and building a portable surgical robot that could be packed into distant spots – remote villages or near battle lines – and operated by surgeons from afar.

Collaborating with Cincinnati surgeon Timothy Broderick, the robot went through its initial round of field tests the first week of June. Researchers set up the robot, which disassembles and is packable at about 25 pounds, in the Southern California desert. Meanwhile, Broderick attempted to manipulate it via sophisticated joysticks from a conference room in Seattle.

Despite a few glitches – the motherboard on the main controlling computer died on the last day – researchers said the tests were successful.

“We did everything we said we were going to do,” Hannaford said. “And every time we have a glitch, that problem will never happen again because we will engineer it out.”

Airfare forecasting startup gets national press

• Read The New York Times story
• Read the Boston Globe story
• Read the Seattle Times article
• Read the Seattle PI story
• See the original news release

Oren Etzioni recalls the first time he started thinking about how airfare pricing worked. He was on a flight, and asked several fellow passengers how much they paid for their tickets for the same trip.

The answers varied wildly.

That was in 2002. A year later, he had initial results from the test of a data-mining algorithm that appeared to be able to predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a traveler can save money by waiting to buy tickets. This year, that process went commercial in the form of Farecast, a start-up company that uses Etzioni’s technology to help air travelers save money.

The company has been covered in national media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show.