Vijee Venkatraman

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Getting Personalized Book Recommendations

The complaint of the bibliophile – too many books, too little time – sounds like a plea for help. Forget about reading them all, how is the time-starved reader supposed to even keep track of the latest offerings from the publishing industry? Like a proactive...

The Making of Life In the Death Zone

Starting in the early 1970s, two German boys—one from the East, one from the West—with binoculars around their necks spent their teenage years pacing either side of the insurmountable Iron Curtain, the “death zone,” looking for birds. Today, the former pen pals are striving to...

Blue-rayed Limpets shine for a reason

Taking a trick from birds and butterflies, a mollusk shines blue using intricate structures that allow selective reflection of light. But unlike other animals, the blue-rayed limpet, a snail that lives along the rocky shores of the northeastern Atlantic, creates functional iridescence using a hard...

Apps vs Autism

Can technology help children with autism accomplish what other educational efforts have not? Ned Sahin aims to find out. Sahin founded Brain Power, a Cambridge startup that is using Google Glass to teach children with autism how to better engage and socialize with people. Brain...

MIT and The Shortcut to Nirvana

The colorful and chaotic Kumbh Mela (Kumbh, for short) is possibly the largest religious gathering on earth. The Hindu pilgrimage, which happens once in twelve years in an Indian city, draws millions of devotees. Now, thanks to Ramesh Raskar, a MIT Media Lab professor whose...

Watching you Watching Me

For people who use video chat services to catch up with someone close—a beloved grandma or dear friend—it’s pretty easy to read the cues and reactions of a familiar face. But in video chats among a group of people, say a business meeting among different...