Canvas for the Innovative Mind

Many congratulations to our EMBA alumnus Michael Hastings (class of 2011) for being elected as the Senator from the 19th Senate District of Illinois.

Note from Raj Echambadi: Many thanks to Larry DeBrock for writing this blog post about Alvin Roth. Larry and Al Roth were colleagues for a while at the University of Illinois. One of Larry’s early academic publications was with Al Roth entitled ”Strike-two: Labor-management negotiations in major league baseball” in the Bell Journal of Economics in 1981. It is an interesting paper that investigates the hyphenated strike in major league baseball in 1980.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics is being shared by two American professors, Al Roth and Lloyd Shaply.  We are particularly proud of one of these two gifted economists. Al Roth started his faculty career at the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  An undergrad from Columbia University, Al earned his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1974 and joined Illinois that same year, holding joint appointments in the Department of Business Administration as well as the Department of Economics (which at that time was part of the Business school).  In 1977 he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 1979 to Full Professor.  That remarkably rapid progression from brand new Assistant Professor to the top ranks of the professoriate was an early predictor of his tremendous abilities.  In 1982, Al moved to the University of Pittsburgh. 

This week, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to enable driverless cars to be operated and tested on the public roads of California. Google’s Sergey Brin expects that people will be able to drive these robot cars in the next few years. A few years ago, people were discounting the possibility of driverless cars and here they are. This innovation is a potential game-changer and is bound to change how several industries operate. 

While ambient noise is omnipresent, our understanding of its impact on human cognition, particularly creative cognition, has been limited. Hence, in a recent project we examined the effect of ambient noise on consumers’ creativity and determined how and why background noise can affect creativity.

Google Glass is basically a smart pair of eye glasses that is location-aware with an inbuilt camera and GPS. One can use head movements to scroll and click on information but it will also use voice input and output. The eyewear is a standalone product that runs on Android and is connected directly to the cloud. Check out this incredible video on what Google Glass can do. Industry watchers think that a mainstream product is likely to be available sometime in late 2013 or 2014 for the price of a smartphone.