Len Schlesinger wryly refers to himself as president of the finest business school between Route 128 and I-495. And indeed, Wellesley, MA-based Babson College is, for many folks around Boston (and elsewhere), often over-shadowed by Hub institutions I don’t need to name.

Yet Babson is also one of the country’s top business schools. I’m not going to cite all the high rankings it gets from places that track B-school programs, because I don’t believe in such metrics. More to the point, Babson has a first-rate faculty, and we here at Xconomy seem to be writing increasingly about its graduates. Off the top of my head, I can reel off Jason Jacobs, who founded FitnessKeeper, maker of a highly popular run-tracking application for the Apple iPhone 3G called RunKeeper; Rush Hambleton, who founded Canditto, a Cambridge-based service that rents out photo-sharing kiosks; and Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben, who launched Paragon Lake (the subject of a previous X Factor column), which is out to revolutionize jewelry design and sales, when they were mere undergrads at Babson.

This kind of evidence, not rankings, is what caught my attention. So I was pleased to be able to visit recently with the dynamic Schlesinger, who took Babson’s reins in July 2008 and wasted no time trying to lift the college’s profile.

The Babson president has a unique academic and business background that includes some 20 years at Harvard Business School and eight years as a top executive at Limited Brands, his most recent position before coming to Babson (full bio here). And he says the combination of business and academic experience gave him three sets of skills that serve him well in his new job. First, thanks to his development work at Harvard and, later, Brown University, he knows how to raise money. Second, he has been able to bring the perspective of a business executive to the management of Babson, which has helped shape his plan to strike partnerships with universities around the world (more on this below). And third, he is intimately familiar with the ways of academia, which has helped him understand the process of getting buy-in from Babson faculty.

Now, Schlesinger is an energetic and thought-provoking speaker—and he can be hard to keep up with when taking notes. (If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube spot.)

What follows is a much-condensed overview of Schlesinger’s rapid-fire comments on innovation and entrepreneurship, and his ambitions for Babson, which was founded in 1919 as the Babson Institute (it became Babson College in 1959) and is now home to some 1,900 undergraduate and 1,600 graduate students.

1) Entrepreneurship rules—and it can be taught.

On this point, Schlesinger quotes or paraphrases the Bangladeshi economist and microlending pioneer Muhammad Yunus: “We’re all entrepreneurs, only too few of us get to practice it.”

Based on academic work at Babson and other institutions, Schlesinger believes that the principles and practice of entrepreneurship are “documentable, codifiable, and consequently teachable to anybody.” That is a tremendous opportunity for Babson, he says. “This is our time…and the world can benefit enormously from a much more expansive diffusion of what it is that we do.”

2) The underlying assumptions of most business plans, such as a skilled, abundant labor market, cheap energy, and easy access to credit, are things of the past. Outcome measures for businesses must be extended beyond the traditional profit and loss to embrace three categories of measures related to “people, planet and profit.

“The last year has just been spectacular in terms of demonstrating the limitation of the operating model that most businesses and most communities operate under,” Schlesinger says. “We need …Next Page »

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Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Intel Labs Seattle, the research lab run by the chip-making giant near the University of Washington campus, for the lab’s annual open house. It’s an extravaganza that always draws a big crowd from the local tech community. Besides the huge variety of lab demos, one of the most interesting things going on was a changing of the guard.

Dieter Fox, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW, succeeded David Wetherall as director of the lab two weeks ago, when Wetherall’s three-year term officially finished (see photo below). Fox is the fourth director of the Seattle lab, formerly called Intel Research Seattle; all have been UW computer science professors. While Wetherall’s expertise is in wireless networks, mobile devices, and Internet protocols, Fox’s strengths are in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. (He is the co-author of the 2005 advanced textbook, Probabilistic Robotics, with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University and Wolfram Burgard from the University of Freiburg.)

So, will Intel Labs Seattle now be doing all robotics, all the time? Will the first general-purpose household helper robot come out of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)? One can always hope—but Fox seems to have a broader and more practical outlook on the lab’s role in shaping the future of computing.

“Our role with respect to Intel is performing what they call disrupting research that is off-roadmap, but essentially our task is also to surprise Intel,” Fox says. “If we show what can be done with future computing systems, then we are serving our purpose. And beyond surprising Intel, we also want to surprise consumers by what can be done. It’s becoming more and more important that these computational systems are going to be observing the environment, using sensors. Today’s smartphones all have GPS, accelerometers, and all that. The key question is, how can we extract relevant information to make it more interesting for users?”

Seeing as robots are computing systems that sense and manipulate their environment, they will certainly figure prominently in the lab’s work—perhaps more than ever before. “For Intel, it’s clear the future of robotics is going to become extremely relevant. We need to see what are the key questions from a computational perspective, what kind of processing is needed for these systems,” Fox says. “Our key agenda is to inform Intel on what the future of computing looks like, especially computing connected to everyday scenarios.”

The idea is that if and when the market for intelligent household robots takes off, it’ll be Intel that provides their brains (in the form of microprocessor chips). But even beyond that, Fox says, “Intel could provide the processing that’s adapted to the specific needs of those systems, and along the way maybe also provide the computational toolset I need. So it’s not only the hardware, but it’s also a better understanding of how you extract information from these sensors. That’s also a theme for Intel—they want to go beyond just building the hardware, and show the whole user experience you can get if you have good computational power.”

Lastly, I got some closing thoughts on the lab’s evolution from its outgoing director. “The trajectory of the lab is, we’ve always done perception and sensing, starting with location, and we’re moving now to richer systems” like computer vision and robotic manipulation of objects, says Wetherall, who is going back to full-time teaching and research at UW this month (though he’ll stay involved with Intel Labs). “It’s quite a natural progression for the lab,” he notes. “That’s what leads to intelligent systems.”

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Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

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The University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering announced its Distinguished Lecturer Series for the fall. Highlights will include talks by spaceman Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software (Oct. 1), cooking science experts Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young of Intellectual Ventures (Oct. 6), wireless wizard Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm (Oct. 15), software strategist Craig Mundie of Microsoft (Nov. 5), and graphics guru Pat Hanrahan of Stanford University (Dec. 3). The talks are open to the public.

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This week, the Seattle area has lived up to its reputation as home to the future of technology, with three local (or formerly local) innovators making the national media rounds in Technology Review, the New York Times, and Time Magazine. And not in just one field or sector either—the three span academia (smart sensors), a major online video company, and a pervasive viral humor blog startup.

—Jason Kilar, CEO of online video website Hulu and a former Amazon executive, wrote a personal essay for the New York Times about his journey into the world of Internet startups, including his first meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, back when Bezos could be much more casual in presentation than he could probably get away with now. Kilar left Amazon in 2006 after becoming senior vice president of worldwide application software, to work for Hulu.

—Ben Huh, the Seattle-based owner of wildly successful humor websites like Lolcats (I Can Has Cheezburger) and FAIL Blog, was profiled in a Time Magazine story about his company Pet Holdings’ success with user-generated content. Starting with angel investor money in 2007, Huh bought the original Lolcats website and has since expanded to more than 20 viral humor blogs.

—Shwetak Patel, assistant professor in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science and engineering at the University of Washington made Technology Review’s list of top young innovators for developing a way to tell how people are moving around a house based on how they use electricity, gas, and water. Patel started with simple devices to monitor house utility use, but has since developed devices for sensing when people enter or leave a room based on air pressure. Monitoring resource usage could ideally lead to conservation of those resources, and help with keeping watch on elderly people who live alone. Patel recently co-founded a startup company in Seattle to generate appliance-itemized utility bills for consumers.

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From the seas to the stars, Microsoft Research is trying to increase its impact. The Redmond, WA-based computer science research organization is releasing new software tools aimed at helping scientists manage and visualize huge amounts of information, and make discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and oceanography. The announcement of the free tools, called Project Trident, is being made today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond.

Everyone knows information overload is a huge issue. Just try being a scientist these days. With increasing amounts of data available from the Internet, satellites, telescopes, cameras, gene sequencers, and networked sensors, researchers—and organizations in general—are looking for ways to cut through the deluge and focus faster on doing the analysis and getting results, rather than sorting through data.

It’s also a problem faced by big companies, financial analysts, and medical institutions. So, ultimately, Project Trident is not aimed at spearing purely scientific research problems—it’s software that also could yield big results for business down the road. “If we look back at the challenges faced in business, scientists were facing them years if not decades before,” says Roger Barga, a Microsoft researcher and principal architect on Project Trident. “We’re getting an early look at what our business customers will expect in their products in 3-5 years. It’s pushing another Microsoft [Windows] platform into new areas.”

Project Trident started around 2006, when Barga began collaborating with legendary Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (who was lost at sea in January 2007) on tools to help oceanographers make sense of volumes of data on things like temperature, salinity, and the physics of seafloor hydrothermal vents. “There’s a clear understanding of the science and how to put instruments in the ocean, but there’s a gap in how to convert data streaming in from the ocean to useful analysis,” Barga says. “Jim had this vision of …Next Page »

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Dan Weld spends a lot of time thinking about the Web and how to get the best information out of it. Weld is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Netbot, AdRelevance, and Nimble Technology. He is also a venture partner with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Some of his research projects include customizable software interfaces and ways to improve information finding on Wikipedia. He is an expert in Web search, information extraction, and adaptive user interfaces, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask: what is the big deal with Microsoft’s Bing, anyway?

In a recent interview, Weld talked about the improvements Bing has made over Google and other current search engines (only slight), the future of Web search, and a hint at a project he is working on that he thinks could change the way we find information online.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: Let’s start with your general impressions of Bing.

Dan Weld: I think it’s a nice, if small, advance. Some of the things they’ve done in this relaunch are primarily architectural and will support their plans for the future. In terms of what is actually available right now, the biggest change is integrating vertical search in a uniform way.

X: What does that mean?

DW: When you think of search, everyone thinks about Google, and maybe Yahoo, but there are many other kinds of search, like people searches (you can think about Facebook as a people search), travel search (Kayak and Expedia), health information sites. You can think about Wikipedia as providing a search for encyclopedic information. Shopping searches—Amazon is great in part because it makes it easy to find so much information about the products, and reviews of products. All of these are examples of vertical search experiences. Instead of having wide coverage, you have a better experience within a narrow range.

Bing has tried to marry those things into an integrated wide search experience. All of the engines have been doing this. If you do a search on Google for a movie, you might see information about show times and trailers at the top, for example. Bing has gone further in some directions than people have gone before, in this aspect. If you look at their tabbed pane, it lets you look at different kinds of information right there.

X: But doesn’t Google do that too?

DW: All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done. With the shopping tab, you get a faceted interface, meaning you can narrow your search using categorical information, restricting yourself to a particular brand or price range. Those facets are specific to the object you’re searching.

X: So if this is just a small change, what kinds of big changes can we expect to see in the future?

DW: Lots of people are happy with search today, but that’s because they set their sights too low. I think search is going to change enormously in the future, and I think it’s going to do so by …Next Page »

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The 2009 University of Washington Business Plan Competition has come and gone. It started with something like 90 business plan submissions that were paired down to 33 set to compete in an investment round. That round can best be described as a Las Vegas-style trade show with 33 booths, over two hundred judges, team shirts, ties, hair styles, and five hours of pitching that left me and many of my friends sounding like frogs at the end of the day. “Ribbit, Nanocel cools electronics better and cheaper, Ribbit.” The 16 teams that had the most “CIE bucks” invested in them made it to the next round.

Teams had a few weeks to prepare a slide deck and practice presenting their cases to a panel of judges. We all had coaches that listened to our pitches and critiqued them. For team Nanocel, this round was critical as our coaches grilled us on our pitch and punched enough holes in our presentation to make it look like Swiss cheese. That session was uncomfortable. But our coaches weren’t there to stroke us. They were there to school us and schooled we were. We recorded the session and listened to our coaches comments over and over. We did our best to implement every single recommendation and answer every single question raised so that they wouldn’t be asked again. It paid off. The questions raised by our coaches were never again asked by judges in subsequent rounds. Our coaches obviously knew their stuff.

Several weeks later, after multiple presentation deck rewrites and scores of practice pitches, we were ready for the Sweet 16. The day started in a room filled with all of the competitors looking tired, nervous, excited, and tough. My evening MBA class was well represented. I knew these student teams and have seen them present on case studies for last two years. We were confident in our product, our team, our pitch. My partner Dustin sat back looking confident and collected. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried and intimidated by the competition.

We found out when and where we’d be pitching, who our judges were and which teams we needed to beat to get to the final round. We had two hours before we had to pitch and used our time to research our judges just in case one of them would personally benefit from our technology. And we paced around. The pitch seemed to go fast and the questions after were tough. But it was what we expected and we were ready.

The toughest part of the day was coming up. We had to pause and eat lunch, waiting to …Next Page »

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Today is the Sweet 16 and final round of the University of Washington’s annual business plan competition. Yesterday, I was asked to write an article about my experiences thus far. The fact that I’m writing this article during time that I should be practicing my pitch or, if I were really smart, trying to sleep, should give you a brief insight into the scrappy nature of an entrepreneur-to-be. I love this technology and the company my partner Dustin and I are forming—Nanocel—so I would rather tell you about it than count sheep.

The process of writing a competition-worthy business plan has been long and arduous. In our case, it has required hundreds of hours of research, meetings that started early and went late, and sacrificing things like sleep and dinner dates. So it helps if you’re starting with a good idea. Dustin Miller, my partner in crime and inventor extraordinaire/PhD student in mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, came up with a good one. He figured out a way to use plastic as a heat sink for electronics applications, and it actually works. Really well.

We took this idea and started the process of researching and validating the market. I wasn’t sure at first if this “million dollar” idea had any legs at all. If it didn’t, we’d know soon enough and do something else. It didn’t take too long to learn that not only did it have legs, but this technology had applications all over the place. Everywhere we turned, from Frost & Sullivan and BCC Research reports to conversations with industry representatives, we learned of an intense need for cooling that exists in the electronics market. This isn’t a million dollar idea. It’s a billion dollar idea. Market validation, check.

This meant that we really had something worth pursuing. So, we started talking to folks that know a lot about startups. Namely, we went and begged for information from Janis Machala and Emer Dooley at the University of Washington. Both had taught classes in my MBA program and both seemed to know all about what to do and what not to do when getting things started. These learned ladies didn’t let us down. We came away with a long laundry list of questions to answer and information to gather. That meeting spawned another, and then another. It didn’t take long before Dustin and I had met with scores of entrepreneurial-minded people from academia to venture capitalists.

Between meetings, Dustin and I spent hours at the library and in coffee shops fleshing out a business plan that would stand up to the questions we’d been getting. Every meeting uncovered a weak spot or an area we hadn’t yet explored. With our research, I would write the plan. Then Dustin would disappear into his lab and work on the prototype. We both found that as time marched on, our lack of sleep was due as much to the excitement we felt about this opportunity as to the work we put into the research and writing of our plan.

By the time the business plan competition season finally rolled around, Dustin and I had become fluent in the electronics cooling market and adept at pitching our product. As a quick aside, I have to say that it’s a delight to work with an engineer who speaks in multisyllabic sentences! We’ve made it to the finals of two competitions thus far and have heard that our product is indeed fundable.

I feel good about our chances of making it to the final round this year. However, the competition is steeper than last year, and several of my classmates are on competing teams, including my teammate from last year. We’ve been good-naturedly taunting each other for weeks. I hope my classmates do well. And I hope I beat the pants off of them too.

This competition has been top-notch from the resource nights before it began to the investment round of 32 teams. Dustin and I have turned in our final business plan (version 15) and put our notes to bed. As I write this article, I think back on the work of the past several months, grateful for the opportunity to learn so much and fearful that it hasn’t been enough to win. We’ll know soon enough.

I’m glad we chose to compete. Win or lose, we’ll move forward with this idea. Someday when you’re reading something on your laptop and you stop to notice that your thighs are not being scalded by the heat emanating from its base, you may well have Dustin and me to thank. I hope so.

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On Monday, Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay to license some of the university’s inventions and to work on technology commercialization strategies with its researchers, as reported by CIOL, Express India, TechFlash, and other outlets. It’s not really big news by itself—Intellectual Ventures has formed similar partnerships with other institutes in India, as well as in China, Japan, Korea, and soon, Singapore—but it fits into the broader strategy the firm is pursuing around the world to foster invention.

Last fall, Intellectual Ventures opened offices in five Asian countries in an effort to gain access to a much wider pool of inventors and talent. Led by global head of technology Patrick Ennis, a physicist and former managing director at Arch Venture Partners—and other members of Intellectual Ventures’ senior leadership team, including co-founder and president Edward Jung—the company is building relationships with prominent academic scientists in Asia, and setting up partnerships whereby it can license certain inventions in exchange for helping with patents and commercialization. The strategy reminds me a lot of Microsoft Research, which has set up labs in China and India in the past 10 years and built partnerships with local university researchers and administrators. (This blueprint is not surprising, given that Intellectual Ventures’ co-founder and CEO Nathan Myhrvold was the founder of Microsoft Research.)

The reception Intellectual Ventures is getting also reminds me of Microsoft Research. While most university officials see the partnerships as benefiting their researchers and increasing the flow of innovation, critics have rolled out the standard “patent troll” fears that the company is coming in to buy up all the best intellectual property—which will only be assuaged by years of relationship building and repeatedly demonstrating that these sorts of deals can benefit both sides.

Nevertheless, Intellectual Ventures’ Indian operation seems to be off to a strong start. It is now staffed by about 15 people, led by Ashok Misra, the former head of IIT-Bombay and a highly respected polymer materials scientist.

I caught up with the staff of Intellectual Ventures to hear about the workings of the Indian university partnership. Nicholas Gibson, one of the firm’s directors of business development in Japan, said via e-mail, “The agreement with IIT-Bombay is important as it gives [us] more direct access to top flight university-based Indian inventors. The deal also gives IIT-B access to commercialization possibilities …Next Page »

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On Monday, Microsoft announced it had appointed Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, to the company’s board of directors. Klawe’s appointment makes Microsoft’s board 10 members strong again, after longtime director Jon Shirley (a former Microsoft president and chief operating officer) stepped down last November. I had the opportunity to speak with Klawe yesterday about her new role, and what she brings to the Redmond software company.

Klawe (pronounced “Claw-vay”) has been president of Harvey Mudd, an elite college in Claremont, CA, focused on science and engineering, since 2006. Before that, she was dean of engineering at Princeton University. She had previously spent 15 years at the University of British Columbia in various leadership roles, including head of the department of computer science and dean of science. For good measure, she also spent eight years at IBM Research. (And for any math geeks out there, her Erdős number is 1.)

A highly respected mathematician and computer scientist, Klawe has done seminal research in areas like multimedia, functional analysis, human-computer interaction, and gender issues in information technology. University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska, who has known Klawe for 30-plus years, touts her smarts and leadership. “She’s impatient and persistent in the best senses—she wants things to be done right, and she wants them to be done right now,” he writes in an e-mail. “She’s very strong on gender equity, which will be good medicine for Microsoft—although she’s by no means a one-issue person. Her only idiosyncrasy is that she paints watercolors during meetings.”

Klawe has a disarming modesty about her, though she says she was “difficult” and “arrogant” growing up (hard to believe now). Having followed her research over the years and talked with her a couple of times, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft is gaining a wealth of perspective on computing, basic research, and consumer-tech trends among young people—mainly through Klawe’s deep connections to student life at her school. She also has plenty of connections to Microsoft and the Seattle area, and some compelling thoughts on local innovation.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

Xconomy: So tell us about your new role as a board member of Microsoft, and what it means to you.

Maria Klawe: I just started as a director. They voted me in on Monday, so I’m not assigned to any specific committees yet; it’s the middle of the year. So I have the generic responsibilities of a director. I attended my first board meeting on March 9. I’m absolutely thrilled about it.

X: How did the board appointment come about? Who were your connections, and had you been thinking about this for a while?

MK: Two things happened independently. I was thinking about the next role to play externally that would be a good learning opportunity for me, and good for the college. I discussed it with my board chair, and said, ‘I want to be on the board of a technology company.’ I made a list of three companies: Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel, in no particular order. Google already had two university presidents on its board. So that was on my to-do list for the next few years. I hadn’t actually told anybody else that was what I wanted to do.

The next thing that happened: I know people at Microsoft Research, foremost among them Rick Rashid [senior vice president and head of research]. I got an e-mail from Rick in October asking if we could talk by phone. Given our schedules, it wasn’t until halfway through November that we talked. He said, ‘Microsoft is thinking about putting an academic on its board, and your name has come up.’ Rick thought for sure I wouldn’t be interested; he seemed sorry to be the one to have to ask me. I said, ‘Actually, it’s on my to-do list, to go on a corporate board.’ He said, ‘Really? If you are interested, you should meet with Brad Smith [senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft] and Bill Gates.’ It just so happened I was going to be in Seattle the next week. Lo and behold, on November 19, I had a meeting with Bill Gates and Brad Smith.

X: I’m guessing the meeting went pretty well. (No word on whether any watercolor paintings came of it.)

MK: As a university president, you want to talk about your college. For the first 45 minutes, Bill just asked me about Harvey Mudd. Towards the end of the hour, he said, …Next Page »

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Oren Etzioni, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Washington, has certainly ventured out of the ivory tower since he first came to Seattle 18 years ago. The Israel-born computer scientist founded three startup companies out of UW: Netbot, a comparison shopping agent acquired by Excite in 1997, Clearforest, a text-miner acquired by Reuters in 2007, and Farecast, an airlines fare prediction tool acquired by Microsoft just last year.

He’s also a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle VC firm that funds technology startups. And he’s been involved as a consultant or advisor to numerous other startups and local businesses, most recently Eggsprout, a new Seattle startup by UW alums that combines social networking with job hunting.

I sat down with Etzioni in his office on the UW campus to chat about his philosophies on technology, startups, and investing in a tricky economy. He also showed me his latest projects—two new software technologies that search the Web in innovative ways.

PanImages, an image search tool, mines Google Images and Flickr for pictures—but the twist is, it works in hundreds of different languages (online translation tools currently don’t work for many of these). So you can not only perform image searches if you happen to speak a language that doesn’t have its own Google Images page, but you can also type in a query in one language and see its translations and corresponding images in other languages. I typed in “shoes,” and we looked at the top image hits for shoes in Italian (pointy), English (sporty), and Serbian (boots).

His other new software application, TextRunner, searches 500 million Web pages for relationships between words. You can type in a question like “What kills bacteria?”, and it finds everything in these 500 million pages that has the relationship “kill” to bacteria, returning answers ranked by the number of hits. So, antibiotics are at the top of the list with 304 hits, but down the list you find that “garlic” came back with seven hits. (More on these projects below.)

Here are edited excerpts from the rest of our conversation:

Xconomy: What do you think academia can bring to business?

Oren Etzioni: The primary mission of a professor is teaching and research, but I want to maximize my positive impact on the world, and I’ve learned over the years that there are lots of ways of doing that. I started out focused on research and writing research papers,and then found out that few people read those. Then I found that mentoring a graduate student can be a very meaningful way to have an impact. Another way to have an impact is that some research ideas have practical applicability, and the best way to get them out to the real world is through commercialization.

To give a concrete example, one of my graduate students, Erik Selberg, and I built the first meta-search engine, MetaCrawler. We were running it here and it became very popular. After a while, the head of the lab staff came to me and said, ‘This MetaCrawler thing is generating so much traffic on our network that people can’t get access to their homework, you have to get rid of it.’ So now I have this problem, I’ve created this thing that people love, so now what? The ideas were already out there in research papers, but we didn’t want to kill the application. We found that by licensing it to a startup company, we gave it some life and millions of people were using it every day at its peak. So it was very gratifying.

X: How do you decide if a research project you’re working on will have commercial applications?

OE: The first question I ask myself is, do people really badly want to use this? And I like to see evidence of that. In both the cases of MetaCrawler and Farecast, I was surprised how much …Next Page »

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On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. …Next Page »

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On Monday evening, I had the pleasure of sailing the Seattle waterways with Microsoft and several hundred of its university-faculty friends. We were all aboard an Argosy cruise ship for a three-hour tour that took us from the city dock in Kirkland, WA, across Lake Washington; past the University of Washington; through the Ballard Locks; and all the way down to Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle, where we docked near the aquarium. The weather was perfect and afforded us spectacular views of Mount Rainier, the Olympic Mountains, and open water.

It was all part of the annual Faculty Summit hosted by Microsoft Research, in which the company invites leading researchers from academia and government to Redmond for two days of talks with staff from all of Microsoft’s global research labs. This week’s summit included sessions on scholarly communication, artificial intelligence, and applications of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth—and plenty of tech demos. (The Seattle P-I did a nice piece on a new spherical-display technology.)

But enough about work… I was there to catch up with familiar faces, meet some new ones, and find out what people are talking about at the intersection of computer science and Microsoft. Over a buffet dinner of halibut, steak, pasta, and fruit, I got more than my fill. Just a few highlights here:

—I should probably start with what people weren’t talking about (at least with me). That would include Microsoft’s competition with Google, the bid to acquire Yahoo, and the abrupt departure of Microsoft senior executive Kevin Johnson. When you’re trying to do innovative research—really the long-term future of any tech company—these corporate dramas are probably just a distraction.

—Microsoft’s Beijing research lab is gearing up for the Olympics, which are the talk of the whole town, according to Hsiao-Wuen Hon, the managing director of the lab. The city will effectively shut down for the opening ceremonies on August 8. The airport will be closed. Street traffic will be highly restricted. All attendees will go through a two-hour security checkpoint. Thousands of Chinese army troops will be stationed next to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing. There is a rumor that the top of the stadium is armed with anti-aircraft guns to shoot down any airborne terrorist threats. I asked Hon whether he gets to attend the ceremony. “Unfortunately yes,” he joked.

—Word has it that Bill Gates will attend the games, along with Warren Buffett and many heads of state, including President George W. Bush. Gates’s preferred sport to watch? Ping-pong (OK, table tennis). The table-tennis viewing will be hosted by Microsoft’s top people in China, as well as government officials. Suffice to say that every minute of his public appearances will be carefully managed and choreographed—not by Microsoft as much as by his gracious hosts.

—Shri Narayanan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, had some interesting insights into the similarities between academia and industry. Narayanan, who spent five years at AT&T Labs-Research, noted that a lot of the challenges are the same when leading a corporate group and a university research group: fighting for funding, intensive recruiting, marketing, and managing workload. An academic research group, he quipped, was “like a startup with no stock options.” The tradeoff, of course, is a bit more independence and flexibility of schedule.

—A couple of Microsoft research projects caught my ear. One is by principal researcher Feng Zhao, who is designing sensor networks for energy-efficient data centers—more on this another time, but Zhao moderated a panel yesterday called “Browsing the physical world in real-time,” which relates a bit to Wade’s story this week about the “Internet of things.” And the other is smart Web-conferencing software by Zhengyou Zhang, another principal researcher in Redmond—this uses computer-vision algorithms to track the gaze and gestures of meeting participants, so as to give more clues about who is speaking or listening to whom. (Having worked out of a remote office for the past three years, I can appreciate the value of that.)

Lastly, as we were waiting to clear the Ballard Locks to enter Puget Sound, we passed through a waterway famous for its migrating salmon. Apparently the action of the lock creates turbulence in the water that brings baby salmon to the surface, where they are easy pickings for predatory seagulls. So the locks have high-pressure water jets to spray the surface and keep the birds away. I’m not sure what this says about corporate competition, but I found it touching.

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Several weeks ago, I heard a very heated discussion on the failure of Harvard entrepreneurship at the MIT Entrepreneurship Forum’s recent Power, Drugs & Money conference (that was extended in an Xconomist Forum post by former gubernatorial candidate and Harvard grad Chris Gabrieli). Being a curious MIT student, I decided to investigate the issue and committed the treasonous act of hanging out at Harvard. What I witnessed over the last few months was a fast-growing and excited group of entrepreneurial students who you should definitely keep your eye on. The following is a general summary of student entrepreneurship activities at Harvard, as well as some observations.

The most active entrepreneurship group at Harvard is the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum (HCEF), now in its second year. While there have been several instances of other student entrepreneurship clubs at Harvard, they have all died with the original founders. Entrepreneurship forum co-presidents Travis May and Michael Segal still face this issue of group sustainability. But they have rallied an impressive group of students. Recent noteworthy events include talks by entrepreneurship journalist Scott Kirsner, Emerge founder/MIT student Alia Whitney-Johnson, and Bessemer Venture Partner/HBS Professor Felda Hardymon. It is interesting to note that these events pull in not only Harvard students, but also MIT, BU, Babson, and BC representatives.

The i3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge, which the HCEF is organizing, along with the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and Harvard Student Agencies, is a business plan competition in its first year that offers up a very respectable $32.5K in prize money. The competition is divided into tracks, akin to the MIT $100K Competition, with categories for for-profit ventures, social entrepreneurship, creative non-business ventures, and campus services. The finals are on April 9, so stay tuned to see if i3 uncovers any gems from the Harvard community.

My only major criticism of Harvard’s entrepreneurship community is the lack of collaboration between components of the Harvard community. We have seen the success from mixing Sloan School of Management students and engineers at MIT. I think we can all agree that a multi-faceted group is necessary in a strong startup team. The results of a “bump and connect”-type encounter—described by Boston History & Innovation Collaborative executive director Bob Krim here—between students from Harvard College, Harvard Business School, and the JFK School of Government could be golden. Now, if we add to that Harvard’s resources in the form of faculty and industry connections, then BAM! We have a veritable innovation machine that can compete with MIT and further drive Boston’s innovation economy. But perhaps that is an overly simplistic model. Post your thoughts below!

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At a meeting in Boston this morning, Massachusetts energy and environmental affairs secretary Ian Bowles signed a memorandum of understanding with University of Massachusetts president Jack Wilson calling for the creation of a committee to coordinate research, education, and public service activities around clean energy. Bowles said that an “effective inter-organizational approach” like that outlined in the memorandum was needed to meet the clean energy needs of Massachusetts citizens. Wilson noted that the university’s energy expertise—with at least 120 researchers studying areas such as offshore wind energy, microbial fuel cells, and cellolusic biofuels—could help the state compete for leadership in the cleantech industry, and he pointed to the university’s existing track record of commercializing clean energy ideas, including UMass spinoffs Konarka and SunEthanol.

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Last week, I was asked to moderate a panel of journalists (what a chance for an ex-candidate—this time it was my turn to ask them irritating, leading, and unfair questions!) in a discussion about the state of New England’s innovation economy. Lots was said that covers old ground, and Xconomy’s Bob Buderi has already posted on one point I raised.

But I do think it is worth discussing a bit more. I was trying to stir the pot about the question of our culture—are our attitudes part of the obstacles to an even more vibrant innovation and entrepreneurship economy? People generally think so, and when I asked for a show of hands of the conferees as to whether we compare unfavorably to Silicon Valley on this, nearly every hand shot up.

So…what can be done about that? I posited that the single biggest change would be if Harvard went from laggard and critic to leader and booster of the advance of ideas into products. After all, Harvard is one of the dominant players in our culture, and I think it is fair to say that it has greatly lagged MIT on this. MIT professors seem to take great pride in participation in startups (think Bose and Langer and many others), and the Institute places clear value on turning intellectual capital into real value for customers/patients, society, and, yes, even shareholders. As a result, Kendall Square is one of the most vibrant spots in the world for the innovation economy, especially in biotech, but there are Akamais too.

By contrast, Harvard’s record is far weaker. Not only have fewer great products and companies emanated from a university whose intellectual excellence can hardly be questioned, but worse yet there is a bad history of being clearly anti-commercialization. I believe I am correct in saying that in the early 1980s, the University forced future Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert to choose between founding Biogen and remaining at the University. Fortunately, he picked Biogen and got it off the ground before eventually returning to the ivory tower. Even this year, I was struck by the contrast between the commencement speeches of outgoing Interim President Derek Bok and commencement speaker Bill Gates. Bok has been a wonderful leader for Harvard, stepping into the void after Larry Summers’ precipitous departure to serve a second, brief term as President. He is clearly a good man. But when he said in his speech that the growing criticality of universities and their innovations to the economy was “for better or for worse,” I thought what could be for worse? It felt to me that he was projecting Harvard’s traditional squeamishness about embracing commercialization.

Then Gates rose and delivered a stirring speech worth reading. Gates has become a critical public voice for the duties of the successful to lead and give back, and his speech about a Harvard that valued making a difference in the world was inspirational. While he emphasized his key interests, global health and poverty and U.S. education, I thought about the difference Harvard could make by accelerating the process of turning its best people’s best ideas into realities—something that usually requires commercialization.

To be fair, Summers cared a lot about this, and his excellent Provost Steve Hyman, happily retained by new President Drew Gilpin Faust, has been moving aggressively. Harvard has recruited a far more proactive and hungry commercialization team, which is beginning to really make a difference. But cultures move slowly and we are still a long way from Harvard being the Stanford of the East (ouch!) when it comes to convincing undergrads, graduate students, and faculty that by caring about how an idea can become a reality, you translate intellectual innovation into human and societal benefit. And it’s OK to make some money doing so.

Harvard has a huge opportunity on the horizon. The university is gearing up for a transformative set of developments on the Boston bank of the Charles in Allston that will leave Harvard as much or more of a Boston institution than a Cambridge one. This new campus should be built with an eye towards fomenting a Kendall Square-like boom around it of hot new companies solving medical, environmental, and other challenges by turning great ideas into great products and companies.

I can think of no greater catalyst to Massachusetts’ success in the coming century in the innovation economy than a Harvard that turns its fiercesome competitive capabilities towards this good goal.

P.S. Full disclosure—I am a Harvard grad (class of 1981) and an elected member of the Board of the Harvard Alumni Association. Plus, I do want to stay on their good side, what with five kids in the college pipeline!

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