Geeking with Gary

[Editor's Note: This has (almost) nothing to do with photography.  I do this from time to time.] 

In this issue:

• A STEM Program on Steroids
• Sony's new Image Authentication System
• Grandpa's Inventions

A STEM Program on Steroids

For the past year I’ve been volunteering at an organization called Beaver Works Summer Institute, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It’s an extraordinary program which challenges high school students to tackle subjects you wouldn’t expect high school students to tackle: Learning to program a quantum computer.  Building an AI-based personal assistant.  Building an autonomous vehicle.  Learning to hack into Internet Of Things devices (so when they grow up and become programmers they can know how to defend against these common techniques).  Things like that.  The program makes use of gifted expert volunteers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to create and teach courses that high school students can clearly understand. 

The challenge I participated in had them building a prototype CubeSat.  And it was a remarkably thorough course; it included learning to program in Python, and introduced the students to orbital dynamics, the space environment, communications, power engineering, propulsion, thermal management, control systems, systems engineering, CAD software, and satellite development tools.  At a HIGH SCHOOL level!!  (As I said, gifted educators!)

Then the teams were then given about $400 in computer hardware and were told “Take this and build a prototype CubeSat and demonstrate its effectiveness to detect plastics in the ocean”.

You can imagine the skills that developed while accepting that challenge: the students had to design their own mission, create a software architecture, calculate a power and link budget, break up the design into subsystems (and program them all) and test each module independently before integrating them into one functional demonstration.  Along the way they developed the kinds of communication and problem solving skills that usually come with project-based learning.  At the end of the course there was a final event where teams presented their projects, from design to video demonstrations showing their effectiveness.  (I actually hosted that event.  I was quite impressed at their designs and software architectures!  It's a little long but you can watch it here.  (I appear 5 times in the credits! :-)) 

I’ve seen first-hand what programs like this can do.  When my younger brother was in high school he attended a similar summer program at Caltech centered on problem solving; that course changed the way his brain worked and he excelled in college, ending up with a Ph.D. in biology, and he spent 20+ years working at Vanderbilt University. 

As you might be able to tell, I am a fan of this program. :-) Shortly after the final event, I approached the staff saying, “How else can I contribute to your program?  The world needs more engineers.  I can create course content for you, I can do high school outreach, I can even do boring administrative work to allow more students to participate in this incredible program.”  15 minutes into that meeting it became clear that their greatest need was not for more volunteer engineers, but rather for corporate grants to allow them to scale the program by paying their volunteers and establishing a solid infrastructure to allow further outreach and growth.  

Without making any promises, I committed to working with them to seek additional grant funding so they can grow the program.  I've never done grant writing or fundraising before, but I can learn.  This is a worthwhile project that deserves my support.

(Any of you have any connections to a foundation that would like to support a STEM program on steroids? :-) )

*** UPDATE  October, 2024 ***

So let me bring you up to date with my MIT activity by sharing a letter I wrote to a fellow volunteer who was equally enamored with the program, so much so that he vowed to put together a pitch deck and take it around to all the aerospace companies to help fundraise, like I wanted to do.

===

Hi, Michael!

I was elated to hear that you were able to see first-hand how BWSI was able to positively impact your son this summer.  I started out at BWSI as a volunteer mentor (I'm still a volunteer, actually) for the Build a Cubesat course.  Like you, I was amazed and impressed at the program, starting from the ambitiousness of the material and the giftedness (that's a word!) of the course designers and instructors.  This isn't just some vanilla STEM course!!

And, like you, my enthusiasm for the courses was so high that I went to Bob [Shin, the founder and director] and asked how I can help the organization.  Can I help design more classes, or coordinate with professors and work on courseware?  Can do boring administrative things to allow more students to participate?   15 minutes into that conversation it became clear that Bob has access to all the smart people he needs.  What he really needed was more funding so they could scale.  I have no background in fundraising (I'm a NASA veteran, truth be told) but I told him, without making any promises, that I would try my best.

That was about 3 years ago, and like you, I had visions of visiting various companies, giving enthusiastic talks about how great the program was and soliciting funding.  I have approached maybe 40 major aerospace companies, sometimes having live phone calls with representatives.  So far, I've been unsuccessful, but in the process I've discovered a glut of invisible roadblocks which has soured me on this approach.

My first thought was to approach the HR departments of aerospace firms: "Would it benefit your company to have more systems-level thinkers apply for your advertised positions (or as summer hires)?"   It turns out that HR departments are more concerned about avoiding lawsuits from disgruntled employees than about hiring quality (that's up to the manager interviewing the candadite), so they don't have budgets for this sort of thing.  And they were not interested in putting me in touch with those who did.  (Just as well, the folks who advertise job openings are bureaucrats who don't think about competitive edges for the company.)

Then I pivoted to the corporate Aerospace foundations.  Surely they would see the value in this program and enthusiastically fund it, for that elusive competitive edge!!  Nope.  All of them have specific goals for that money, earmaked to address a specific, predefined, unfulfilled needs: Not enough women engineers entering college.  Not enough people from a specific geographic region going into engineering.  Not enough LGBTQ interest in engineering.  Things like that.

The BWSI program doesn't get so easily pigeonholed.  YES we can accept students from all of those backgrounds, but what we do probably better than anyone else is we turn good engineers into GREAT systems engineers, regardless of their backgrounds, geographic location, or DEI status.  These foundation administrators get unsolicited proposals all day long; if it doesn't fit like a glove it gets rejected, regardless of merit and regardless of the potential benefit to the founding company.  Again, no systems-level thinking (which is kind of ironic, since this course promotes systems-level thinking.)

And consider this dismaying observation: Let's say you're in the position to grant funds to an organization, and you have three proposals sitting on your desk:

• "If you don't fund our animal shelter program, thousands of innocent animals will have to be euthenized!"
• "If you don't fund our homeless veterans program, thousands of veterans who selflessly served their country will go hungry!"
• "If you don't help us scale this outstanding STEM program, hundreds of talented high school students will go to college and gratuate and go on to have great aerospace careers anyway". 

Which proposal will you fund??  Rightly or wrongly, this program is seen as help for privledged kids that doesn't solve a pressing pain point.  (And the fact that it's from MIT, which people think is the equivalent to Harvard in terms of well-endowededness (that's a word!), doesn't help.)

You and I know from the ground level how great BWSI courses are.  But from the 30,000 foot level (the administrators who grant funds), it's just another STEM program in a literal sea of STEM programs.  You have to experience it from the ground level to appreciate just how unique and powerful it is.

So that's been my experience; and I've now shifted (yet again) to concentrating on government grants like this one since it so clearly addresses the customer's stated pain point of not enough experienced engineers in the employment pipeline.  Statistics say the more I try the more likely I'll be successful.  But so far, nothing.

===

So now you know.  Anyone know of a generous and forward-thinking funding source for such a dramatically transformational program??

Sony's new "Anti-Forgery" Image Authentication System

A couple of weeks ago Sony announced the ability for one of their cameras (currently the A7 IV) to "prove" that an image taken with that camera had not been manipulated by computer.  No price or availability was given, but this interested me greatly because it appears to work exactly like my image authentication patent that was granted back in the 1990's.  

Nikon and Canon tried to do this almost two decades ago but a poor implementation made it susceptible to hacking, and in fact a bunch of Russian hackers compromised both systems.  Newer, better versions of these products never appeared.

In a nutshell, the system employs something called Public Key Encryption, where the key used to encrypt a file is different from the key used to decrypt it.  And only the private key needs to be kept a secret.  Public keys (as the name implies) can be publicly known and widely distributed, but if you can successfully decrypt the file with this key you can be assured (to any required degree) that the image is as the camera had captured it.  My implementation not only authenticated the bits of the image, but also metadata about the image, including date, time, GPS coordinates, exposure info, and what direction the camera was pointing.

I immediately contacted a friend at Sony, sent him a copy of my patent, and asked to test out their system.  I'll be looking for two things:

1. Is the private key stored in the camera's firmware, or in a special secure cryptoprocessor chip whose contents can't be externally probed?  (If the latter, that explains why it would work with only certain cameras and not be added to other cameras via a firmware update.)
2. Will they provide the same private key for all of their devices?  (That was Nikon's and Canon's downfall when they tried to enter this space.)

If I ever get a test system you can be sure I'll be blogging about my findings!

Grandpa's Inventions

The grandkids are always asking about my inventions from my previous life as an engineer.  I think I finally created an approachable summary of a couple of dozen of my favorites.  Some of these relate to photography, and others were things I thought of years before others made them commercially available.  (It's murder being a pioneer!)  You can read the byte-sized summaries here:

https://grandpasinventions.blogspot.com/

Until next time,

Yours truly, Gary Friedman