As a teenager,
I was fascinated with the wizarding world.
I wanted to be like Hermione Granger.
I wanted to be a powerful
witch with a wand.
Out of all the spells,
I really liked "Accio."
I could say "Accio" and name anything
and it would fly into my hands,
even if it's a restricted book,
locked and hidden
inside the headmaster's office.
But as you might have noticed,
I did not get into Hogwarts.
So I came to my backup school, MIT.
(Laughter)
And I made my own magic.
I can now --
I can have the spells now
that are even more powerful
than Hermione's,
because I don't need a wand.
I can see the invisible.
Let me show you my first spell.
For example, I want to find
my black shirt in my closet that I lost.
I put on my AR headset and I say "Accio."
Within a matter of seconds,
my shirt will light up.
Like I said, I can see the invisible.
(Applause)
So how does this spell work?
How did I make an AR headset
able to see what my own eyes cannot see?
My trick is to use wireless signals
like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
These signals are great.
This is exactly why you can get
Wi-Fi from another room.
So these signals are sent by this headset.
They are scattered in the environment.
They go through boxes
and then are reflected back
from all of these hidden objects,
including my shirt.
We then design algorithms
that use these reflected signals
to find these objects.
Let me show you how these algorithms work.
First, the headset tries
to understand its environment
by creating a virtual 3D map.
And then as I walk in the environment,
it keeps sending these wireless signals,
tries to collect all of the reflections,
and then combines them
to collect this information,
and then tries to locate the object
that I was looking for.
Then after some time,
it becomes confident
about it and then tells me,
"Here it is."
This is the glow,
which is where the object I want is,
and I can go and grab it.
Besides helping me
having these magical powers,
it has a lot of industrial applications.
For example, in a warehouse,
it can help warehouse workers
to find packages,
and then it can guide them through
the warehouse to find these packages.
In a retail store,
it can help the store associates
to pack customer's orders
and find misplaced items.
It also has a lot of other applications
in logistics and manufacturing.
So having X-ray vision is very cool.
It's better than what Hermione had.
But sometimes I'm just so lazy,
I don't want to go ahead
and put my headset on
and then say "Accio" and then go
and find my key,
grab it under the pile.
So I was thinking, what if I had
a robot that knew my spell?
So I taught my spells to a robot.
My robot can find my keys
and bring them to me.
Let me show it to you.
For example, here,
my keychain is hidden
under the pile in the basket.
My robot is able to search
the environment
and locate my keys
with centimeter-level accuracy,
purposefully declutter the environment
and then grab the keys
and bring them to me.
So how do we do this?
We built a specialized gripper
instead of a wand.
So it has a camera and a wireless sensor,
which sends similar signals
like the headset that I just talked about.
So this is great, now this gripper
can locate the keys.
But there's one challenge.
What if I put my robot
in a completely new environment?
For example, put it in the living room
and ask it to find a remote control.
How does this robot adapt itself
to a completely new environment
and a completely new object?
If the robot does exactly
the same steps as before,
then it can only find a key in a basket.
We designed an AI algorithm
specifically to help this robot to adapt
itself to a completely new environment
and find objects it has never seen before.
For example, here it's trying to find
a remote control on a couch
in a living room it has never seen before.
It's able to find it
and then bring it to me,
and I can go and grab this remote control
and then watch my favorite show.
Magical X-ray vision can change the way
we think about our environment
and the way we interact
with our environment.
It opens up new possibilities
that we never thought are possible.
For example, it can help our future
robots in our homes to help us.
It can also help us interact
with our future smart homes
in ways we never imagined before.
But the application that I'm
personally very excited about
is helping our first responders
to find and track humans
in conditions with low visibility.
Or helping humans under the rubble
after disaster hits.
And as the cherry on top,
it can help those of us
who did not get into Hogwarts
to get one step closer
to the wizarding world.
Thank you.
(Applause)