The algorithm had been designed to predict famine.

If famines were spotted before they started, more aid could be routed to the affected country, more people could be saved. Or so the thinking went.

In the spring of 2020, JaBria Bishop built her first video game.

It was a 2D side-scroller—think Super Mario Brothers—which she believes she called Lunar Dreamscape. In it, a little girl wakes up in a lost world. Bishop’s idea for this whimsical game was for the players, too, to feel lost, so she designed it accordingly.

“I wanted the player to also feel how the little girl feels,” she says.

“All right, take your hands off the wheel and pull your feet off the pedals,” the Mercedes-Benz salesperson said. His tone was confident, and his posture relaxed. I was excited to see this “self-driving” car in action. The Range Rover was good, the Tesla was better, but this Mercedes had “250 times more code than the primary flight software in NASA’s space shuttle.” How could it not be the best?

Tonight, take a moment to gaze toward the heavens and salute the moon. After all, it was fifty years ago this month that Apollo 11 launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and Neil Armstrong took his “small step.”

And, on the team it took to pull off such a historic feat were three Duke alumnae. Parrish Nelson Hirasaki ’67, Julie Isherwood ’68, and Lindsay Robinson ’67 all worked on the Apollo program. And by their telling, they had the time of their lives doing it.

Retelling the Story: Deondra Rose

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

A Duke researcher has developed a 3D imaging technique for peering into the layering of a painting. Warren Warren, a chemist and biomedical engineer at Duke, develops laser systems to image human tissues. But he thought his work might be useful for art historians as well.

In late March, newly renovated Gross Hall played host to the 2014 DataFest, a forty-eight-hour team competition in big data analytics. The event attracted close to 130 undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, including statistics, computer science, and engineering. Duke was the best represented school, but participants also made the trip from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and even Dartmouth College.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Matt Koidin M.B.A. ’05, co-chair of DukeGEN and chief technology officer of Pocket.

SW: How has Duke become more interested in entrepreneurship?

Phil Haus ’08 wants to pheed the world. More specifically, with Pheed—the new all-in-one text, photo, video, and audio social network—he wants to change the social-media landscape. The app, which debuted in November 2012, was dubbed “the social-media company of the year” by Business Insider.

One of the most potent sources of growth in the U.S. hightech economy has been foreign brainpower. Immigrants were responsible for more than half of the start-up launches in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005—and more than one in four new engineering and technology ventures nationally.

But Duke’s Vivek Wadhwa says that trend has stagnated, putting the country’s leadership in high-tech innovation at risk.

New app can sniff out doctored files.