Category: Business/Technology

The popular smartphone game “Pokemon Go!” has swept the country up in a craze to catch them all, but there are other branches of virtual reality from researchers and developers all over the world, and some of the best and brightest are right here in Madison.

Noted: And there are plenty of schools where MBA debt is a mere fraction of the total load taken on by grads of elite business schools. At the University of Wisconsin’s Business School in Madison, the average debt burden for graduating MBAs was $15,481, $106,889 less than Wharton’s average, while the first-year median comp package was $114,694, just $31,609 below the median pay for a Wharton grad.

Mackie, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of medical physics and engineering physics and director emeritus of medical engineering at the Morgridge Institute for Research, is co-founder of two of the finalists in this year’s contest, Asto CT and Linectra, as well as one of last year’s finalists, OnLume.

Schools like Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin are already piloting VR technology in specific majors to measure student experience outcomes, and while some experts believe the industry for “immersive experiences” will grow to be as big as the mobile revolution, cost and pairing between technology and mission may settle VR to be an enhanced professional training resource for students in STEM and military disciplines.

When a man drowned during a triathlon that Pat Hughes was also competing in several years ago, it was a life-changing moment for the shaken Hughes.“It seemed like a very preventable tragedy,” said Hughes, a 2012 Wisconsin School of Business graduate.

Alex Kubicek, a UW-Madison grad, moved Understory back to Madison weeks ago after developing it with his team in Boston. The company’s hardware tracks weather events to provide better data for companies, and it’s returned after closing a $7.5 million fundraising round that included Monsanto’s venture capital arm. The lead investor, Wisconsin fund 4490 Ventures, had asked Kubicek whether they’d be willing to come back to Madison.

“The extent to which parents are tied up with these devices in ways that disrupt the interactions with the child has potential for a far bigger impact,” says Heather Kirkorian, who heads up the Cognitive Development & Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If I’m on the floor with a child but checking my phone every five minutes, what message does that send?”

Fuzzing’s method of using random data tweaks to dig up bugs was itself an accident. In 1987, University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Barton Miller was trying to use the desktop VAX computer in his office via a terminal in his home. But he was connecting to that UNIX machine over a phone line using an old-fashioned modem without error correction, and a thunderstorm kept introducing noise into the commands he was typing.

We accept that to err is human. Not so with machines. When our electronic counterparts fail us—whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence—we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues.University of Wisconsin researchers recently sought to test how we might get along with our future AI coworkers.