Turbine Access Systems, Polar Explorers, and LabVIEW From the Couch: NIWeek Day Two Keynote Recap

[LRohre]

The second keynote presentation of NIWeek 2012 continued highlighting the worldwide application of NI products. Cofounder and NI Fellow, Jeff Kodosky, began the morning with a history of system architectures. Jeff described how professional programmers build parallel software systems using threads, mutexes, and text-based sequential programming languages. Then he remarked “Really? Is this the best we can do? Well, actually, there is a better way and it is called graphical system design—using the parallel graphical notation of LabVIEW to design systems.”

Shelley Gretlein, NI director of software marketing, followed Kodosky to showcase several applications using LabVIEW and NI hardware. Along with leaders from the engineering community, Gretlein shared some of the most exciting projects happening in the world today.

• The Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) improves the viability of solar power by using the NI graphical system design approach
• A hydraulic motion compensated gangway from ISC Ltd. improves access for offshore wind turbines
• The Kyoto University Radiation Mapping System, or KURAMA I for short, monitors the energy and number of gamma-ray in post-Fukushima Japan

Sir Robert Swan, polar traveler and UN Goodwill Ambassador, was later welcomed on stage to discuss technology access in developing counties. He addressed the audience saying that “the last great exploration is to survive on earth. And the heroes and heroines of that exploration are sitting right in front of me now. It’s in your hands as engineers.”

      To end the day Kyle Gupton, manager of software product management at NI, discussed NI’s long-term vision for mobile devices, which is to connect virtual instruments running on tablets and smartphones to NI hardware devices through wireless connections and to the NI Technical Data Cloud for data and configuration storage. At the core of this vision, of course, is LabVIEW. Jeff Kodosky then joined Kyle to demonstrate an experiment he’s been working on called the physics-based editor—or to the astonished audience, programming a LabVIEW block diagram on an iPad.

Shelley summed up the day by describing why the impact of solving some of these issues is so great and that as tool providers, NI is empowering engineers and scientists that are working on these problems. Just like when CERN set out on the journey to build the largest instrument on earth, LabVIEW and PXI were there. And when just a little over a month ago they discovered the Higgs Boson, LabVIEW was there. Just on Sunday, NASA and the Curiosity rover landed on Mars and LabVIEW was there as well. “These potential impacts and some of this research is why NI wants to ensure that we’re providing the tools to measure, control, prove, or disprove anything that’s out there,” concluded Shelley.

Click here for a full video recap of each keynote presentation.