（続）Silent service or Unsung service

前回の投稿でunsung heroのスペルが間違っていました。お詫びして訂正します。



ちょうどアメリカ版WiredのCover StoryがUnsung Geniusesという特集を組んでいました。Most of the time, the people doing the asking are not household names—not the Musks or Sandbergs of the world. They’re unsung talents, the ones doing the actual work of innovation, sleeves rolled up, meals skipped, families missed.とセレブになっていないイノベータを紹介するのが目的のようです。

Welcome to the Next List for 2015

A FEW TIMES a year, I get to see demonstrations of some of the most mind-blowing technologies and designs—explode-your-head kind of stuff—and I can’t tell a soul about them. Nobody, not even my wife. And certainly not you. Just imagine: You receive an invite from an engineering or product lead to come down and visit with a few folks at, er, Giant Tech Multinational to check out a new project, something they’re excited about and want some feedback on. Most of the time, the people doing the asking are not household names—not the Musks or Sandbergs of the world. They’re unsung talents, the ones doing the actual work of innovation, sleeves rolled up, meals skipped, families missed.

すでにサイト上でも選ばれた人のリストが公開されていました。

Next List

雑誌ではYoky Matsoukaという日本出身の方がトップバッターでした。

Taking Simple Tech and Giving It Some Smarts
Yoky Matsouka | VP of technology and analytics

AS ARTIFICIAL intelligence becomes integral to everything from health care to home heating systems, you can think of Yoky Matsuoka as one of the chief architects of the future. The winner of a MacArthur “genius” award, Matsuoka was on the founding team of Google X and helped build the Nest smart thermostat. At 43, she’s a polymath who has studied computer science, electrical engineering, neuroscience, robotics, and mechanical engineering. Her aim is nothing less than blending elements of each of these fields to redefine the relationship humans can have with technology. “With the combination of technology and neuroscience, there are so many things we can achieve,” Matsuoka says.

Her path to invention began with tennis. At 16, she came to the United States from Japan to improve her game, then attended UC Berkeley. After multiple injuries, she gave up her professional tennis ambitions and turned to engineering, focusing on building a robot that could play tennis with her. This pursuit brought her to MIT, where she got a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science. But her tennis buddy, as she called the robot, fell short. “The limitation wasn’t in engineering or computer science but in understanding the human brain,” she says. So she began studying computational neuroscience: “I thought, ‘I’m going to create a brand-new way to study artificial intelligence.’” She became a pioneer in the emerging field of neurobotics.

This was part of the larger work that the MacArthur Foundation recognized in 2007.とUnsungといっても作家のAdichieも受賞していたMacArthur Foundationをもらっているのですから、業界では有名な方なのでしょう。TOEIC的には受賞関連で使われる場合の動詞recognizeを抑えておきたいですね。