Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

Hope we hear more from ATAP. They had some really interesting projects last year I'm hoping make it further towards market.

View on HN

The most interesting ATAP-related news so far this year is its director moving to Facebook.

I worked previously on an ATAP project when I was a university postdoc (much of the engineering work gets farmed out to universities and subcontractors). Eventually I began wondering why I was working fifty hours a week for Google on a postdoc salary. It's a strange arrangement to wind up in.

Sorry, but what's ATAP?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ATAP

Think Google X, but with 2 year instead of 10 year technologies.

example: https://www.google.com/atap/project-soli/

That looks incredible. Such a lovely video particularly when you see the fourier transform of a hand moving in space!

I hope this project will result in such products on the consumer market.

Very strange you were downvoted. It's Google's 'Advanced Technology and Projects' group. Incubator run by an ex-DARPA guy. Projects are given two years.

Ex-DARPA gal, actually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan

Regina Dugan now works for Facebook.

Hmm. I didn't know about her. It mentions strategic investments in INFOSEC and many of my good papers are DARPA funded. I wonder if there's a list of what hardware/software architectures were funded under her time there. It's the lower-level people that decide on the projects that I'm aware of but the Director usually sets the culture and priorities with significant effects.

Ah sorry my mistake.

I'm more interested in Project Vault, which seems dead since the project leader quit Google soon after he announced it:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/29/googles-project-vault-is-a-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6qrQzn8uBo

Because the question is literally answered by the first half a dozen results from any search engine?

I thought the most interesting news from ATAP (last year) was project Jacquard [1]. It seemed very exciting and promising, but it doesn't seem that the tech has made it to market.

[1] https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/

Jacquard was neat, my favorites were Vault and Soli though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com