“Apple has hired famed robotics expert Yoky Matsuoka, one of the co-founders of Google’s X lab and former head of technology at Nest, to work on the iPhone maker’s health projects,” Aaron Pressman reports for Fortune. “Matsuoka left Nest last year and was headed to Twitter until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, according to a post she wrote on Medium last May. Treatment of the undisclosed illness was effective, she wrote.”
“Apple said Matsuoka is working for chief operating officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the tech giant’s growing number of health initiatives,” Pressman reports. “Those efforts include the HealthKit framework for developing apps, ResearchKit for using mobile devices in medical studies, and CareKit to help individuals improve their own medical care.”
“After moving to the United States from Japan as a teenager to pursue a tennis career, she attended the University of California, Berkeley. Injuries waylaid her future in tennis, but she became interested in building a tennis-playing robot, a pursuit that led her to MIT where she got a Ph.D. and helped develop the BarrettHand, an revolutionary robotic arm,” Pressman reports. “She then spent a decade in academia at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington in Seattle as a professor of robotics. Among her students at Carnegie Mellon was Matt Rogers, who went on to co-found Nest…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Matsuoka’s life so far vibrantly illustrates the following:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference. — Steve Jobs