CHAPTER 4
MANAGING AND
MANIPULATING DATA
A
s a
Star Wars
fan growing up in Syria, Dina Katabi was intrigued by the idea
of the Force, an energy connecting everything in the universe. “I would be
sitting at home,” she said, “just concentrating and focusing, trying to feel the Force.”
Despite her efforts, Katabi never did feel it. But now, as a professor at MIT, she uses
radio waves to create her own version of the Force.
Radio waves travel through the air, like ripples through water. When these
invisible waves collide with people or objects, they bounce back as reflections.
Katabi realized she could use those reflections to perceive things she couldn’t see
directly. Detecting radio waves was easy—the challenge lay in making sense of the
radio wave data her sensors collected.
Radio waves don’t reflect just once, explains Katabi. “You get very complex
reflections where the same signal reflects off me and then off you, and then off
the ceiling, then off the floor. And you have to make sense of that mess.” She and
Dina Katabi (
left
) speaks with FCC chair Julius Genachowski (
middle
) and MIT professor
Hari Balakrishnan in 2013.
54
