National Instruments Honors Engineering and Science Innovation

By DE Editors

National Instruments (NI) honored 17 applications developed by engineers, scientists and researchers from around the world at the fourth annual Graphical System Design Achievement Awards. At the award ceremony held during the annual NIWeek conference and exhibition, winners were recognized for using NI technology and a graphical system design approach to develop solutions to engineering and science challenges.

The 2011 Application of the Year Award was presented to Christian Sames of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics for developing a custom time digitizer that makes it possible to implement real-time execution of time-critical tasks in hardware. Further, Max Planck engineers implemented feedback control for systems as small as a single atom and performed decision-making processes on time scales of one nanosecond based on the detection of single photons.

The Green Engineering Award was presented to Vestas Wind Systems and CIM Industrial Systems A/S for designing and testing the durability of a wind turbine drivetrain. Kitasato University received the Humanitarian Award for developing the world’s first real-time 3D medical imaging system. This medical instrument can potentially detect cancer during medical checkups without requiring the patient to undergo the severe stress of a biopsy.

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Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.