News Articles

Fall 2006

What Do I Know? A life's recounting in the subject's own words
I'm an entrepreneur, the CEO of a company. That takes up a lot of my time. But I love playing with my kids, doing things with friends and getting exercise. I've also found that I need artistic stimulation to exercise the other part of my brain. That's one of the reasons I write. It helps me to recharge, to gain other perspectives and to practice being creative. I believe that one of the keys to a healthy life is balance.

Nov. 2005

40 Under 40
“40 Under 40” recognizes 40 talented individuals under the age of 40 who are making a positive impact on the region’s development. Chosen from a nomination pool of more than 150 candidates, this year’s honorees were determined by an independent panel of 12 judges, comprised of former winners, business professionals and civic leaders. Winners were chosen based on their passion, commitment, visibility, diversity of interests and overall positive impact on the region.

Jun. 6, 2005

Future Teller
Doctors tell us whats wrong with our bodies today. Computer scientist Astro Teller says his software will predict what is going wrong tomorrow.

Eric Teller's Ph.D. is in artificial intelligence, but his practice is more in medicine. He collects numbers, lots of them, from tiny computers silently monitoring subtle changes on thousands of bodies. "Your body is spewing off millions of data points a second," he says.

Jun. 16, 2003

Technology Elite Are Focusing Next On Human Body
Scientists, technologists, doctors, entrepreneurs and drug company executives gather in Philadelphia for first-ever 'Tedmed' conference, where they explore ramifications of widening array of technological tools that could significantly improve human health and longevity; leaders of medical technology start-up companies represented at conference say they are managing to attract investor interest.

Apr. 1, 2003

Armed for Success
What's more amazing than Astro Teller's new wearable body monitor? How a sci-fi novelist with little business cred landed the funding to sell it.

Strap the silver-blue gizmo to your bicep and, in an instant, your body goes on trial for sloth. Through your skin, metallic sensors take readings of body motion, heat, and sweat. Inside, software algorithms translate the data into a constant reading of your body's energy burn rate -- when driving to work, running a marathon, or reading this story. (Pull one on before you go to bed and it'll report back on how many times you woke during the night.)

04.01.03

TEDMED
A gathering of geniuses confront a simple question: Why do we know more about our cars than our own bodies?

Dec. 01, 2002

The Young and the Restless: Pittsburgh's Innovators Cut Across Industry Lines, Blur Passion with Business
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it," according to Astro Teller, CEO of BodyMedia, a Downtown outfit that researches, manufactures and sells wearable body monitors.

Jul. 10, 2001

In Sickness and Health, Biometrics Field Grows
The marketplace is getting crowded with devices that monitor your vital signs, then transmit the data to a wristwatch, Web site, or a nursing station across town. But that raises a vital question for the makers of these "biometric" gadgets: Is the big money to be made in sickness, or in health?

May 18, 2001

Talking ... Health Care With Astro Teller
Highlights from a conversation with Astro Teller and The Wall Street Journal about BodyMedia's recent agreement with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

May 18, 2001

BodyMedia Gets Cash, And an Important Partner
After about four months of negotiation, the fledgling health-information company struck a deal with a local giant: the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which will partner with BodyMedia to do research into several areas, primarily sleep and weight loss. As a key part of the deal, UPMC has given BodyMedia a much-needed cash infusion of more than $2 million in the form of a convertible note. The company won't disclose details.

April 17, 2001

New Age BodyMedia Weathers Market Fallout
Trying to challenge the status quo in health care is no picnic. Even Hillary Clinton failed. BodyMedia Inc. -- 22 months old, 40 employees, almost no revenue -- is an unlikely change agent. Yet here it is in a neo-industrial setting on the edge of downtown Pittsburgh with $8 million in financing and a dream.

Spring 1998

Little Search Engine Gone Beserk
Astro Teller, Ph.D. student in computer science, walks down dimly lit corridor in Wean Hall. "This place always reminds of the catacombs in Paris," he says as he passes a wall of shelves packed with dusty computer terminals, monitors, keyboards and control panels with switches. Some terminals are labeled "good" or "bad." One of many computer graveyards at Carnegie Mellon, it always makes Teller feel uneasy.

Jan./Feb. 1998

Creating a Virtual Frankenstein
Teller, '92, MS '93, says he followed the classic advice: Write about what you know. As a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, one of the leading centers on artificial intelligence, Teller knows computers and their potential. In the overcrowded cinder-block office he shares with three other graduate students, he works on programs designed to solve problems as deceptively simple as recognizing differences between a hat and a shoe. "The goal is to get computers to do the complicated visual processing that humans do without even thinking about it," he says. "It's a process that's not well understood, as much an art as a science."

Sept. 1997

The Shelf
This month, Vintage is reintroducing its line of original paperback fiction, with the first novel by Astro (yes, Astro) Teller. Vintage has such grand hopes for young Teller's Exegesis that it's printing a hungred thousand copies. Twenty-six, a Ph.D. candidate in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon, with a terrifically brainy pedigree (he is of the atomic Tellers), the author's got cybercelebrity written all over him. And at only eleven dollars a pop (and at only 224 easy-to-read pages), Exegesis—in which an excitable woman grad student's computer project takes on a life of its own—might, indeed, turn out to be a Big Book.

Sept. 1997

Astro Teller Brings Frankenstein into Computer Age
His father's father developed the hydrogen bomb. His mother's father won a Nobel Prize for economics. At 26, Astro Teller is gaining attention, not for his family tree, but for his work in artificial intelligence, which he defines as "the science of how to get machines to do the things they do in the movies," and for his new novel, a comic-tragedy set in cyberspace.

Sept. 1997

The Man Machine
"I'm a romantic by nature. I like to tackle problems that most people don't have any idea how to solve. I try to think creatively, on the fringe," bright-eyed computer wonk and fledgling fictionist Astro Teller tells me, brushing back his shoulder length mane of frizzy hair at a bustling outdoor cafe in the heart of Silicon Valley. As professed by this 26-year-old grandson of Edward Teller, inventor of a little thermonuclear device called the hydrogen bomb, such zeal for exploring the unknwon might be cause for stockpiling the basement with canned peaches and tuning into the emergency broadcast station. Lucky for us that Teller, unlike his infamous grandfather, is more interested in digital daydreaming at his artificial-intelligence lab than in blowing up stuff real good.

May 1, 1997

Face to Face
You've heard of struggling artists. But how about two guys so intent on making their exhibition a success that they plan to mug everyone who comes to it? You're forewarned, but don't be afraid: The only mug they want is an image of your face. In fact, their interactive installation takes people's pictures and incorporates them into itself. Spectators become the art. Without them, the art doesn't exist.