No Such Thing As Originality

So I've been working on this idea on and off for several months. Basically a small autonomous aircraft able to navigate on a programmed path using GPS, and equipped with thermal cameras. The purpose of the system would be for search and rescue purposes. Imagine one of these flying out in the wilderness around where a person went missing. Using the thermal cameras, every time a "warm body" was detected it would send a picture of the body along with GPS coordinates to a base station, who could then direct emergency response teams to the area. Just imagine how much ground one (or several) of these things could cover. And how much faster/more efficient/cheaper it would be then flying helicopters around and search parties and such. Anyway, that's the brilliant idea I've been cooking up for quite some time now. I don't have any techincal details down or anything, but have just been trying build up a concept system, and determine the plausability of the whole thing.

So I was thinking about the possibility of transferring down to BYU next year, and whilst perusing their computer science department I came upon one of the research areas that the school is working on...unmanned aerial vehicals for the purpose of search and rescue. I seriously almost cried when I saw the article (http://research.cs.byu.edu/~hcmi/news_stories/Fieldtest_5_29_08/story.php) I really thought I had a somewhat original idea that could be used to save lives. And it's a research area at BYU. I'm not going to give up on the project, in hopes that maybe I'll be able to improve on what they've done, as there are some key differences in the imaging capabilities for what they have and what I'm hoping for. But all in all I've given up hope that I'll really be able to come up with something truly original/groundbreaking. I am working on a piece of software to cure cancer, but haven't quite figured out the whole cure cancer part of it. Oh well.

On a more positive note, finding this has strengthened my desire to transfer to BYU, and I think the field (Human-Centered Machine Intelligence) is something I would like to focus on as a career.