IEEE Spectrum February, 2014 - 47

North America. Meanwhile, as the
continent moved west, it plowed
into the island chains, erecting the
mountain ranges that now stretch
from Alaska to Mexico.
After receiving her Ph.D. from
Princeton in 2008, Sigloch took
a job as an assistant professor at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München, in Germany, where she
worked until moving to Oxford
last October. One day, she got an
e-mail from a French colleague,
Guilhem Barruol. He said he was
moving to Réunion and wanted
to investigate the island's volcanic source. Sigloch told him that
the German government had recently bought 80 ocean-bottom
seismometers for scientific research, and she suggested they
distribute them near the island
in hopes of imaging the hypothesized plume below.
By 2011, they had raised enough funds from
the French and German governments for
57 ocean-bottom stations and 37 new land stations on Réunion and nearby islands. That year,
they set up the land stations, sailing to pristine
coral atolls, some of them uninhabited nature
preserves where they watched sea turtles hatch
and hordes of giant hermit crabs snatch liver
pâté from their sandwiches.
The next year, with help from a small crew
of colleagues and students, they deployed the
ocean-bottom stations. The cruise lasted five
weeks. Each day, the researchers assembled
the instruments in a makeshift workshop inside
the ship's helicopter hangar and hauled one or
two overboard using the ship's crane. At night,
they ate cheese and sipped wine and rum punch.
The team returned to Réunion to retrieve the
ocean-bottom sensors in 2013, but it will take
years to process all of the data.
Sigloch concedes that her work can sometimes feel tedious. And she probably could
have made more money had she stuck with
the cellphone industry or used her training
in geophysics to get a job with an oil company.
"But that wouldn't bring the same intellectual
excitement," she says. "You can only discover
something once. If we find a plume under La
Réunion, then for this place on Earth, we will
have settled the question of its existence once
and for all." -a r iel bleicher

baseball's
most valuable
coder
SPortviSion'S mark Perry traCkS
BaSeBaLL PLayerS' every move

All And lAnky, studying engineering. But then his
Mark Perry (no rela- classes got tough. It was decision
tion to this author) time. "I love baseball," Perry says.
looks like the pro- "I will never stop loving the game. But
I realized I couldn't do both halfway,
fessional baseball
pitcher he once dreamed he'd become. so I chose the safer route."
During his junior year, that safer
But it's his coding, not his fastball, that
route included a wrong turn. Perry
got him into the major leagues.
took a co-op engineering job with
Perry works for Sportvision, in
Mountain View, Calif., the compa- Cisco Systems, doing hardware testny that creates and operates tracking
ing. "It just wasn't for me," he says.
and graphics systems for sportSeeking more of a challenge, he
started looking for an internship
ing events. If you've ever watched
American football on television, writing software. That's when his
you've probably seen one of the com- mother stepped in. Earlier she'd had
a chance meeting with Rob Amyx,
pany's early innovations-a virtual
Sportsvision's senior manager of spefirst-down line "painted" across the
screen in bright yellow.
cial projects. Although Amyx hadn't
Perry is Sportvision's lead engi- described his work in great detail,
neer for baseball, developing soft- Perry's mother got the sense that he
ware to analyze pitches, hits, and worked for a company that sometimes
sent engineers to sporting events. She
soon, the movements of the players
themselves. It's the perfect job for thought that sounded like a good fit for
her baseball-crazy engineer son and
a baseball fanatic turned engineer.
insisted that he send Amyx his résumé.
Amyx passed the résumé on to
perry didn't step right off the pitcher's mound into this line of work- Sportvision's engineering team, and
but almost. Although he was good at Perry landed a three-month summath and science in high school, his
mer internship, where he found himmain interest was baseball, which he
self assigned to a golf project. Perry
intended to make his career. But dur- doesn't play golf, but he knew that
ing his senior year, a lower-back in- Sportvision was still the right place
for him. For one thing, he says, it
jury knocked him out of the starting
rotation and into the bullpen, forcing was great to be surrounded by peohim to consider other possibilities.
ple who cared about sports; in addiWhen he entered California Poly- tion to golf and football, Sportvision
has products for motor sports, basetechnic State University, in San Luis
Obispo, in 2001, he planned to
ball, and sailing. Also, working at
keep playing while simultaneously Sportvision felt a lot like being a
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2014