The inaugural graduates of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley school backed by NASA, Google Inc., and tech industry luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, unveiled their grand visions on Thursday for leveraging emerging technologies to solve humanity's great challenges.
The stated mission of the unaccredited university, founded in 2008, is to foster leaders who will build on rapid advances in and convergence across areas like biotechnology, supercomputing, nanotechnology and robotics to address intractable problems.
"It is only the scale of these exponentially growing technologies that has the ability to address the major challenges of humanity, whether it's energy and the environment, or poverty and disease," said Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and author of "The Singularity Is Near."
During the nine-week interdisciplinary graduate studies program, the 40 students were asked to develop projects that could help 1 billion people within 10 years. The individuals divided themselves into four teams focused on different challenges.
Four teams
Team Xidar Global Disaster Response developed new systems to facilitate communications in the aftermath of a disaster, including smart phone applications that provide GPS-based evacuation guidance or relay vital signs from "eTriage" bracelets.
"We're calling for an entirely new communication architecture," said Christian Tom, 22, who recently graduated from Stanford.
Lest it all seem pie in the sky, he noted the team members are in the process of incorporating a company and applying for patents.
Team Domus 3D Printing presented a plan to scale up advances in 3-D printing technologies, already employed to create miniature prototypes of buildings and consumer products, to create the actual components of affordable housing from materials like cement or polymers.
Team One Global Voice devised a text message-based information sharing system that enables marketplaces, job boards and other means of accelerating economic development in developing countries.
Finally, Team Gettaround proposed an "intelligent transportation grid" that would make vehicle use safer and more efficient by using censors and cell phones to provide real-time travel updates, enabling owners to rent their autos when they're not using them and, eventually, taking advantage of "autonomous" or self-driving vehicles.
40 top students
The 40 students - some recent college graduates, some the chief executives of existing companies - were accepted into the course from a field of more than a thousand applicants. Their bios are rife with advanced degrees from Harvard, MIT, Stanford and the like.
The university's board of trustees include: Kurzweil; Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which awards multimillion-dollar prizes to organizations that achieve breakthroughs in genomics, energy, medicine and other fields; and Robert Richards, the founder of Odyssey Moon Ltd., which is attempting to commercialize trips to the moon.
Subsequent graduate programs at Singularity University will include around 120 students. Tuition is $25,000. The school is also gearing up to offer three- and nine-day executive programs, limited to 25 and 50 individuals, respectively.
Margo Lipstin, 23, a Team Domus member who studied the ethics of science at Stanford, said she was drawn to Singularity University because of its emphasis on real life applications. Technology is developing so rapidly and changing the world so dramatically that it's no longer possible to separate ideas from practice, she said.
"The theories are very powerful and we need to understand what values they espouse, and what is the vision for the world we're trying to reach with them," she said.
E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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