Accelerating information technologies such as genetics and robotics may someday bring about a technological singularity, but long before this they may have a more immediate outcome: helping us to solve mankind’s grand challenges.  Tonight Singularity University will host the second in a series of panel discussions with an impressive array of leading experts to investigate how accelerating technologies can be used to solve mankind’s grand challenges in areas of public health, climate change, energy, and water:

• Moderator:  Mr. Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Writer for The Economist, Author of “Zoom”
• Global Public Health: Dr. Larry Brilliant, President, Skoll Urgest Threats Funds
• Climate: Dr. Chris Field, Carnegie/Stanford, U.S. Rep to the International Panel on Climate Change, co-author of the IPCC report that won the Nobel Prize with Al Gore
• Water: Ms. Meena Palaniappan, Pacific Institute, Director of their Water Initiative
• Climate: Dr. Bill Collins, Head of the Climate Science Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
• Energy: Dr. Dan Kammen, Berkeley Institute of the Environment and the IPCC

If you live in the Bay Area then you might want to join in on this exciting free event.  If you are remote, then don’t despair – video and/or other coverage of the event will likely be made available in the coming weeks.

These panels are a prelude to the Singularity University team project that will take place during the final three weeks of the Singularity University summer session.  The goal of the project will be to create a proposal and subsequently implement over the next ten years a plan that will positively impact more than 1 billion people in one or more grand challenge areas.

The official invitation for the event is located here.   The event is completely free and open to the public, hosted at the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View, CA.  For your convenience, the invitation is pasted below:

Disclosure: Keith Kleiner is an Associate Founder of Singularity University