As we mentioned a month ago, Futuremed 2011 doesn’t exactly have a cheap price tag: $7500 with limited scholarships available for those in academia. Yet over the past few years Singularity University has proven that it can provide an educational experience you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the world. Check out the schedule of events on their site – looks like they’ll be going to Intuitive Surgical (makers of the DaVinci surgery robot) among other destinations. Whether they’re focusing on medicine, or looking at a broad range of fields, SU has a strong commitment to helping the rising generation of leaders harness exponential trends for the good of all humanity. This past year’s graduating class from the summer program dreamed up a dozen new ways to help a billion people in the next decade. Should be interesting to see what changes Futuremed 2011 can produce in five days.

[image and video credit: Singularity University]
[source: Futuremed 2011]

Singularity University's newest executive program, FutureMed, will focus on how various accelerating technologies could transform medicine in the next decade.

Singularity University thinks that emerging technology could revolutionize healthcare in the next ten years. They want medical professionals to be ready for it. SU recently announced a new executive program to be held at their NASA AMES campus in Silicon Valley. FutureMed 2011 (May 10th to May 15th) will be a five-day series of lectures, site visits, panel discussions, hands-on experiences, and workshops. The program will focus on the next 2-10 years of medicine, looking to see what disruptive and innovative influences will be created by growth in genomic sequencing, digital healthcare, medical robots, artificial intelligence, nanomedicine, stem cells, systems medicine, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology. It could be a much needed wake up call for investors, medical executives, and entrepreneurs who haven’t considered how emergent tech will change the healthcare industry in the years ahead. It even serves as a continuing medical education credit for physicians. Space is limited, but registration is still open. Total cost is $7500, with a possible discount for academics. Can Singularity University spark the same changes in the medical industry as they have for accelerating technologies in general? We’ll soon find out.

“The acceleration of science and technology within biomedicine makes it more important than ever for clinicians, researchers, policy-makers, and business leaders to understand and approach the potential opportunities and risks of new technologies in a thoughtful and nuanced way.”
— Neil Jacobstein, President of Singularity University

Founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, Singularity University aims to educate present and future leaders in the power of exponential growth. One of their strengths is getting creative minds to generate new solutions to classic problems using emergent technology. We’ve seen how their summer graduate studies programs are aimed to help one billion people in the next ten years. FutureMed fits into that theme rather well. With medical technology, the potential benefits to the global population are enormous. Yet those benefits will only arise if accelerating technologies can be properly recognized and exploited. To harness that potential, the medical industry may need to start thinking more like engineers, as well as accept the aid and guidance of its patients as a valuable crowd-sourcing tool. Hopefully, with medical experts like Daniel Kraft (a prominent researcher in regenerative medicine at Stanford) leading the Singularity University team, FutureMed will provide its students with the vision and training they need to push the healthcare industry firmly into the 21st century.

Disclosure: Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner is an Associate Founder of Singularity University

[image credits: Singularity University]
[sources: Singularity University]

Singularity University has teamed up with FIAP for their first international program in November.

Singularity University is branching outside Silicon Valley with its first international program to take place in November in Brazil. SU has teamed up with FIAP, one of the leading academic technology centers in the country, to establish an executive program. For six days (8 Nov to 13 Nov) students will learn from the likes of Dan Barry, Andrew Hessel, and other faculty members who will be on location in São Paolo. Other key SU figures, like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, will be tele-commuting in via video conferencing. As always the focus will be on how accelerating technologies can be leveraged to change and aid humanity. This international program is being offered at a relative bargain, just 8000 reais (~$4700 USD), much less than the typical SU executive program which runs $7.5k to $15k. It’s also open to many more participants, up to 350 according to the site. Check out Peter Diamandis’ pitch for the program in the video below. There’s still time to sign up if you’re interested.


I’m rather impressed with how quickly Singularity University is expanding. They’ve only just finished their second summer program, and they already have their sights on international franchising. It’s also cool, and fitting, that they’re using video conferencing technology to facilitate this launch over seas. In fact, there are some big advantages to the video based lecture series. Like Diamandis’ call for applicants, all of the SU/FIAP lectures will be in English with simultaneous broadcast in Portuguese. This instantaneous translation will probably be less jarring when paired with the normal lag for international video calls. In the future, it will probably makes sense to simply move much of SU Executive Program online. It’s great to establish a connection with FIAP, but why not also have a simultaneous program in Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. Or Turkey, Japan, and Italy for that matter. Once we enable faculty and students to meaningfully connect via video calls, the range of Singularity University becomes global. It will likely take a few years to establish such an online education platform, but considering SU’s rate of expansion, maybe it will arrive sooner than I think. Who knows, perhaps the Executive Program class of 2012 will have thousands of participants from all over the world meeting in cyberspace.

[image credit: Singularity University]
[source: Singularity University, FIAP, KurzweilAI.net]

(Exponentially) Fast Times @ SingularityU

Ray Kurzweil - A Regular At Singularity University

Having been through Singularity University multiple times now, first as a student during the inaugural Graduate Studies Program in summer ’09, then as a Teaching Fellow for the Medicine & Neuroscience track during the November ’09 alpha launch of the Executive Program, you’d think this would be old hat by now, as we launch into the first-ever full-fledged Executive Program, 45 participants strong, me reprising my role as a TF.

You’d think.

The nice thing about a program centering on accelerating technologies is that the curriculum changes every single time. A nightmare to continually update for our world-class faculty and lecturers, perhaps (who already lead quadruple-lives as some combination of former astronauts, Nobel laureates, best-selling authors, cutting-edge technologists and tier-1 entrepreneurs), but hey, at least we’re never bored round these parts.

From Left: Ray Kurzweil, Shawna Pandya, Simon Daniel

Besides, hosting 45 participants representing 19 countries over 9 days is the largest SU undertaking to date, easily surpassing the 17 participants from the first EP and even the 40 students we hosted during the summer. That element alone guarantees excitement and er, entropy. Even still, I have my doubts. This will be our most Executive crowd yet. Sure, they have experience and expertise…but do they have vision and daring? More importantly, will they be fun?

After 9 days, I am happy to say I can eat my words. From dancing queens to roving machines, in true SU style, our minds have been blown – and when I say “our,” I mean participants AND faculty alike.

As SU Executive Director Salim Ismail points out, it’s not infrequent for a speaker to comment that they have never been as challenged or as stimulated by discussion or questions as when speaking at SU. It’s kind of like an ideas playground in that way – participant, faculty or lecturer, anyone seeking an intellectual high will find it here.

This session of SU was particularly enlightening because of the focus on the participants’ own intellectual prowess. Mid-way through the 10-day marathon-sprint, participants were given the opportunity to showcase their own interests and expertise by way of 15-minute lightning talks, bar-camp style. Later on, over the final 2 days of the program, the executives were led through industry discussions led by Tom Wujec, senior fellow at Autodesk, and Dave Blakely of IDEO, during which time the EP-ers used the knowledge gleaned during the week to synthesize new directions and innovations within their own fields. As they presented these seedling ideas to the group, spanning sectors such as healthcare, insurance and energy, Salim and Peter spoke for us all: “We’re blown away.” I don’t know why I forget this, but I’m reminded quickly enough – everyone who comes through this institution is an innovation engine waiting to be kick-started.

Apart from intellectual candy (actually that’s putting it mildly – as one friend noted afterwards, I had the equivalent of an intellectual hangover), the experiences themselves were memorable-and-a-half. Tom Wujec visualized the full 9-day experience by drawing it on the walls. In real-time. Forget trying to follow along as you are exposed to the latest advances in nanotechnology, robotics – this guy draws it on the walls neatly (and prettily) in an easily digestible format. It is one thing to attempt to grasp the sheer magnitude of what you’ve learned that is cutting-edge – but to see the entirety of the academic content visualized on the 4 walls of NASA’s Eagle Room is, in a word, wow.

At SU, great ideas are pondered, discussed…and written on the walls

At the end of the 14-hour days jam-packed with brainful goodness (really, we have to invent adjectives to keep up with the awesometasticness of the program), the conversations really begin. For the hardcore, the driven and the sleep-averse, we retire to NASA-lodge for late-night debate, discussion, mayhem and merriment. It’s not uncommon for participants to rate this as their favourite part of the program, when we take off our brain-plugs and let the ideas and opinions flow. EP participant Rob Nail and I start talking about our favourite TED talks, when he mentions a newly posted video entitled, “The 5 Lives of an Artist,” by Raghava KK. As it happens, the same video has crossed my inbox that morning, so of course this moment seems as appropriate as any to pull it up. Always game for something new, Singularity U co-founder and X-Prize CEO Peter Diamandis, a frequenter of the nightly discussions at the Lodge, joins us, and we contemplate the more artistic side of life for 18 minutes.

Later in the week, Dan Barry, former 3-time shuttle astronaut and head of faculty at Singularity U, partners with the good folks at Willow Garage and the guys behind Personal Robot-2 to bring in a telepresence robot. As he is testing the thing, Scott Hassan, founder of Willow Garage, pops up on the screen and roams around, saying hello from Willow Garage. Of course it isn’t long before Scott’s tele-persona is adorned with post-it note elephant ears and shaggy eyebrows, courtesy of none other than Peter Diamandis. It’s just that kind of place.

Several hours later, Scott Hassan is back on the tele-robot, and this time he’s with a friend. Dan calls me over to meet them, but in the robo-excitement, the introduction is lost. Besides, I’m too busy making fun of the now bare-faced robot – where are the elegant ears and eyebrows of yester-hour? I make a funny face at the tele-pair and walk off. It’s like a camcorder at a party, right?

“Oh so you got a chance to meet Scott and Sergey on the robot?” Someone asks me later on. Wait, what? Sergey? Not that Sergey, I hope. I mean, I was making fun of the guy via robot, for goodness sake. Dan confirms as much, but unconsolingly points out that he did say “meet Sergey” at the time. So Sergey Brin, if you are reading this, you really do make a very lovely robot, eyebrows or not. And to redeem myself, I’ll start using your esteemed search engine more frequently, I promise. Bob Harell, an EP participant, later tags me on Twitter for my #RobotFauxPas, a hashtag for which I, for better or worse, have a 100% market share on Twitter.

At this pace, the days blur by and somehow we are already at the last night of the program. As is tradition by now, the class unveils their footprint for SU, a gift from this session to the University as a reminder of the experience. Previously, we’ve had glass-encased photos of the SU crew (GSP’09) and SU-engraved chocolates and wineglasses, carved by the participants themselves, courtesy of a trek down to TechShop (EP’09). This souvenir, however, has to be my favourite to date: a group of 10, together with the brilliant hands at TechShop, have put together an LED-emblazoned SU emblem, complete with exponential curve on the front. In two days. If anyone has doubted it so far, they surely cannot anymore: ‘round these parts, we work in exponential time.

At the end of the night, one of the participants, Robin Tedder, an Australian investor, comes to myself and Ross, our VP of Executive and University Relations, to thank us for the experience. His mind has been completely blown, and then some. He extends his hand by way of thanks, but Ross won’t have any of it. After 9 intense days, we’re beyond such formalities, and Ross tells him as much, embracing him as one would an old friend.

Welcome to the family, SU EP10.

9 days, 45 participants, 19 countries and 1 kajillion lost sleep-hours later: welcome to the family, EP10!

Along with growing student interest and class size, SU has also updated its look to include more videos, more alumni voices, and more social networking.

The spring season of growth has come early to the NASA Ames center in Silicon Valley. That’s where Singularity University is gearing up for its one year anniversary and a new burst of innovation and development. It’s winter Executive Program is currently underway, the spring Executive Progam is approaching and SU is working to double the number of students in its summer Graduate Studies Program. The fledgling university has also formed partnerships with other institutions to further its goals of instructing a generation of leaders about accelerating technologies. SU is working with the XPrize Lab at MIT on brain computer interfaces and is sponsoring the She’s Geeky conferences to help promote women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. If all that wasn’t enough, SU has even revamped their website: adding in more videos, alumni feedback, and social networking. Technology is accelerating, and Singularity University wants to grow right along with it.

SU is unique as the only educational institution focused on teaching its students how to leverage exponential growth trends in information technologies to help solve humanity’s grand challenges such as poverty, hunger, environment, health, and energy. Its programs are relatively short (9 weeks for the summer, 10 days for Executive programs) to fit a body of students that are often already successful entrepreneurs and leaders. The hope is that the growing body of alumni will use their talents to produce successful new ventures around growing technologies like bioinformatics, mobile devices, augmented reality, or dozens of others. With alumni success comes university success and SU hopes to keep expanding in the years ahead. Eventually, SU may produce enough open minded and innovative thinkers that they can help steer the globe towards accepting, adapting to, and taking advantage the rising tide of technological progress.

To do that, SU is constantly finding new ways it can improve. We’ve already seen impressive growth in class size, and student interest, but SU is also committed to continuing to innovate its curriculum, and widen the expertise of its already insanely talented faculty and advisors. By any metric, Singularity University is having a tremendous first year and I look forward to seeing how this next summer brings in a new class of students, a new round of lectures, and a new burst of creativity. As always, Singularity Hub will continue to follow Singularity University’s progress, so stay tuned.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner, owner of Singularity Hub, is an associate founder at Singularity University.
[image credits: Singularity University]

When you’re running a company, or a research team, there’s not much time for continuing education. That’s why Singularity University has taken its nine week summer course and distilled it into ten days of intense experiences. Although many important upcoming technologies will not be active for years to come, those in charge of investments and entrepreneurial endeavors need to plan now for the changes that such technologies will bring. That sort of philosophy is what has kept Kurzweil successful in business and the lecture circuit for so long. SU also hopes that its Executive Program will help powerful decisions makers see the benefit of using accelerating technologies to solve the world’s “grand challenges”: hunger, poverty, energy, and climate change.

SU’s Executive Program is cheap as far as such seminars go, $15k for tuition, room and board, but that’s still more cash than I have laying around. If you’ve got the bank (maybe you work for a bank) you can sign up at the SU website. Luckily, Singularity University is making many of its lectures available online after the seminars close. We’ve already discussed a few here on the Hub. As more talks from more world-caliber speakers become available, we’ll pass them on. You don’t get the full SU experience (Tesla car rides, Vomit Comet weightless training, tours through Silicon Valley companies, etc) but it is free.

We’ll also keep you informed about the unique innovations and new companies that have sprouted up around the SU programs. Gettaround car sharing, a 3D printer that can produce a house, crowd-sourcing disaster recovery…these are all cool ideas that had their start at Singularity University. Still, the most profound effects of these Executive Programs may not be the short term innovations they spawn. As SU does its best to raise a generation of Executives with a forward-thinking and global-improvement mindset, we could see new trends in business help create a future we can all enjoy and be proud of. Heh. Not bad for ten days.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an Associate Founder at Singularity University.
[photo credit: Singularity University]
[video credit: Singularity University]

Kraft discusses the future of medicine after his Singularity University Executive Program lecture.

There’s some amazing things coming down the healthcare pipeline and Daniel Kraft knows a little about all of them. Kraft teaches at Stanford University, is an expert on regenerative medicine, and a member of the faculty at Singularity University. He was one of the many lecturers at SU’s nine-day Executive Program which is just wrapping up. After his lecture, he sat down with executive director Salim Ismail to discuss the future of medicine. Check out the video after the break.

Regenerative medicine is starting to experience tremendous growth with the blossoming use of stem cells to help the body heal and replace damaged tissue. While there has been tremendous debate in the US around the ethics of using embryonic stem cells, Kraft is happy to discuss how all manner of adult cells may be coaxed into becoming pluripotent (able to tranform into different tissues). While you should definitely check out the full ten minute interview, don’t miss Kraft discussing pluripotency starting after 6:16. Kraft also briefly touches on the possibility of 3D printing of living tissue (8:50) and the use of stem cells to cure baldness (10:05). These are some impressive developments!

Stay tuned to the Hub for more news about Singularity University and videos of their unique presentations. And check out SU’s twitter feed to keep up to date on everything going on in the program.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an associate founder at Singularity University.

[screen capture and video credit: Matt Rutherford, Singularity University]

Dan Barry has pretty much done every cool thing you can do. And he's going to build intelligent robots next. Take that, Leonardo DaVinci.

There are people out there who’s list of accomplishments simply seem unbelievable. Dan Barry has a MD PhD and a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science. He’s a robotics expert, and a former astronaut who flew three missions. Of course most of you probably know him because he was a contestant on Survivor. Sounds impossible, but it’s all true. Barry was also the Head of Faculty for Singularity University’s Graduate Summer Program and is the track chair for AI and Robotics. After his recent lecture at SU’s nine-day Executive Program, he sat down with executive director Salim Ismail to discuss the future of robotics. Check out his uniquely qualified opinions in the video after the break.

From a certain point of view, your car is a robot. Remote controlled machines are remarkable, and an important branch of robotics, but Barry’s focus is on autonomous creations. He wants to build a robot that could interact and live with humans, maybe even have human like intelligence and consciousness. While there are many breakthroughs coming in the next five years (see 2:50 in the video), it seems unlikely to Barry that we’ll have companion robots even in the next decade (5:40). Eventually, however, Barry believes that we will fall in love with our robots (9:35) the same way we fall in love with pets and cars. While the entire video is worth watching, make sure to check at 11:30 to hear about Barry’s theories on how intelligence is based on movement. He also speculates on how robots may eventually become self aware at 13:47.

Stay tuned to the Hub for more news about Singularity University and videos of their unique presentations. And check out SU’s twitter feed to keep up to date on everything going on in the program.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an associate founder at Singularity University.

[screen capture and video credit: Matt Rutherford, Singularity University]

Part of Singularity University’s unique approach to executive training focuses on getting attendees to use social networking to connect their experience to the wider world. You can follow most of what happens in the program on SU’s twitter feed. Making their $15,000 per person program as transparent and publicly accessible as possible is a revolutionary, and some might say, economically dangerous idea. Why pay for the university cow when you get the cyber milk for free? Yet, Singularity University is betting that the uniqueness of their program will continually attract new attendees while recognizing that part of that program is wasted if it can’t be shared with the global community. You get the feeling that SU is trying to show that the new executive must be globally conscience and future-minded.

Video from David Orban, Singularity University Advisor:

Already, SU exec program attendees have heard some great talks. There were big name futurists like Ray Kurzweil who gave an opening address. But you also have innovators like Andrew Hessel, one of the founders of openwetware the wiki for synthetic biology. The curriculum (shared in part with the summer session) is expansive and execs may also get special visits from experts like Jonathan Zittrain (cyber-law guru) and others. If it deals with the future, and fits in a nine-day session, you can bet SU is trying to include it in their executive program.

Of course, one of the great things about short programs such as this one is that they can be repeated fairly regularly. The next session begins in February, and interested parties can sign up at the Singularity University website. With each session limited to 40 people it’s going to be interesting to see how quickly this next one fills up.

Andrew Hessel and David Orban get a chance to try out the Tesla Roadster. Nice perk.

As neither an executive, nor a student with $15k to spend on continuing education, my interest in the SU nine day program is centered less on the curriculum than on the projects that may arise from it. The summer session led to the development of a new car-sharing company (Gettaround, mentioned in our iPhone Zipcar story). With less time, but more industrial clout, I wonder what kind of new products, philosophies, or synergies are being born this week in the halls of Singularity University. A lot could happen in nine days. Especially if those execs stop joy-riding around in roadsters.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an Associate Founder at Singularity University.
[photo credits: Singularity University, Rod Furlan via David Orban]
[video credit: David Orban]

Singularity University’s executive program in November essentially takes a nine week summer course and distills it into just nine days. The aim is to educate business leaders about the possibilities and consequences of exponential growth in technologies. With the knowledge from the course, SU hopes to generate a class of educated executives who will be capable of harnessing the emergent trends of technology to solve humanity’s grand challenges (including hunger, poverty, climate change and energy). Hopefully, those attending the course will be better able to navigate their own companies to profit from exponential growth technologies while simultaneously creating a future where those technologies benefit everyone.


As is typical with an executive program, SU’s nine day course doesn’t come cheap. Tuition, room, and board will run you or your business a total of $15,000. While that’s steep for me, it’s pretty cheap for executive programs which usually run around $5k-$10k for a weekend. The nine day course is expected to have less than 40 students, and not everyone who is interested will necessarily qualify.

The summer session was a success and produced some interesting ideas: a 3D printer that could produce a house, improved disaster recovery through crowd sourcing, SMS applications in developing countries, and the creation of Gettaround car sharing (which is competing with Zipcar). I’m curious to see what high power business executives can do with their time at Singularity University. While I doubt we will see the depth of projects we did with the summer session (there just isn’t enough time), these students will be at the unique position to reshape their companies upon returning from the class. There could be more change in less time. Which is sort of what exponential growth is all about.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an Associate Founder at Singularity University.

[photo credit: Singularity University]
[video credit: Singularity University]