A new university for changing the world

IT IS a hot and sticky summer afternoon in Silicon Valley, and a group of students are chatting over drinks and food, having just completed the final presentations for their course.

But these are no ordinary graduates: they are the first class to pass through the Singularity University (SU).

The brainchild of the futurist Ray Kurzweil and his friend Peter Diamandis, the pioneer of personal space flight and founder of the X Prize Foundation, the SU is a "summer camp" for people to learn about emerging technologies from experts.

It's a nine-week hothouse that allows a hand-picked selection of bright thinkers to absorb cutting-edge thinking from some of the world's most talented technologists.

Over the summer, 40 students with diverse backgrounds among them medicine, physics, computing and law were brought together and given an intensive course in the most important futuristic ideas. The objective? As its slogan says: "Preparing humanity for accelerating technological change."

It is a lofty and ambitious goal. When it was formally announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference this year, the idea raised some eyebrows. However, the project gained a number of backers and more than US$2m ($2.87m) in funding, and became a reality.

Housed on Moffett Federal Airfield, a former naval base 50km south of San Francisco that is now used as a research centre by NASA, the Singularity programme ran in a building used by NASA's International Space University, which provided the model for SU.

Its location is apposite, providing a physical reminder of the impact of technology over generations. Across the campus from SU classes is Hangar One, an enormous shed built to house airships in the 1930s

Next door, NASA's Ames pioneers aeronautical research, and just down the road stand Google's headquarters. Indeed, the Moffett airstrip is where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin land from their travels around the globe.

Over the course, the students attended classes from more than 100 faculty advisers and speakers, who have given their time for free as part of the experiment.

The subjects included biotechnology, space research, artificial intelligence and nanotech; visitors included luminaries such as Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe, often called the "Fathers of the Internet", as well as the Nobel laureate physicist George Smoot and 21st-century success stories such as the game design legend Will Wright and billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

The students (or their sponsors) have paid US$25,000 ($35,957) each to attend. The cost was not a deterrent, however, as staff had to sift through more than 1,200 applications, says Salim Ismail, the executive director of the project.

"They have an extraordinary academic background some of them are qualified to teach some of the courses."

But most difficult, says Ismail, was picking out a broad mix of skills. "If we had 40 nanotechnologists, it wouldn't be a good mix. So we thought carefully about how many of each discipline we wanted in that founding class and I think we've succeeded: they're a frightening bunch."

The point, he says, is to arm the students with the tools they need to go out and make a difference in the world, using the smartest and fastest-growing technologies to overcome some of the planet's major problems.

The first stage of the course involved a wide range of lectures, talks and discussions that touched briefly on a variety of topics. After that, students could take a deeper look at more particular subject areas. After this came the final project phase, which lasted two weeks.

It was intended to be a way for the students to put the things they had learned, with the goal of outlining a business or service that could help change the lives of a billion people within 10 years.

Among the presentations, Xidar team proposed a suite of emergency systems to help save lives during a major disaster.

But one of the most intriguing projects was Acasa, a scheme to build houses using 3D printing technology.

The concept was a portable, programmable gantry that piped concrete into customised patterns, building up layers of material until the shell of a building was complete.

The system, its creators said, would take just a handful of people to operate it and could build an entire house in less than two days.

They plan to form a company and try to raise money to help build houses on a large scale in the developing world.

Their presentations done, the class could let off a little steam. In the shadow of Hangar One, Sofya Yampolsky, a graduate student from New York with a background in arts and future studies, explains how her sense of perspective and scale had drastically altered since she began the course.

"There was so much to learn that it was difficult to believe that you could actually retain everything you'd heard, but a salient point was calling a friend of mine back in Boston," she says.

"All of a sudden all these facts kept surfacing about nanotech and networks and computing that I didn't anticipate that I'd retained."

She adds, "I don't think there's such a thing as a normal life after SU. It just changes the way you see the world.

"Now when someone says anything less than a billion people, it doesn't seem like a big deal. The numbers, the scale, has drastically changed. The vision is so much bigger."

With results like that, Ismail says the inaugural class has gone as well as anybody could have predicted.

"The students have been phenomenal. We've attracted some of the top thinkers in the world. Every week or two, we've had some extraordinary figure come by and chat with the students," he says.

Still, he adds, this year is a work in progress. In the winter, the organisation will run a course and next year it plans to expand the summer course to accommodate 120 students a threefold increase.

Will that change what happens?

"We're tweaking almost non-stop," he smiles. "This is essentially a real-time institution."

Observer