Innovation Watch - Eye on the Future

Peter Diamandis – The Best Way to Predict the Future (Singularity University)

iw — Wed, 30 May 2012 03:28:54 +0000

Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-Founder of Singularity University, discusses the best way to predict the future, and shares his personal philosophies on innovation and the commercial space industry. Filmed at Singularity University’s Executive Program, March 2010. (1h 46m 10s)

Tony Wagner: Creating Innovators (Think Global School)

iw — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:52:22 +0000

THINK Global School and Traidhos Three Generation Community for Learning host a lecture event with Tony Wagner, a renowned educator focused on transforming education for the 21st century. (52m 12s)

Steve Mahan: Self-Driving Car Test (Google)

iw — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:04:53 +0000

Google announced its self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, it shares one of its favorite moments in this video. Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, joined for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. Google organized this test as a technical experiment. It’s also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met. (3m 2s)

Google’s Project Glass: Augmented Reality Glasses (Google)

iw — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:35:21 +0000

Google believes technology should work for you —- to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t. A team within in the Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. (2m 30s)

Peter Diamandis: Abundance is Our Future (TED)

iw — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:40:12 +0000

Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism — that we’ll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us. “I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.” (16m 15s)

Tiny Transistor (UNSW)

iw — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:21:38 +0000

In a remarkable feat of micro-engineering, UNSW physicists have created a working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal. The transistor has implications for both classical and quantum computing. (2m 53s)

Michael Nielsen: Reinventing Discovery (@Google)

iw — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:31:04 +0000

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book–the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. (43m 24s)

Peter Diamandis: Tapping ‘Cognitive Surplus’ to Solve Global Problems (FORA TV)

iw — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 01:12:52 +0000

Calling on Clay Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” theory, Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, argues that the best way to solve the world’s problems and encourage social innovation is to engage the passionate mind. (3m 20s)

20 Under 20 (Thiel Fellowship)

iw — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:56:28 +0000

The Thiel Foundation defends and promotes freedom in all its dimensions: political, personal, and economic. It supports innovative scientific research and new technologies that empower people to improve their lives, champions organizations and individuals who expose human rights abuses and authoritarianism in all its guises, and encourages the exploration of new ideas and new spaces where people can be less reliant on government and where freedom can flourish. The 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship pays 20 of the brightest minds to drop out of college and receive $100,000 to get business ideas off the ground instead of sitting in a classroom. (7m 31s)

Luis von Ahn: Massive-Scale Online Collaboration (TED)

iw — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:40:03 +0000

After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately — all for free. (16m 40s)

Making the Impossible Possible (X PRIZE Foundation)

iw — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:34:34 +0000

Find out what Revolution through Competition really means and discover how the X PRIZE Foundation is Making the Impossible, Possible. (7m 17s)

The Sahara Solar Breeder Project (DigInfo)

iw — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:26:36 +0000

The Sahara Solar Breeder Project, a huge project led by Japanese scientists, is getting underway. Its goal is to provide the ultimate solution to humanities biggest problem in the 21st century – our reliance on finite energy resources. This project will use the world’s biggest desert, the Sahara, as an energy source. Deserts have ample sunlight over a vast area, and their sand contains lots of silica – the raw material for silicon. So the idea is to build silicon manufacturing plants around the desert and solar power plants in the desert, and use the power generated to build more silicon and power plants in a “breeding” process. In the future, such plants could supply energy worldwide, through DC power lines using high-temperature superconductors. (5m 33s)