Future Positive

XPRIZE Founder Peter H. Diamandis is in conversation with His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, the Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council at ASPIRE, partner and sponsor of XPRIZE Feed The Next Billion. Tune in to hear these industry leaders discuss the fight against global food insecurity.His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General, Advanced Technology Research Council, sits with XPRIZE to chat about food security in the Middle East and how advanced research and technology will drive transformative breakthroughs in our future food systems. His Excellency oversees ASPIRE, the technology programme management pillar of the Abu Dhabi Government's Advanced Technology Research Council. The $15M XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition is sponsored by ASPIRE and The Tony Robbins Foundation. https://www.xprize.org/prizes/feedthenextbillion See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For this week's Future Positive Podcast we bring you an exclusive conversation with XPRIZE Founder, Peter H. Diamandis and XPRIZE Innovation Board Member, Sergey Young. In their conversation they dive deep into all aspects of longevity and what the implications of living longer will have on the future of humanity. They also both share their own advice on how to live a longer, healthier, younger and more active existence. Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of at least one billion people. He founded the Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR) and the Development Sponsor of Age Reversal XPRIZE global competition designed to cure aging. Sergey is also a Top 100 Longevity Leader who is transforming the world one workplace at a time with Longevity@Work--the first non-profit corporate longevity program of its kind. Sergey has been featured as a top longevity expert and contributor on Fox News, BBC, Sky News, Forbes, and Thrive Global. His book The Science And Technology Of Growing Young is available for pre-order at https://sergeyyoung.com/ Links: http://xprize.org https://sergeyyoung.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our Pride Month podcast take over culminates this week. For the past four weeks we have been bringing you a series of interviews conducted by Journalist Amelia Abraham with leading figures from the LGBTQ+ community who are impacting our world for the better. This week Amelia speaks to Kelly Rakowski, the CEO and founder of LEX – a queer dating app based on personal ads. Queer visibility online, and coding LGBTQ+ platforms for inclusivity are just a couple of the topics they talk about.Lex is a lo-fi, text-based dating and social app for lesbian, bisexual, asexual, and queer people. Lex is for womxn and trans, genderqueer, intersex, two spirit, and non-binary people for meeting lovers and friends. Inspired by old school newspaper personal ads, Lex (formerly known as Personals) lived on Instagram for years before evolving into an app. If you missed the previous episodes with Vincent, Desmond, Lucas Larochelle and Os Keyes then we strongly recommend that you check it out in our feed. Links: http://xprize.org https://thisislex.app/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Continuing our Pride Month podcast take over we bring you the third in our series of interviews conducted by Journalist Amelia Abraham with leading figures from the LGBTQ+ community who are impacting our world for the better. This week Amelia speaks to Vincent Desmond, a writer and essayist living and working in Lagos, Nigeria. They sit down to discuss the issues facing the queer community in Nigeria, the very real perils of digital catfishing and the power of social media movements.Vincent is currently an editor at Zikoko. He has written for Vogue, ELLE US, Allure, Reuters, i-D, VICE, Dazed, NYLON, PAPER and several more. In 2019, he was awarded the TIER's Young Activist Award for his work in media advocacy. In 2020, he was shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Difference and Diversity and nominated for the Future Award for Leading Conversation. If you missed the previous episodes with Lucas Larochelle and Os Keyes then we strongly recommend that you check it out in our feed. Links: http://xprize.org https://www.desmondvincent.me/ https://www.zikoko.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Continuing our Pride Month podcast take over we bring you the second in our series of interviews conducted by Journalist Amelia Abraham with leading figures from the LGBTQ+ community who are impacting our world for the better. This week Amelia speaks to Os Keyes a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Washington's Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering. Os was also the inaugural winner of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship.Os has a background in law, data science and data ethics. Their research interests include: 1) the way gender is encoded into technology, and its social and ethical implications; 2) Data ethics and their viability under different political frameworks; 3) classification systems and the tensions of negotiating them in design. They are currently researching the way gender is built into physical and virtual infrastructure and the implications this has for trans users.If you missed the previous episode with Lucas Larochelle we strongly recommend that you check it out in our feed. Links: http://xprize.org https://ironholds.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

June 1st marks the beginning of Pride Month, and to celebrate we are bringing a series of interviews conducted by Journalist Amelia Abraham with leading figures from the LGBTQ+ community who are impacting our world for the better. For our first interview, Amelia talks to designer and Queering The Map founder Lucas LaRochelle about the importance of digital queer spaces, AI and surveillance and… gay penguins.Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer geographies, critical internet studies, and community-based archiving. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space.They have lectured, facilitated, and exhibited nationally and internationally, recently at Ars Electronica (Austria), Somerset House (United Kingdom), Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands), fanfare (Netherlands), OTHERWISE Festival (Switzerland), Studio XX (Canada) and SBC Gallery (Canada), The Bartlett School of Architecture (United Kingdom), University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras School of Architecture (Puerto Rico), Links: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/gay-male-penguins-steal-lesbian-couple-s-eggs-dutch-zoo-n1244575 http://xprize.org https://www.queeringthemap.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How can avatars allow us to use our senses at a remote location in real time? Will we ever be able to smell and taste remotely? For this week’s Future Positive podcast, Amelia Abraham speaks with Dr. Jacki Morie – Scientist, Artist, Educator and Senior Advisor on the A.N.A Avatar XPRIZE to answer these questions and more. We also hear from four of the semifinalist teams competing in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE who take us through their approaches to creating robotic avatars that convey a sense of presence and human connection in the most remote of locations. Forged Droids is a project that aims to create a low-cost, humanoid robotics system, which includes a robot, an immersive operator control/training system, and service for sharing the training data. Cyberselves began life at the University of Sheffield, UK. They work at the intersection of psychology, computer science, cultural studies, and philosophy, looking at what happens to human beings as we increasingly find ourselves engaging in immersive, digital cultures and environments, including everything from social media to virtual reality spaces. Touchlab manufactures e-skin thinner than human skin which can be wrapped around hard or soft surfaces to sense pressure and location in real-time. Applications include on-land, underwater, and in space robotics & machines.Dragon Tree Labs empowers human beings to surpass distance, strength, accuracy and two-task limits. Rooted in the collaboration of those who invent - academia, technology entrepreneurs, corporate researchers. They see their role as creating an environment where a great mixture of professors, research experts and engineers become a community for breakthrough innovations.Links: http://xprize.org https://www.xprize.org/prizes/avatar https://www.forgeddroids.com/ https://www.touchlab.io/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Converting carbon into fuel is the next exciting frontier in the ever changing energy landscape. For this week’s Future Positive podcast, we get the scoop on the future of fuel with two finalists of the NRG COSIA CARBON XPRIZE who are now successfully turning carbon into fuels. First, journalist Amelia Abraham interviews Brooklyn based Staff Sheehan of Air Company, then she catches up with Jason Salfi of Dimensional Energy based in Ithaca, New York. Staff Sheehan is the Chief Technology Officer at Air Company. He is a scientist and entrepreneur in the Renewables & Environment industry. Skilled in green chemistry, electrochemistry, process chemistry, chemical engineering, heterogeneous catalysis, and carbon dioxide conversion. Jason Salfi is the CEO and Co-founder of Dimensional Energy, he is also a board member of Scale for ClimateTech which is dedicated to helping companies navigate time-sensitive, critical decisions throughout the full manufacturing process.Links: http://xprize.org www.dimensionalenergy.com www.aircompany.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our oceans, and specifically fish, have been on our cultural menu recently with the success of the much talked about documentary, Seaspiracy and the academy award success of the film My Octopus Teacher. On this week's episode Journalist Amelia Abraham takes a deep dive into the deep blue with XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion Judge and all round fish guy, Dr Keith Cox. They explore the depths of ocean health and how cultivated and plant-based fish can really help with healing this fragile ecosystem.Dr. Cox is a co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Seafood Analytics, a company that manufactures electronic devices that measure, store and auto-analyze metrics that help monitor different aspects of growth or degradation of protein foodstuffs. Currently, the data pathway provides real-time analysis of different parameters including health, degradation, body composition and other specific metrics such as whether the product has been previously frozen. Personally, Dr. Cox has over 20 years of experience working with organisms including plants and animals that vary in size from whales to bacteria. He has also held positions at the University of Alaska the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Links: http://xprize.org http://feedthenextbillion.xprize.org https://certifiedqualityseafoods.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we peer into how the work-life balance is playing out during the pandemic. The past year has had an effect on all our working lives; from remote working and home offices to disrupted shifts, furloughs and for many unfortunate people, unemployment. For this episode, we get some insight into the reality of working lives by asking our own colleagues at XPRIZE to weigh in on this global change to work. Journalist and Writer Amelia Abraham interviews our Chief Prize Operations Officer here at XPRIZE, Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer. Their conversation explores the post COVID impact on work and how technology has the capacity to impact our working lives for the better in the future. Links: http://xprize.org/http://rapidreskilling.xprize.org https://www.xprize.org/about/people/chanda-gonzales-mowrer See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Did you miss the live reveal of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE hosted by WIRED Brand Labs and moderated by Wired Editor Megan Greenwell? Fear not! We hit the record button and captured it in its full unedited glory for you to listen to now. In 2015, XPRIZE launched the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a competition to jumpstart the carbontech economy and tackle global warming. Last Monday, April 19th the winners were revealed in an online event hosted by the Wired Brand Lab. Megan Greenwell sat down with the winners and took questions from the audience listening live. CARBONCURE is a Canadian based company which extracts the CO2 generated in the production of concrete and recycles it back into the product. They started off small but now operate in many countries around the globe.UCLA CARBONBUILT came out of a UCLA lab where they designed a system to take CO2 and create a stronger concrete which is less reliant on Portland cement, a material responsible for 7% of Global CO2 emissions.Both won the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE and took home a cheque for $7.5M each. Although this is the end of the competition it is only the start of the journey for these companies.Links: www.carboncure.com www.carbonbuilt.com http://carbon.xprize.orghttp://xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we take you on a time travelling adventure into the past, present and future of Carbon Capture as journalist Amelia Abraham interviews XPRIZE’s own world leaders of Carbontech. First Mike Leitch, Technical Lead, NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, takes us on a whistle stop tour of Carbontech history. Before XPRIZE, he served as the Research Manager at RGL Reservoir Management, an oilfield manufacturing company based in Edmonton, Canada. There, he worked with a diverse team of engineers and scientists at the University of Alberta to build a comprehensive understanding of little known and little studied aspects of the oil recovery process. To bring us to the present Nikki Batchelor gives us the scoop on where the tech is now. Nikki is the Director of Prize Operations for the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. She has served as an Innovation Advisor to USAID on their Grand Challenges for Development initiative, helping to design and execute incentive competitions around energy, health, education, civic engagement, and water. Most recently, she worked as a Senior Strategist at NationBuilder, helping the tech start-up expand into new markets, explore product use cases, and lead marketing efforts. Ms. Batchelor has also managed large grant programs for USAID in Iraq and Afghanistan with DAI, both at home and overseas. Finally to show us the future is Senior Associate for Prize Operations for the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE is James Burbridge. Before XPRIZE James was a journalist covering international energy and carbon markets. He started his career as an editor in the Shanghai bureau of Interfax, Russia’s largest private news organization. Following three years in China, he moved to Singapore to focus on Asia-Pacific oil markets. Most recently, Mr. Burbridge covered North American carbon markets for the price reporting subsidiary of IHS Markit, where he created a new report for the consultancy focused on California’s environmental compliance programs.Links: http://carbon.xprize.orghttp://xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For this week’s episode we are excited to bring you a conversation between our own CEO Anousheh Ansari and the Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Space IL Kfir Damari. Three engineers walk into a bar. On this day two years ago their team’s lander ‘Beresheet’ made its descent to the surface of the moon after a 48 day journey. What happened next didn’t exactly follow the playbook....Established in 2011, Space IL competed in the Google Lunar XPRIZE and won the $1 Million Dollar ‘Moon Shot’ award for it’s successful entry into lunar orbit and for its attempt to land on the lunar surface – both of which were “firsts” for a privately-funded entity, marking a new era in space exploration.To celebrate the second anniversary join Anousheh and Kfir as they discuss the prize, overcoming adversity and its surprise conclusion whilst diving deep into the future of this audacious space program and it’s real impact on the future of space travel. Links: www.xprize.orgwww.spaceil.comwww.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For today’s episode, we’re tuning in to a conversation recorded back in May 2020. This fascinating discussion tackles issues around food insecurity, including but not limited to the impact of COVID-19 on food systems and identifying how AI can help us reach zero hunger and shape the food landscape of tomorrow. Led by Caroline Kolta, Senior Associate here at XPRIZE with contributions from Bernhard Kowatsch, Lorin Fries and Merijn Dols.Bernhard Kowatsch is Head of the Innovation Accelerator at the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The Accelerator identifies, nurtures and scales disruptive startups and entrepreneurs that accelerate progress towards zero hunger. Lorin Fries is an expert on the future of food systems with over 15 years of experience. She is the founder of FutureTable and served as Head of Global Food Systems Collaboration at the World Economic Forum. She has advised Fortune 500 businesses, start-ups, international organizations, family foundations and NGOs. Merijn Dols is a passionate Circular Economy scholar, system thinker, activist and entrepreneur, with over 15 years of experience in design and innovation in the food industry. Merijn holds a Bachelor in Industrial Design Engineering and studies Circular Economy at the Bradford School of Management as one of the first to specialize in the Circular Economy for Food.Links: http://ai.xprize.org www.xprize.org/feed www.futuretable.org http://avatar.xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we bring you a peek into our intimate futures. We are well over a year into the lockdown caused by this pandemic and our lives have changed inconceivably. Probably the biggest change though is our lack of intimacy with other people. Technology is adapting though, as it always has. The telephone made communication with a distant loved one much easier. Algorithms in dating apps allow our future partner to get automatically shifted from the ghosters, the players and the people with no table manners. Most recently Zoom has become a verb which we all understand as a means to see the people we hold dear: friends, family, lovers, work colleagues…near and far. Hear from some of our amazing staff here at XPRIZE on what intimacy means to them, how technology will aid our relationships and what their ideal robot date would look like.We also feature an interview between journalist Amelia Abraham and our own A.I. technical lead, Neama Dadkhahnikoo. Links: http://xprize.org/blog http://ai.xprize.org http://avatar.xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The world of rainforest conservation is quickly changing. Technology’s exponential development is enabling a wide range of advances in conservation, while simultaneously showing the limitations of humanity’s knowledge. We know now more than ever about earth’s most diverse ecosystem, yet there is so much left to be understood. On today’s podcast we bring you a discussion between two incredible conservationists, and two members of the XPRIZE Rainforest Advisory Board: Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and Shyla Raghav, who take a deep dive into People, Climate & Policy and why the world needs much more than international climate agreements. Their conversation was originally recorded as part of the XPRIZE Rainforest Summit: Pathways to Conservation held on the 18th and 19th February 2021. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is an expert in the adaptation and mitigation of indigenous peoples to climate change. She is a member of the Mbororo pastoralist people in Chad and President of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT). Oumarou Ibrahim is an advocate for the greater inclusion of indigenous people and their knowledge and traditions in the global movement to fight the effects of climate change. Oumarou Ibrahim received the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award and was appointed as a United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Advocate. She serves as a Member of the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues; Member of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC); Member of the Advisory Committee to the Secretary-General’s 2019 Climate Action Summit; and Conservation International Senior Indigenous Fellow. In 2019, she was listed by Time Magazine as one of 15 women championing action on climate change.Shyla Raghav leads Conservation International’s climate strategy to build and support the development and implementation of climate change mitigation and adaptation action globally. Shyla and her interdisciplinary global team engage with key partners to amplify Conservation International's successful climate change strategies, which demonstrate that ecosystem-based mitigation and adaptation offer tremendous opportunities for meeting the climate challenge. Having attended nearly a decade of United Nations climate change negotiations at the international level on climate change adaptation, she works closely with partners through innovation and research, demonstration projects, and amplification to bring nature-based solutions for climate change to scale. Links: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/rainforest https://www.xprize.org/prizes/rainforest/articles/xprize-rainforest-summit https://www.weforum.org/people/hindou-oumarou-ibrahim https://www.conservation.org/experts-list/shyla-raghav See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For this week’s podcast we are bringing you another Radical Idea written by journalist Amelia Abraham and read by our host Sofia Tapia. What if we could make travel more accessible, more affordable, and more sustainable for everyone? In the future, avatar technology has the powerful potential to allow more people to see the untouched corners of the earth, while actually leaving them untouched. Introducing this week’s Radical Read: Here’s How Avatars Will Blow Travel Wide Open. Links:http://www.xprize.orghttp://avatar.xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's Future Positive podcats, XPRIZE’s own Neama Dadkhahnikoo sits down with A.I. entrepreneur Anita Schjøll Brede to ask her all about her experience as a thought leader and woman in A.I., her tenacity to identify problems and her incredible ability to solve them. She also shares with us which women have inspired her along the way.Anita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai; an AI science assistant, able to read and connect scientific knowledge, that will grow up to be the world’s first AI Researcher within a decade. Iris.ai are one of 10 semifinals of the the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE.Anita was announced by Forbes to be one of the World’s Top 50 Women in Tech in 2018. She thoroughly enjoys her time on stage, has done two TEDx talks and 500 startups, Singularity University Global Grand Challenges Awards and TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alumni.Anita has never had what she refers to as “a real job” and Iris.ai is her fourth own startup. The past 10 years of her career have spanned over 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry.Links:http://www.xprize.orghttp://ai.xprize.org https://aiforgood.itu.int https://iris.aihttps://amandapalmer.net/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s podcast we are bringing you another radical idea written by journalist Amelia Abraham and read by our host Sofie Tapia. Mars Your Ulitmate Travel Guide.NASA’s Perseverance Rover made history earlier this month when it touched down on Mars, so it looks like we have liftoff! Or at least we will soon… if the Mars colonizers have their way. Are you going with them? Our Travel Guide to Mars will help you decide, or at the very least give you a whistle-stop tour of the 7 wonders of the red planet not to be missed!Links:http://www.xprize.org/blogPerseverance Rover Landinghttps://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/videos/?v=461 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For this week’s podcast we are bringing you another Radical Read written by journalist Amelia Abraham and read by our host Sofie Tapia. From the invention of a device to measure longitude at sea back in the 18th Century to our newest and biggest Prize ever, XPRIZE Carbon Removal, incentive prizes make the impossible possible. Find out Why We Need Incentive Prizes to truly foster genius.The XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity — fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone. For more information visit www.xprize.org Links:https://www.xprize.org/elonmusk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this special news round-up of the Future Positive podcast we’re talking all things XPRIZE Carbon Removal – our new $100M Prize for a technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere, halting climate change in the process. First, XPRIZE’s Chief Impact Officer Zenia Tata, one of the primary designers of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, runs through one of the most common reactions to the Prize announcement – “But what about trees!” – explaining why trees are no longer enough when it comes to offsetting our emissions. Thought-leader and climate expert Marcius Extavour brings us up to speed on the exciting potential for turning carbon into products. Plus, we caught up with comedian and self-proclaimed inventor Duncan Trussell about the crazy ideas that the Prize has already sparked online. Including a contraption to turn carbon into mini hot dogs. You heard it here first!Links:https://xprize.orgAlchemizing Sky Tours Tweethttps://twitter.com/duncantrussell/status/1358948891169861639 Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcasthttp://www.duncantrussell.com/episodes See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this bonus podcast we are bringing you a Radical Idea written by journalist Amelia Abraham and read by our host Sofie Tapia. The article was written in response to President Joe Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and just a few days later Elon Musk teasing the largest prize in human history, the $100M XPRIZE CARBON REMOVAL. These two events alone have seriously changed the future of our planet by shifting our agenda towards climate change. Released to coincide with the launch of the XPRIZE Carbon Removal which is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity — fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone. For more information visit www.xprize.org Links:https://www.xprize.org/elonmusk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this week's Future Positive our host Neama Dadkhahnikoo, Technical Lead of the AI XPRIZE chairs a virtual roundtable with a panel of female innovators in the field of AI. Andy Coravos is the CEO and founder of Elektra Labs, a company that advances healthcare by enabling safe, effective, and personalized use of connected products (wearables and other connected sensors) at home.Kishau Rogers is a Computer Scientist, Systems Thinker, Entrepreneur and CEO of Time Study Inc. A venture-backed startup offering solutions for using machine learning, advanced natural language processing, and data science to automatically tell a story of how enterprise employees spend their time and to create more value for the enterprise’s greatest resource, people.Caitlin Kraft-Buchman is the Founder and CEO of Women @ The Table, a global gender equality & democracy CSO based in Geneva. Focusing on systems change by helping feminists gain influence in sectors that have key structural impact: technology, economy, sustainability, democracy and governance.Ida Tin is a Danish internet entrepreneur, author and the co-founder and CEO of Clue, an accurate menstrual calendar, ovulation app, and pregnancy tracker. Clue helps women take control of their reproductive health by discovering unique patterns in their individual menstrual cycle. Ida is credited with coining the term "femtech".Less than a quarter of positions in the industry are held by women and gender bias is hard wired into certain algorithms due to under-representation in data sets. Our panel deconstruct and identify AI solutions that empower underrepresented communities and enable an equitable future for all.Links:XPRIZE AI For Goodhttps://www.xprize.org/AIforgood Elektra Labs https://www.elektralabs.com/Time Study Inc.https://www.timestudy.co/ Women @ The Tablehttps://www.womenatthetable.net/ Cluehttps://helloclue.com/ https://xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to a special edition of The Future Positive podcast. For this week's pod our host Shlomy Kattan, Chief Advancement Officer at XPRIZE virtually sits down with two thought leaders, Desmond Dickerson and Dwayne Matthews to discuss the future of work and education whilst also giving some priceless advice on the best ways to work remotely.Desmond Dickerson is a Manager and Innovation Consultant for the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work. He’s a passionate advocate and leader for the African American and Latino Business Resource Group. Under his guidance, the group has helped to mentor future leaders and leverage relationships with other affinity groups to promote innovation through diversity.Dwayne Matthews is a self-proclaimed Innovation Evangelist and future of education strategist. Dwayne helps school boards, educators and parents understand the new and evolving themes around the future of education, the future of work and how to prepare children to thrive in a digitally evolving world.The trio look at how under-resourced communities in the U.S. face systemic barriers to learning, mobility, and progress. Core problems impeding effective workforce development which include a widening skills gap, deteriorating job quality, and a lack of collaboration between players in the labor market. With an unprecedented digital disruption and adoption caused by COVID-19 comes a new opportunity to radically change the lives of millions of Americans.The $5M XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling competition strives to secure a future in which all workers can rapidly attain new and more relevant skills to their current workplace - and their next one. Novel solutions developed in XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling will uplift the labor market in the U.S. and close the widening skills gap. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Much of the fundamental research in computer science has been driven by the needs of those attempting to utilize computing for various applications, including healthcare. Today’s guest, Shwetak Patel describes a collection of research projects that leverage mobile phone technology in new ways to enable the screening, self-management and studying of diseases. By using mobile phones as healthcare devices, we can enable access and scale, helping advance health and clinical science through the convergence of sensing, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. Today’s episode was originally recorded at AI For Good, an annual global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, and while some elements of the conversation are more timely to COVID’s spread in July 2020 at the time of recording, all of the technology is still relevant today. Shwetak Naran Patel is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur best known for his work on developing novel sensing solutions and ubiquitous computing. He is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor at the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where he joined in 2008. His technology start-up company on energy sensing, Zensi, was acquired by Belkin International, Inc. in 2010. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. He was named the recipient of the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health. Links: https://aiforgood.itu.int/ https://xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When it comes to fighting infectious disease outbreaks, contact tracing is a key public health response. Mobile technologies including GPS, Bluetooth, cellphone masts and AI-powered big data analytics, can help collect data that helps decision-makers understand and manage the spread of pandemics like COVID-19 within their own communities. But when using this kind of technology, it’s critical to preserve personal privacy to not only maintain public trust but especially to protect vulnerable individuals during a crisis. This episode explores how privacy-preserving techniques such as homomorphic encryption and solutions for mobile phone contact tracing can be deployed, including real-world examples from Israel and the US. Today’s episode was originally recorded at AI For Good, an annual global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, and while some elements of the conversation are more timely to COVID’s spread in April 2020 at the time of recording, our guests discuss explore how developers are creating tracing software, its importance in early response efforts and technical specifics, all of which are especially relevant challenges still today. Thomas Wiegand is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/MPEG-H HEVC video coding standards. For H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also an active technical contributor to both standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. Wiegand is Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and executive director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He heads research teams working on : Video processing and coding, Multimedia transmission, Machine learning, Mobile Communications (management) and Computer Vision (management).Kurt Rohloff is the co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies, a technology start-up enabling privacy-preserving analytics and collaboration on sensitive data. He leads the development of PALISADE, an open source homomorphic encryption software library that encrypts data so that they can be safely used for predictive analytics while preserving private information. Prior to co-founding Duality he was a professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a DARPA Director’s Fellowship. Links: https://dualitytech.com/ https://aiforgood.itu.int/ xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

AAI for Good, a global summit hosted by XPRIZE and ITU, about machine translation and cognitive code switching. Today’s episode explores the concept of Cosmo-uBuntu, an approach to technological innovation that addresses issues of global justice and helps us better understand personhood in AI praxis. Hosted by S. Ama Wray, an associate professor at UC Irvine and co-founder of AI for Africa, with guests Vukosi Marivate, Jose Cossa and Jackie Berry, highlight the cultural and individual differences in direct interaction with different technology interfaces based on the cultural reading practices of non-Western and African peoples, with thoughts on how these works can reverse the trend toward exclusively Anglophone digital futures in Africana worlds while conducting proactive restoration of African epistemologies.Dr. S. Ama Wray, is a self-described Performance Architect and is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of California, Irvine. Through dance methods she innovates across disciplinary lines, collaborating widely with practitioners from music, new media, health, visual art and theater. She is one of the co-Founders of AI 4 Afrika, inspired by AI for Good, and also the Africana Institute for Creativity Recognition and Elevation. In 2018 she received the 2018 Emerging Scholar Award from the African Diaspora SIG of the Comparative International Education Society. Her research into improvisation through the lens of West African performance, specifically Ewe, is burgeoning into a new interdisciplinary field, an integrative study of the optimization of human performance. The outcomes include Embodiology® an inclusive movement and mind method, optimizing creativity, empathy and wellbeing. As a consequence of COVID-19 she has created online wellness practice - Embodying Resilience - to maintain vitality and create community. Her creative praxis as relates to digital domains began in the U.K as recipient of the 2003 National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts Fellowship, producing the prize-winning Texterritory. Integrating a cellphone performance platform it transforms audiences into co-creators in live performance settings. As founding Artistic Director of JazzXchange Wray continues to elevate jazz music in the concert dance setting, collaborating with artists including: Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Nicole Mitchell, Gary Crosby, OBE, Zoe Rahman and Julian Joseph, OBE. Her academic writing on Embodiology® and also Jazz Dance have been published by Oxford Books, Routledge and Florida University Press.Dr. Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area, Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is a founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning.José Cossa, Ph.D., is a Mozambican scholar, writer/author, researcher, poet, blogger, “Twitterer”, podcaster, entrepreneur, and an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Most recently, Cossa served as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the American University in Cairo and a Senior Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Cossa holds a Ph.D. in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies with a depth area in Comparative and International Education from Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of the book Power, Politics, and Higher Education: International Regimes, Local Governments, and Educational Autonomy, the recipient of the 2012 Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on People of African Descent, awarded by the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and a member of the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change Panel of Judges for two consecutive competitions (Inaugural Challenge and 2019/2020). Cossa’s research focus is on power dynamics in negotiation over educational policy; unveiling issues inherent in the promise of modernity and working towards decolonizing, de-bordering, de-peripheralizing, and de-centering the world; higher education policy and administration; system transfer; international development; and, global and social justice. In addition, Cossa is currently engaging in a new (exterior to modernity) theorizing, i.e., Cosmo-uBuntu, to offer alternative theoretical grounding to research, analysis, and practice.Dr. Jackie Berry is a Cognitive Scientist studying visual perception, human-computer interaction, and expertise. Dr. Berry was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the American University in Cairo for the 2019-2020 academic year where she served as a teacher and researcher. Her work focused on TetLag which is the brief performance dip caused by switching to a different, but familiar, computer interface. Jackie holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, a Master of Science in Human Factors Psychology, a Master of Business Administration, and a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology. She was the first person at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to collect online research data and the first African-American to graduate with a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from the State University of New York at the University in Albany. Her major research projects include developing a new model of geometric feature detection for English letter recognition, studying task switching in older adults, and investigating attentional capture during visual search. During her Fulbright U.S. Scholar award year Dr. Berry investigated whether Arabic-English biliterates might be better able to switch between different interfaces and configurations for the same task because they must regularly alternate between different orientations of text in reading, writing, and technology use in their daily lives. She wishes to continue this research with other “bidirectional biliterates” such as biliterate speakers of Hebrew and Chinese.Links:xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chess-playing computers have been better than human World Chess Champions for more than 20 years now. But when DeepMind published a preprint in December 2017 about AlphaZero, a computer program based on neural networks and mastering the games of chess, Shogi and Go, the entire world paid attention.Today’s episode, moderated by Kenneth Cukier of The Economist, explores recent AI developments in chess and how these developments have impacted chess played by humans. Join Peter Heine Nielsen, Chess Grandmaster and coach of World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, and Sebastian J. Kuhnert, CEO of chess24, as they share their experiences using AI in chess and illustrate various innovations in sports during COVID-19 and beyond. Kenneth Cukier is a Senior Editor at The Economist, and host of its weekly podcast on technology. He is also an associate fellow at Said Business School at Oxford, researching artificial intelligence. Kenn is the co-author of “Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think” with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. It was a NYT Bestseller translated in over 20 languages, and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. It won the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Award and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. Kenn also co-authored a follow-on book, “Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education.” Previously, Kenn was a foreign correspondent for two decades in Europe, Asia and America. From 2002-2004, he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kenn’s writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has been a frequent commentator on CBS, CNN, NPR, the BBC and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s global council on data-driven development.Peter Heine Nielsen is a Danish chess trainer. He was awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE in 1994. Nielsen became an International Grandmaster in 1994. He won the Danish Chess Championship five times: in 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2008. He played for Denmark in seven Chess Olympiads, three times on top board. Nielsen coached World Champion Viswanathan Anand from 2002 until 2012. Anand won the World Championship title in Mexico 2007, and defended it in Bonn 2008, Sofia 2010 and Moscow 2012. Nielsen has been coaching world number one, Magnus Carlsen, since 2013. Carlsen won the Candidates Tournament 2013, which gave him the right to challenge Anand for the world championship. He defeated Anand, and has since defended the title three times. Nielsen has previously coached Carlsen in Khanty-Mansiysk 2005, where Carlsen became the youngest player ever to qualify for the candidate matches.Sebastian J. Kuhnert is an internet executive with over 12 years of experience, including general management of startups and small to midsize organizations, corporate development, product development, multinational business operations, strategy, sales, partnerships, fundraising, investor relations, communication, and M&A. Currently, Sebastian serves as the COO at the Play Magnus Group, the web’s most powerful chess ecosystem and CEO of several of its subsidiaries, including chess24, the number one chess broadcasting site and digital home to World Champion Magnus Carlsen. Prior to Play Magnus, he served as CEO at Tradimo Interactive, one of the web’s highest quality education sites for active financial trading, which he co-founded originally on behalf of Etruvian and later moved to Denmark following an investment by the CFH Group. Sebastian learned from a number of leaders in diverse industries such as online education, marketing, price management, management consulting and HR consulting prior to his recent ventures. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A chance to listen again to one of our most inspiring podcasts of 2020. Captured during Visioneering at Paramount Studios, Peter H. Diamandis is joined by Harrison Ford and Wes Bush from Conservation International. In a thrilling discussion, they discuss the urgency to change the economics, behaviors and political will in order to save the planet. It requires the support of everyone, and will rely on technological innovation and new economic incentives to move in the right direction, quickly. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”Harrison Ford has become one of the most popular and acclaimed actors of our time. His works include 35 feature films, ten of which have exceeded $100 million each at the box office. Through his starring roles in such cinematic blockbusters as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, The Fugitive, Air Force One, Patriot Games and K-19 he has come to embody the quintessential hero for moviegoers around the world. Strongly committed to environmental concerns, Harrison Ford has served on the board of Conservation International for more than 10 years, actively participating in its design and growth. During this time CI has emerged as a leading force in global conservation. He presently serves as vice chair of the board and is on CI's Executive Committee.He has played an instrumental role in the establishment at CI of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, the first early warning system for global conservation efforts. Additionally, he played a key role in the design and development of CI's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, a coalition of conservation and business interests searching for ways to reduce the impact of development on the earth's biodiversity. Mr. Ford serves as a board member of Conservation International's Global Conservation Fund, which has secured the protection of over 40,000,000 acres on 3 continents in the past 18 months. Mr. Ford lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he donated 389 acres of his property for a conservation easement to the Jackson Hole Land Trust.Prior to becoming CEO of Northrop Grumman, Wes Bush held numerous leadership roles at Northrop Grumman including President and Chief Operating Officer; Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and President of the Space Technology division. He joined the company as a systems engineer at TRW in 1987 and was the President and CEO of TRW’s Aeronautical Systems business when Northrop Grumman acquired the TRW in 2002. He earlier worked at Aerospace Corporation and Comsat Labs. Bush received both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a graduate of the Executive Management Program at UCLA. He serves on the board of directors of Conservation International and the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation, and he chairs the boards of the Aerospace Industries Association and the Business-Higher Education Forum.Links: https://www.conservation.org/https://xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this modern age of technology, artificial intelligence has the unique ability to shed light on environmentally destructive practices while providing solutions to help protect our world. In today’s episode, Marcius Extavour, Executive Director of Prize Operations on Energy and Resources here at XPRIZE, chats with Andrew Zolli, Vice President of Global Impact at Planet, and Sasha Luccioni, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Mila Labs. Urgent action is needed to combat climate change, and today’s conversation will focus not only on identifying solutions for the sustainable use of our planet’s resources but will help us re-imagine the future of earth with AI. Sasha Luccioni, is a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Yoshua Bengio and others on a project that uses Artificial Intelligence to visualize the consequences of climate change. Sasha also leads various climate change-related initiatives at Mila, including projects that aim to estimate the environmental impact of Machine Learning and to analyze financial disclosures from a climate standpoint.Her work sits at the intersection of AI and the environment with the goal to find ways to maximize the positive impacts of AI while minimizing the negative ones - be it from a research or application perspective. She is also involved in general ‘AI for Good’ projects and has been working with the United Nations and the World Health Organization to figure out ways in which AI can help tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.She publishes under her full name, Alexandra Luccioni, and you can find a full list of her publications here. Her work has been featured in various news and media outlets such as MIT Technology Review, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal, among others, for her work on the environmental impact of AI and how to reduce it. She is also a 2020 National Geographic Explorer and holds an IVADO postdoctoral scholarship.Andrew Zolli is the Vice President of Global Impact at Planet, a space and AI-driven organization known for having deployed the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in history. These satellites image the entire surface of the Earth, every day, at 3m/pixel resolution. Andrew works to ensure Planet's data and capabilities are used to deliver breakthrough sustainable development, climate, public health, humanitarian, and human rights outcomes. He also helps the company design and implement data and AI-related ethics policies and programs. Beyond Planet, Andrew works broadly on issues of foresight, innovation, and systemic and social resilience.Marcius Extavour is a leader and expert working at the intersection of science, technology and public policy. At XPRIZE he leads environment, energy, and climate work, including the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a global competition to recycle CO2 into valuable products. Before joining XPRIZE he was focused on technology and policy in clean energy as an independent consultant, at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, in the Canadian electric power sector, and in academia. Dr. Extavour holds a PhD and MSc in quantum optics and atomic physics, and a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto. Outside of the office and the lab Dr. Extavour loves teaching, the intersection of art and science, and is active in engaging young and early-career scientists interested in careers outside of academia.Links:xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For over 25 years, XPRIZE has convened the brightest minds from around the globe to tackle the world’s greatest challenges. One of the most pressing problems facing humanity today is food insecurity, and the need for nutritious, affordable, and sustainably-sourced food has reached critical status. In this exciting episode hosted by XPRIZE Founder and Executive Chairman, Peter H. Diamandis, we’re talking to world-renowned author, philanthropist and business strategist, Tony Robbins, as he discusses the inspiration behind the latest competition, $15M XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion.By 2050, Earth’s population will have reached 9.7 billion. The demand for high protein products is increasing while the impact from current meat production practices is devastating our planet. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened food insecurity, food safety, and access for many communities around the world. Furthermore, cities projected to face rapid population growth and wealth increase are experiencing surges in demand for poultry and fish as opposed to red meat. While there is increasing activity in utilizing plant-based and cultivated approaches to create meat alternatives, more work is needed to make it widespread. XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion is a $15M competition incentivizing teams to produce chicken and fish alternatives that replicate or outperform conventional protein in structure, versatility, sensory properties, and nutritional profile, while having a lower comparable environmental footprint.Today’s guest, Tony Robbins, is an entrepreneur, #1 NY Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and the nation’s #1 life and business strategist. Author of six internationally bestselling books, including the recent New York Times #1 best-seller MONEY: Master the Game and UNSHAKEABLE, Mr. Robbins has empowered more than 50 million people from 100 countries through his audio, video and life training programs. He created the #1 personal and professional development program of all time, and more than 4 million people have attended his live seminars.Tony Robbins has made it one of his life's missions to help feed as many people as possible. As a philanthropist, through his partnership with Feeding America, Mr. Robbins has provided over 500 million meals in the last 5 years to those in need. He is on track to provide 1 billion meals over the next 5 years. He has also initiated programs in more than 1,500 schools, 700 prisons, and 50,000 service organizations and shelters. He provides fresh water to 250,000 people a day in India in order to fight waterborne diseases, the number one killer of children in that country. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”Links:XPRIZE.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In recent years, a large number of AI for Good projects have been deployed all over the world, using AI to solve critical issues such as poverty, hunger and climate change. While certainly well-intentioned, these projects often miss crucial elements in their design and deployment, which can result in a large amount of fanfare but very little impact. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Sasha Luccioni, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Mila Labs in Quebec, Canada, to explore the AI for Good movement through a series of examples. Sasha will also discuss some guiding principles that will help to ensure AI is used for the biggest positive impact.Sasha Luccioni is a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Yoshua Bengio and others on a project that uses Artificial Intelligence to visualize the consequences of climate change. She also leads various climate change-related initiatives at Mila, including projects that aim to estimate the environmental impact of Machine Learning and to analyze financial disclosures from a climate standpoint.Her work sits at the intersection of AI and the environment with the goal to find ways to maximize the positive impacts of AI while minimizing the negative ones - be it from a research or application perspective. She is also involved in general ‘AI for Good’ projects and has been working with the United Nations and the World Health Organization to figure out ways in which AI can help tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.She publishes under her full name, Alexandra Luccioni, and you can find a full list of her publications here. Her work has been featured in various news and media outlets such as MIT Technology Review, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal, among others, for her work on the environmental impact of AI and how to reduce it. She is also a 2020 National Geographic Explorer and holds an IVADO postdoctoral scholarship.Links:xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Collaboration. The Superpower of the 21st Century XPRIZE convenes the world’s brightest minds to help solve some of the most pressing challenges, and for this special Giving Tuesday episode, we’re taking a look back at 2020 with avid entrepreneur, philanthropist and XPRIZE Trustee Paresh Ghelani; physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and Chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance Task Force Daniel Kraft; and Sonny Kohli, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at CloudDX, a co-winner of the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a Fast Company "World Changing Idea" finalist. Paresh, Daniel and Sonny look back at the year to share their personal stories, recounting how they collaborated their own work in unexpected ways, to fight one of the most pressing challenges of our time, COVID-19. With real world impact including $1M Next Gen Mask Challenge, XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing, and more, we’ll explore the origin story of the Pandemic Alliance and provide highlights of what our partners and our ecosystem have accomplished and where we’re headed into 2021.Paresh Ghelani is an avid entrepreneur and philanthropist who focuses on solving problems through innovation and entrepreneurship. He is currently active in building and investing in Moon Express, Viome Inc, DTV Motor Corporation, Ferrate Treatment Technologies, Casepoint, Radimmune Therapeutics. He believes in investing and mentoring companies and entrepreneurs who are taking moon shots and changing the world by building breakthrough technologies. One of Paresh’s passion project as a philanthropist is XPRIZE Foundation which leads the world in solving grand challenges through incentive prize. Paresh along with Ratan Tata and Naveen Jain also brought the XPRIZE foundation to India to solve India’s greatest challenges like health, sanitation, women’s safety, access to clean water, waste management, and other challenges. Truly living by his motto, “work hard in silence and let your success be the noise”, Paresh has successfully founded and built the 2020 Company LLC , from the ground up from 1 to 1000+ employees, providing the US government advance technology in education, defense, and healthcare space. The successful company was later acquired by a private equity firm. Prior to the 2020 Company LLC, Paresh had founded and successfully built two other companies in the technology field.Through his body of work and achievements Paresh sets an example as an entrepreneur, philanthropist and also is an inspiration to young aspiring entrepreneur around the world who are on a mission to make a positive impact on humanity moving forward.Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator and is serving as the Chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance Task Force. With over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, biomedical research and healthcare innovation, Kraft has chaired the Medicine for Singularity University since its inception in 2008, and is founder and chair of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. Following undergraduate degrees from Brown University and medical school at Stanford, Daniel was Board Certified in both Internal Medicine & Pediatrics after completing a Harvard residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital & Boston Children's Hospital, and fellowships in hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplantation at Stanford.He is often called upon to speak to the future of health, medicine and technology and has given 5 TED and TEDMED Talks.He has multiple scientific publications and medical device, immunology and stem cell related patents through faculty positions with Stanford University School of Medicine and as clinical faculty for the pediatric bone marrow transplantation service at University of California San Francisco. Daniel is a member of the Kaufman Fellows Society (Class 13) and member of the Inaugural (2015) class of the Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellowship. Daniel's academic research has focused on: stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, stem cell derived immunotherapies for cancer, bioengineering human T-cell differentiation, and humanized animal models. His research has been published in journals that include Nature and Science. His clinical work has focuses on: bone marrow / hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for malignant and non-malignant diseases in adults and children, medical devices to enable stem cell based regenerative medicine, including marrow derived stem cell harvesting, processing and delivery. He also implemented the first text-paging system at Stanford Hospital. He is heavily involved in digital health, founded Digital.Health, and is on the board of Healthy.io and advises several digital health related startups. Daniel recently founded IntelliMedicine, focused on personalized, data driven, precision medicine. He is also the inventor of the MarrowMiner, an FDA approved device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founded RegenMed Systems, a company developing technologies to enable adult stem cell based regenerative therapies. Daniel is an avid pilot and has served in the Massachusetts and California Air National Guard as an officer and flight surgeon with F-15 & F-16 fighter Squadrons. He has conducted research on aerospace medicine that was published with NASA, with whom he was a finalist for astronaut selection.Sonny is an attending Physician in Intensive Care and Internal Medicine at Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital and Assistant Clinical Professor (Adjunct) of Medicine at McMaster University. In 2008/09, Sonny was an Astronaut Candidate at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) where he was awarded a Scholarship to the Johnson Space Center.Links:xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome back to another edition of Future Positive, a podcast from XPRIZE. We convene the world’s brightest minds, across a kaleidoscope of cultures and points of view, revealing their inspirations, and how and why they will change the world.Since the foundation of the AI for Good movement, there have been many great examples of how AI can help solve the world’s problems to address the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals. But, AI technology is being developed in such a manner that its governance is at stake, and the signatories of the SDGs have pledged to Leave No One Behind -- Raising many questions around accountability. How do we develop accountable AI solutions? Does regulation stifle innovation? How can we ensure exponential technology is also ethical? This episode, featuring robot ethicist Aimee van Wynsberghe and Council of Europe’s Director of Information Society Jan Kleijssen, will explore data ethics as a resource to understand risk and how to establish a legal framework for AI.Aimee van Wynsberghe has been working in ICT and robotics since 2004. She began her career as part of a research team investigating the network variables related to surgical robots in Canada at the CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advance Robotics) Institute. She is Assistant Professor in Ethics and Technology and the TU Delft. She is co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and on the board of the Institute for Accountability in a digital age and the Dutch National Alliance on AI (ALLAI). She serves as a member of the European Commission high level expert group on AI. Aimee has been named one of the Netherlands top 400 influential women under 38 by VIVA, was named one of the 25 ‘women in robotics you need to know about’, and is the 2018 winner of the L'oreal/UNESCO 'Women in Science'. She is author of the book Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design, and Implementation and has been awarded an NWO personal research grant to study how we can responsibly design service robots. She has been interviewed by BBC, Quartz, Financial Times, and other International news media on the topic of ethics and robots, and is invited to speak at International conferences and summits.Jan Kleijssen was born in 1958 in Almelo, The Netherlands. He studied International Law at Utrecht State University (LLM in 1981) and International Affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa (MA 1982). He then did his military service as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands Navy. Jan joined the Council of Europe in 1983 as a Lawyer with the European Commission of Human Rights. In 1987, he was appointed to the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly and was Secretary to the Political Affairs Committee from 1990 to 1999. Jan then served as the Director of the Secretary General's Private Office until 2004 and subsequently as Director in the Parliamentary Assembly and Special Advisor to the President. In 2006, he moved to the Directorate General of Human Rights and was Director of Standard-setting until 2011 when he was appointed to his current function of Director of Information Society - Action against Crime, Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law.https://xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Collective Problem Solving with AIFor today’s episode, we’ll hear from AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio who is a Turing-award winning computer scientist, AI XPRIZE advisory board member, and one of the “godfathers of machine learning”. Yoshua takes us on a deep dive into how machine learning is helping us in the fight against Covid-19. Yoshua pulls the curtains back on two AI projects, one around prediction of contagiousness, and a second on antiviral drug discovery. Both projects lead to a discussion about the need to change our economic and social structures to maximize collective well-being.Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Following his studies in Montreal, culminating in a Ph.D. in computer science from McGill University, Professor Bengio did postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.Since 1993, Yoshua Bengio has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operational Research at the Université de Montréal. In addition to having held for its maximum duration a Canada Research Chair, he is also the founder and scientific director of Mila, the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s largest university-based research group in deep learning. In 2016 he also became the Scientific Director of IVADO and co-Chair of the Canada’s Advisory Council on AI in 2019.His contribution to research is undeniable. In 2018, Yoshua Bengio is the computer scientist who collected the largest number of new citations in the world, thanks to his three books and some 500 publications.His ultimate goal is to understand the principles that lead to intelligence through learning and his research has earned him multiple awards. In 2017, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in addition to receiving the Prix Marie-Victorin and being named Scientist of the Year by Radio-Canada. In 2018, he was awarded the 50th Anniversary Medal by Quebec’s Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Association. In 2019, he was awarded the Killam Prize, the IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, as well as the ACM A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing”, jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. These honours reflect the profound influence of his work on the evolution of our society.Concerned about the social impacts of this new technology, he actively contributed to the development of the Montreal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.https://www.xprize.org/aiforgood See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to “Future Positive,” a podcast from XPRIZE. We convene the world’s brightest minds, across a kaleidoscope of cultures and points of view, revealing their inspirations, and how and why they will change the world. The views on this podcast are those expressed by guests as their own personal views and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of the guests or their views by XPRIZE.”The gloves are off. The end of the 20th century saw the implosion of communist dictatorships across the globe. In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall, we saw democracy greatly expanding. Fast forward to today, where we have Turkey and Venezuela sprinting away from democracy and even the American experiment hangs in the balance with the rise of fake-news, misinformation and lack of leadership. We join political educator, social commentator, and Chief Advancement Officer Shlomy Kattan as he talks with “professor in exile” Bret Weinstein, in a special two-part episode that rips the band-aid off taboo topics like campaign corruption, UNITY 2020 and the conversation du jour - changing the system of government with a courageous, capable, patriotic bi-partisan team. Oh, and we get deep on tools, teams and techniques on election hacking. Fireworks. Bret Weinstein is a Theoretical Evolutionary Biologist and Former Professor at Evergreen State College. Weinstein began his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He eventually transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received his undergraduate degree.Weinstein spent the majority of his academic career as a professor of Biology at Evergreen State College in Washington. In 2002, he published The Reserve-Capacity Hypothesis, which proposed that the telomeric differences between humans and laboratory mice have led scientists to underestimate the risks new drugs pose to humans in the form of heart disease, liver dysfunction and related organ failure. Weinstein took a brief hiatus from Evergreen to earn his PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on evolutionary trade-off mechanisms.Weinstein first experienced notoriety when he became the focus of a campus protest at Evergreen State College, where he was teaching biology. His involvement began when he wrote a letter to Evergreen faculty in March of 2017. His letter objected to a change in the College's decades-old tradition of observing a "Day of Absence" during which students and faculty of a minority race would stay home from campus to highlight their contributions to the College. The announced change would flip the traditional event, asking white students and faculty to stay home. Weinstein's letter strongly opposed and criticized the change. In late May 2017, student protests—focusing in large part on the comments made by Weinstein—disrupted the campus and called for a number of changes to the college. The College's president refused to allow law enforcement to quell protesters. Campus police told Weinstein that they could not protect him and encouraged him to stay off campus, which caused Weinstein to hold his biology class in a public park. In September of 2017, a settlement was reached in which Weinstein and his wife, professor Heather Heying, resigned and received a settlement.Following his resignation from Evergreen, Weinstein has been described as being part of the "Intellectual Dark Web", a term which his brother Eric coined to describe a group of academics and media personalities who publish outside of mainstream media.Weinstein describes himself as a political progressive and "left-libertarian".Weinstein appeared before the U.S. House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2018, to discuss free speech on college campuses. He is also the host of the Dark Horse podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bret-weinstein-darkhorse-podcast/id1471581521 https://articlesofunity.org/ https://xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to “Future Positive,” a podcast from XPRIZE. We convene the world’s brightest minds, across a kaleidoscope of cultures and points of view, revealing their inspirations, and how and why they will change the world. The views on this podcast are not those of XPRIZE.Democracy’s obituary? Part 1: The Dark Side of Technology The end of the 20th century saw the implosion of communist dictatorships across the globe. In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall, we saw democracy greatly expanding, and in the 1989 essay “The End of History’’ American academic Frances Fukuyama declared a victory and the universalization of western liberalism. Fast forward to today, where we have Turkey and Venezuela sprinting away from democracy and even the American experiment hangs in the balance with the rise of fake-news, misinformation and lack of leadership. The gloves are off. We join political educator, social commentator, and Chief Advancement Officer Shlomy Kattan as he gathers Susan Herman, head of ACLU, political innovator Joe Trippi and “professor in exile” Bret Weinstein, for a special two-part episode that rips the band-aid off taboo topics like campaign corruption, UNITY 2020 and the conversation du jour - changing the system of government with a courageous, capable, patriotic bi-partisan team. Oh, and we get deep on tools, teams and techniques on election hacking. Fireworks. Susan N. Herman was elected President of the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2008, after having served on the ACLU National Board of Directors, as a member of the Executive Committee, and as General Counsel. Herman holds a chair as Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where she teaches courses in Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure, and seminars on Law and Literature, and Terrorism and Civil LibertiesShe writes extensively on constitutional and criminal procedure topics for scholarly and other publications, ranging from law reviews and books to periodicals and on-line publications. Her most recent book, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy, (Oxford University Press 2011; 2014 paperback), is the winner of the 2012 Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.Herman has also discussed constitutional law issues on radio, including NPR shows around the country; on television, including programs on PBS, CSPAN, NBC, MSNBC and a series of appearances on the Today in New York show; and in print media including Newsday, TIME, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times.She has been a frequent speaker at academic conferences and continuing legal education events organized by groups including the Federal Judicial Center, and at numerous law schools, colleges (including the U.S. Army War College), universities, and high schools. She has also spoken at dozens of non-academic conferences, including recent appearances at the 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, Wikimania, the Brussels Forum, the National Archives, etc. She has received awards from groups as disparate as the Japanese-American Bar Association, the United Sikhs, and the Theatre of the Oppressed NYC.Herman has also participated in Supreme Court litigation, writing and collaborating on amicus curiae briefs for the ACLU on a range of constitutional criminal procedure issues, most recently in Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014), where the Supreme Court accepted the argument that cell phones cannot be searched “incident to arrest” without a search warrant.Herman received a B.A. from Barnard College as a philosophy major, and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Note and Comment Editor on the N.Y.U. Law Review. Before entering teaching, Professor Herman was Pro Se Law Clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Staff Attorney and then Associate Director of Prisoners' Legal Services of New York.Heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who “reinvented campaigning,” Joe Trippi has been at the forefront of movement politics for nearly 40 years. Trippi began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1980 and has worked on numerous presidential, gubernatorial, senate, and congressional campaigns ever since.Most recently, Trippi was a senior strategist on Doug Jones’ historic victory in Alabama, helping elect the first Democrat U.S. Senator in Alabama in 25 years. Trippi wrote the ads and helped build the campaign strategy which was recognized with 7 Reed Awards and 3 Pollie Awards, including the “Best in Show” award for a Democratic Campaign.Trippi helped engineer a number of groundbreaking House victories for Representatives Ro Khanna, Tulsi Gabbard, Mark Takano, and Seth Moulton. In 2014, Trippi advised and produced the ads for Seth Moulton in one of the biggest upsets of the year, beating 18-year incumbent John Tierney. One ad, “Re-elect,” propelled Seth to victory and was named “the best […] of the primary ads.”In 2010, Trippi was a senior strategist and media consultant in Jerry Brown’s successful run for California Governor. The campaign’s ads were described as “clever” and “amazing,” and they were widely considered some of best of 2010. TIME magazine named one ad, “Echo,” the best ad of 2010, and the Brown ads received four “Pollie” awards for excellence in political media.In 2004, as the National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, Trippi pioneered the use of online technology to organize what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics. Through his innovative use of the Internet for small-donor fundraising, “Dean for America” raised more money than any Democratic presidential campaign to that point – all with donations averaging less than $100.Trippi and his team pioneered the empowerment message and the online community tools that President Barack Obama used, which inspired a movement of supporters and has now become the basis for movement politics all around the world.Trippi has an extensive international resume. In 1993, he worked for then-PASOK leader Andreas Papandreou’s successful campaign of Prime Minister of Greece, as well as for his son, George Papandreou in 2007. Trippi advised former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his successful election. In 2006, he worked for Romano Prodi on his winning race for Prime Minister of Italy. In 2008, Trippi helped Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change receive the most votes and helped garner international media attention to Robert Mugabe’s democratic subversion and violence. These efforts led to a ‘unity’ government and Tsvangirai becoming Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. In 2011, Trippi helped elect Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan.In 2016, Trippi founded Vanguard Africa, to provide advice and technical support to pro-democracy and anti-corruption candidates. Among other races, as part of the international campaign team, Trippi helped oust Gambia’s dictator, Yahya Jammeh.In addition to his political work, Trippi has consulted with a number of leading non-profits and corporations including the Humane Society of the United States, the American Cancer Society, Best Friends Animal Society, Monster.com, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, SES Americom, Corning, LabCorp, IBM, Lionsgate Films, BestBuy, and Wave Systems.Trippi is a CNN Contributor and the Author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.www.aclu.orgxprize.org/bloghttps://tnrcampaigns.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For many indigenous communities, passing down knowledge to the next generation is critical to cultural survival. The preservation of these cultures have traditionally been done through the study and documentation of languages, traditions and rituals. In today’s episode, we’ll start by hearing from Burr Settles, Head of Research and AI at Duolingo, and go into a discussion between Davar Ardalan from IVOW AI, AI writer Chamisa Edmo, Alva Lim from Agora Food Studio, AI Researcher Victor Yarlott, and Tracy Monteith, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft who spent 20 years putting the Cherokee language in Microsoft Word. Our guests dive into the role AI can play in helping ensure that our collective knowledge, histories and cultures will be around for generations to come.Burr Settles leads the research group at Duolingo, an award-winning website and mobile app offering free language education for the world. He also runs FAWM.ORG, a global annual songwriting experiment. He is the author of Active Learning — an intermediate text on machine learning algorithms that are adaptive, curious, and exploratory (if you will). His research has been published in NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL-HLT, and CHI, and has been covered by The New York Times, Slate, Forbes, WIRED, and the BBC among others. In past lives, he was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon and earned a PhD from UW-Madison. Burr currently lives in Pittsburgh, where he gets around by bike and plays guitar in the pop band delicious pastries.Davar is a tech entrepreneur and founder of IVOW AI. Prior to this, she was Deputy Director of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington D.C. and before that a veteran journalist at NPR News. In 2015, her last position at NPR was senior producer of the Identity and Culture Unit.Chamisa Edmo is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock and resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous and American Indian Studies, with an emphasis in Tribal Sovereignty, from Haskell Indian Nations University. She is currently working toward a Masters in Computer Science. She is a certified full stack developer and has worked on various web development and robotics projects in her post-baccalaureate career. Chamisa worked for Hanson Robotics as a conversational AI character writer for Sophia the Robot and at CNM Ingenuity as an Assistant Instructor for the Deep Dive Coding Fullstack Bootcamp. In addition to high tech projects, Chamisa is also interested in exploring how North American tribes and Indigenous populations around the world can leverage technology while exercising tribal sovereignty and self-determination.Agora Food Studio is a plant-foward restaurant created by the Timor-Leste Food Lab - a social enterprise dedicated to mentoring future food and coffee innovators. The Timor-Leste Food Lab represents a community of people that believe in a simple, but powerful idea: "Food should be good, clean and fair for producers, eaters and the environment. We believe in a food system that celebrates biodiversity and nourishes the planet; a food system that creates healthy communities where everyone can eat, and eat well." We are based in Timor-Leste, located 8.8 degrees south of the equator. This half-island nation is part of a greater archipelagic region with profound food diversity and bio-cultural history that we hope to research, experiment, taste and document, and then share to a wider audience. Every day is an exploration.Tracy Monteith is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. His decades-long work as an innovative technologist and leader have produced unique results on a global scale. Tracy has received a first place finish in world’s largest private hackathon (23K participants, 400 cities world-wide) for AI approach to translating tribal-polymorphic languages and a second place finish for an IoT, cloud-connected beehive-sensor array. His passion for hackathons is shared with thousands of STEM-focussed tribal students across North America as he conducts hackathons for tribal schools. Tracy was the driving force and technical-innovator behind the inclusion of the Cherokee Syllabary in Windows and Office, the first tribal language with that distinction. His work continues with enhancing polymorphic-languages preservation and dissemination through the infusion of appropriate technology into indigenous circles.Wolfgang Victor Yarlott is a member of the Native American Crow tribe. Yarlott’s pioneering research took place with the Genesis Story Understanding System at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In collaboration with his Professor Patrick Winston, Yarlott wanted to determine whether the system could understand stories from Crow folklore as well as it understood the works of Shakespeare. At first his “audience” was the program itself — he wanted to instill an understanding. https://aiforgood.itu.int Twitter: https://twitter.com/ITU_AIForGood LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2651...LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8567748Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiforgoodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/AIforGoodhttps://www.xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The future of mobility is electric, connected, autonomous and shared. With an estimated $100B invested in autonomous driving globally, autonomous driving technology was pitched as the biggest change in mobility since we stopped using horses. Yet in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, where is this autonomous driving (AD) future we were promised? This episode features a radically open conversation between World Economic Forum’s Head of Automotive and Autonomous Mobility Michelle Avary, Professor and Director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory Mary Missy Cummings, and Bryn Balcombe Founder of Roborace, as they discuss how COVID has altered our path to the future of mobility. The discussion twists and turns as Michelle, Missy and Bryn talk through the differences between how AI learns how to drive and how a human learns how to drive, cybersecurity in automated driving, why aftermarket AD tech is a no-go, and what a world with universal basic mobility for everyone could look like. Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is currently a Professor in the Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and a member of the Defense Innovation Board. Her research interests include human supervisory control, explainable artificial intelligence, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-robot interaction, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.Michelle leads the automotive and autonomous platform at the World Economic Forum, dedicated to identifying and closing critical governance gaps through multi-stakeholder co-designing, piloting, and scaling solutions. As a leader in automotive technologies, Ms. Avary has been at the forefront of revolutionizing the mobility space and has devoted her career in establishing better infrastructures for automotive, autonomous, IoT, and connectivity platforms.Prior to joining the World Economic Forum, Ms. Avary was Vice President of Products and Strategy, Global Automotive Io(m)T at Aeris, led a team that developed and operated telematics services for Toyota Motor Sales, and scouted technologies for leading automotive supplier Harman.An endless pioneer in developing automotive technologies, Ms. Avary co-founded Drive Time Metrics, an automotive data monetization startup, is the founder and President of Women in Automotive Technology (WAT), an advocacy group, and an advisor to several start-ups including DeepScale and Sfara.Ms. Avary holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Pennsylvania State University, a Masters of Art in Economics from the University of San Francisco, and studied international law and economics at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. She is a certified yoga instructor and holds several automotive technology related patents.Bryn Balcombe is a Founder of the Autonomous Drivers Alliance (ADA) and the Chief Strategy Officer for Roborace, a motorsport competition for human and AI drivers, designed to accelerate the research and development of Vehicle Intelligence and human machine interfaces required for transportation of the future. His previous experience comes from Formula One where he architected and patented vehicle to infrastructure communication systems and developed the F1 Group’s first global media network. He has also consulted on technology strategy for organisations including the BBC and McCann Worldgroup and has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering & Vehicle Design. Balcombe is the chairman of ITU-T Focus Group on AI for Autonomous and Assisted Driving (FG-AI4AD).https://xprize.org/bloghttps://www.weforum.org/https://duke.edu/https://roborace.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In today’s episode, educator, developer, and game industry leader Gordon Bellamy talks about the rise of esports and how it has influenced the future of learning. As a catalyst to learn, create and experience the future, video games and virtual reality give us new creative outlets to realize our full potential. Gordon explores his career trajectory, from Tencent, MTV and Electronic Arts (as a designer on Madden NFL Football), ultimately leading him to a career dedicated to championing inclusivity and accessibility within the gaming industry. Gordon Bellamy has played key business and product leadership roles at Tencent, Electronic Arts, as a designer on Madden NFL Football, and MTV. He served as Executive Director of both the game industry’s trade organization, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and the International Game Developers Association. He holds a BA in Engineering from Harvard College.Links:https://www.interactive.org/ https://igda.org/https://xprize.org/blog/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this Labor Day special a racy conversation takes place around labor, race, and equity - it’s an important one. This week, XPRIZE’s own Shlomy Kattan sits down with New Profit Partner, Dr. Angela Jackson, and attorney / activist, Karen Fleshman to discuss the future of work. Over the course of this conversation we take a deep dive into capitalism’s historic inequality, how Gen Z will save us all and the tools and procedures necessary to make meaningful careers accessible to ALL. Dr. Angela Jackson leads New Profit’s Future of Work Initiative, which seeks to close the career-readiness gap for workers from disinvested communities. She is currently leading a $15M Future of Work global initiative to invest in entrepreneurs and companies developing innovative technical solutions to upskill workers for the jobs of the future.Karen Fleshman is a mentor, activist, entrepreneur, attorney, author, educator, proud San Franciscan, and a single soccer mom. In 2014, she founded Racy Conversations, a workplace workshop facilitation company, to inspire the antiracist generation. Inspired by Mike Brown, Black Lives Matter, and her mentees, Karen vowed to stop preparing young adults for the workplace and start preparing the workplace for young adults. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first book White Women We Need to Talk: Doing Our Part to End Racism.Links:https://www.xprize.org/prizes/rapidreskilling https://www.newprofit.org/go/fow-grand-challenge/www.racyconversations.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Ali Velshi, TV journalist, NBC News correspondent and co-anchor of Velshi & Ruhle on MSNBC, sits down to talk with entrepreneur, author, lifestyle guru, and Founder of Bulletproof 360 and Bulletproof Nutrition, Dave Asprey. Ali and Dave met at XPRIZE Visioneering, to talk about how their experience gave them a necessary escape from the cynicism of today’s world and opened their eyes to infinite possibilities. Ali and Dave argue that innovation should be fun, and how surprising and unexpected meetings can lead you to the next breakthrough idea. Ali Velshi is an MSNBC Anchor and Business Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC.Velshi has covered a wide range of breaking news events and global affairs throughout his career, including U.S. presidential elections, ISIL and the Syrian refugee crisis, the Iran nuclear deal from Tehran, the tensions between Russia and NATO from Eastern Europe and the High Arctic, the debt crisis in Greece, the funeral of Nelson Mandela, and the global financial crisis.Before joining NBC News and MSNBC, Velshi hosted “Ali Velshi On Target,” a nightly primetime show on Al Jazeera America. Before that, he served as CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent, anchor of CNN International’s “World Business Today” and host of CNN’s weekly business roundtable “Your Money.” Velshi also co-hosted CNN’s morning show, “American Morning.”An award-winning journalist, Velshi was honored with a National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage. Additionally, Velshi has taken his economic analysis to “Oprah,” “The View,” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”Velshi is the author of Gimme My Money Back (Sterling and Ross, 2008) and co-author with CNN’s Christine Romans of How to Speak Money (Wiley, 2010).Born in Kenya and raised in Canada, Velshi graduated from Queen’s University in Canada, which bestowed an honorary Doctorate of Laws upon him in 2016. Velshi splits his time between New York City and Philadelphia. Active in the community, Velshi serves on the Board of Trustees of the Chicago History Museum, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also volunteers with New York’s Center for Urban Community Services homeless outreach program.Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof and author of New York Times bestseller The Bulletproof Diet, is a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent two decades and more than one million dollars to hack his own biology.Dave lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise, used techniques to upgrade his brain and lift his IQ by 20 points, and lowered his biological age while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time. Learning to do these seemingly impossible things transformed him into a better entrepreneur, a better husband, and a better father.Dave is the creator of the widely popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the #1 health podcast, Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet. Through his work Dave provides information, techniques and keys to taking control of and improving your biochemistry, your body and your mind so they work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what you’d expect, without burning out, getting sick, or allowing stress to control your decisions.LINKShttps://www.bulletproof.com/https://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhlehttps://www.xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week’s episode, Dr. Emily Church, Executive Director of Equity & Education at XPRIZE, will be dropping in on a conversation between Brent Bushnell, entrepreneur, engineer and CEO/co-founder of Two Bit Circus and Chris Copeland, professional athlete who has played for the New York Knicks, Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks, ultimately earning the nickname "The X-Factor". In this candid conversation, Brent and Chris come together to talk about creativity, their experience at XPRIZE Visioneering, and the importance of experimentation and taking risks. Brent Bushnell is an entrepreneur, engineer and CEO/co-founder of Two Bit Circus, a Los Angeles-based experiential entertainment company. The interdisciplinary team strives to create immersive, social fun and is currently building a network of micro-amusement parks featuring free-roaming VR, robot bartenders, an interactive supper club and more. Previously they created STEAM Carnival, a traveling event to inspire kids about science, technology, engineering, art and math.Brent is on fire about using play and spectacle to inspire inventors. He is passionate about rebranding STEM learning to STEAM with the inclusion of art and creativity. He is motivated by the power of group games and interactive media to bring people together in fun and meaningful ways. As a UCLA-trained engineer, he is a hands-on maker who uses rapid prototyping to turn vision into reality. He's board president of Two Bit Circus Foundation, an LA-based 501c3 that deploys STEAM-based programs for middle and high school students. Previously, he was the on-camera inventor for the ABC TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. He was a founding member of Syyn Labs, a creative collective creating stunts for brands like Google and Disney and helped OK Go build the Rube Goldberg machine for their viral This Too Shall Pass music video that garnered 50+ million views on YouTube.In his spare time, Brent enjoys mentoring teens in entrepreneurship via programs such as NFTE. He's a supporter of Clowns Without Borders and publishes on Twitter at @brentbushnell.Chris Copeland nicknamed "The X-Factor" is an American professional basketball player who last played for MoraBanc Andorra of the Liga ACB. He played college basketball for the University of Colorado Boulder from 2002 until 2006Links: http://www.twobitcircus.org/https://www.xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, XPRIZE founder Peter H. Diamandis discusses AI and how it is often portrayed in science fiction with world renowned sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, at XPRIZE Visioneering recorded at Paramount Studios. Robinson questions our relationship with AI and the important future of synthetic medicine. Although he is inspired by space exploration, he argues that the race to Mars is not an urgent problem, but rather a reward for fixing the problems on planet Earth. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”Kim Stanley Robinson is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. Robinson began publishing novels in 1984. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction". Robinson himself has been a proud defender and advocate of science fiction as a genre, which he regards as one of the most powerful of all literary forms.Robinson was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but moved to Orange County, California, when he was two. As a child he loved to play in the orange groves stretching out for miles around his home, so when suburban sprawl began to encroach and the groves were torn out and paved over, the rapid change of modern life hit close to home. It was not until college in 1971 that he would stumble upon new wave science fiction and find in it an expression of that very sense of rapid change that had made such an impression upon him growing up, at which point he knew almost immediately that he would be committed to science fiction from then on. He enrolled at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) in 1970 and received his B.A. in Literature in 1974. During that time he developed the idea to write a trio of books exploring three different alternative future histories in which southern California had gone down different paths, what became the Orange County trilogy. After briefly leaving California to receive an M.A. in English at Boston University in 1975, Robinson returned to UCSD to complete his Ph.D. Though science fiction was something of a "literary ghetto culture" in the academic world, Robinson could not have had a more sympathetic advisor in Fredric Jameson, who suggested that Robinson do his thesis on the works of Philip K. Dick, whom Robinson was not particularly familiar with at the time but whom Jameson regarded as the greatest living American novelist. Robinson agreed to the idea and finished his Ph.D. in 1982, a revised version of which was published in 1984 as The Novels Of Philip K. Dick. In 1978 Robinson took a break from his Ph.D. work and moved north to Davis, California, where he worked in a bookstore and spent a lot of time outdoors, especially backpacking in the mountains, where he continued to develop his love for landscape and the outdoors. While in Davis he met Lisa Howland Nowell, an environmental chemist, and in 1982 upon completing his Ph.D. he returned to Davis and the two were married. He taught freshman composition among other courses at UC Davis, another autobiographical tidbit that would be bestowed upon his fictional alter-ego Jim in 1988's The Gold Coast. Then a few years later, after publishing his first few novels, his wife's post-doctoral work in environmental toxicology took the couple to Switzerland, where they lived for two years, and at which point he began to write full time. Her work also took them to Washington, D.C., and during their four years there Robinson was a stay-at-home parent to their first son while his wife worked. Finally, in 1991 they moved back to Davis to buy a house in Village Homes -- a planned community that shares many things in common with the community depicted in his 1990 novel Pacific Edge -- where their second son was born. Robinson is still the stay-at-home parent, giving him plenty of time to write, while his wife continues to work full time as a chemist. As a result, much of the couple's social circle is made up of her friends and colleagues, giving Robinson ample material with which to write about scientists. As can be gathered from above, Robinson enjoys inserting personal life experiences or autobiographical elements in his works. For example:Robinson enjoys mountaineering greatly, which can be seen in landscape descriptions and trekking trips in nearly all his works.His stay in Switzerland is a likely inspiration for frequent references to Swiss government and people (Green Mars, Fifty Degrees Below).He has visited Greece and enjoys the architecture of the Greek islands (The Gold Coast, Blue Mars).He likes softball, referenced in Icehenge and Pacific Edge, and plays the frisbee golf described in Fifty Degrees Below.At times he is a stay-at-home dad, like Charlie Quibler in the Science In The Capital trilogy.He is a Californian teacher, like characters in The Gold Coast and The Years Of Rice And Salt.Links: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, our podcast host Dr. Emily Church looks at how technology is innovating modern medicine at an exponential rate to be smarter and proactive. In a special recording from Visioneering, XPRIZE founder Peter H. Diamandis is joined by two of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs: iBOT & Segway inventor engineer Dean Kamen, and science innovator and founder of United Therapeutics, Martine Rothblatt. They discuss the future of health and medicine where biology IS technology. Drawing from their own inspirational experience, including printing new organs, and eradicating diabetes and Alzheimers, Peter, Dean and Martine discuss the positive impact that innovation is having on human health and longevity. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”Dr. Martine Rothblatt founded Lung Biotechnology, as well as its parent company, United Therapeutics, in order to develop therapies for orphan diseases such as PAH. She earned her PhD in medical ethics from the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary College, University of London and also obtained JD and MBA degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. Prior to entering the life sciences field, Dr. Rothblatt was active in satellite communications, founding Sirius XM Satellite Radio and serving as its Chairman and CEO. She has also published many books, including Your Life or Mine: How Geoethics Can Resolve the Conflict Between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation.Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST and President of DEKA Research & Development CorporationDean Kamen is an inventor, an entrepreneur, and a tireless advocate for science and technology. His roles as inventor and advocate are intertwined—his own passion for technology and its practical uses has driven his personal determination to spread the word about technology's virtues and by so doing to change the culture of the United States.As an inventor, he holds more than 440 U.S. and foreign patents, many of them for innovative medical devices that have expanded the frontiers of health care worldwide. While still a college undergraduate, he invented the first wearable infusion pump, which rapidly gained acceptance from such diverse medical specialties as oncology, neonatology, and endocrinology. In 1976, he founded his first medical device company, AutoSyringe, Inc., to manufacture and market the pumps. Then, working with leading diabetes researchers, Dean pioneered the design and adoption of the first portable insulin pump. It was quickly demonstrated that using a pump could much more effectively control patients’ blood glucose levels. . At age 30, he sold AutoSyringe to Baxter Healthcare Corporation. Following the sale of AutoSyringe, Inc., he founded DEKA Research & Development Corporation to develop internally generated inventions as well as to provide research and development for major corporate clients. Kamen led DEKA's development of the HomeChoiceTM peritoneal dialysis system for Baxter International Inc. The HomeChoiceTM system allows patients to be dialyzed in the privacy and comfort of their home and quickly became the worldwide market leader. Kamen also led the development of technology to improve slide preparation for the CYTYC (now Hologic Inc.) ThinPrep® Pap Test. Kamen-led DEKA teams have also developed critical components of the UVARTM XTSTM System, an extracorporeal photophereisis device marketed by Therakos, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for treatment of T-Cell lymphoma. An advanced prosthetic arm in development for DARPA should advance the quality of life for returning injured soldiers. Other notable developments include the HydroflexTM surgical irrigation pump for C.R. Bard, the CrownTM stent, an improvement to the original Palmaz-Schatz stent, for Johnson & Johnson, the iBOTTM mobility device, and the Segway® Human Transporter.Kamen has received many awards for his efforts. Notably, Kamen was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000. Presented by President Clinton, this award was in recognition for inventions that have advanced medical care worldwide, and for innovative and imaginative leadership in awakening America to the excitement of science and technology. Kamen was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2005. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, as well as many other national and international engineering organizations.In 2010, Dean hosted the Planet Green television series Dean of Invention.In addition to DEKA, one of Dean's proudest accomplishments is founding FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to motivating the next generation to understand, use and enjoy science and technology. Founded in 1989, this year FIRST® will serve more than 1,000,000 young people, ages 6 to 18, in more than 86 countries around the globe. Last year, high-school-aged participants were eligible to apply for more than $50 million in scholarships from over 200 leading colleges, universities, and corporations.Links: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frchttps://www.unither.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, XPRIZE CEO and astronaut Anousheh Ansari, talks to SpaceX COO and President, Gwynne Shotwell, about working with interstellar innovator Elon Musk, and the company's plans for the future of space travel and exploration including its plans to build communities on the moon, Mars and beyond. Recorded at Paramount Studios during XPRIZE Visioneering, Anousheh invites guests to question Gwynne about her predictions for commercial space travel.Anousheh Ansari is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Ansari, along with her family, sponsored the organization’s first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, a $10 million competition that ignited a new era for commercial spaceflight. Since then, she has served on XPRIZE’s Board of Directors. Prior to being named CEO of XPRIZE, Ansari served as the CEO of Prodea Systems, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) technology firm she co-founded in 2006, and continues to serve as the executive chairwoman. She captured headlines around the world when she embarked upon an 11-day space expedition, accomplishing her childhood dream of becoming the first female private space explorer, first astronaut of Iranian descent, first Muslim woman in space, and fourth private explorer to visit space. Ansari serves on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Future Council and has received numerous honors, including the WEF Young Global Leader, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and STEM Leadership Hall of Fame, among others. She is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and serves on the board of Jabil and Peace First, as well as several other not-for-profit organizations focused on STEM education and youth empowerment. Ansari also co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, announced in October 2018 at the Tri Hita Karana (THK) Forum on Sustainable Development in Bali, with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies by 2020.She published her memoir, My Dream of Stars, to share her life story as inspiration for young women around the world. Ansari holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University; and honorary doctorates from George Mason University, Utah Valley University, and International Space University.As President and COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is responsible for day-to-day operations and for managing all customer and strategic relations. She joined SpaceX in 2002 as Vice President of Business Development and built the Falcon vehicle family manifest to more than 70 launches, representing more than $10 billion in business. Shotwell is a member of the SpaceX Board of Directors. Prior to joining SpaceX, Shotwell spent more than 10 years at the Aerospace Corporation, holding positions in Space Systems Engineering & Technology and Project Management. Shotwell was subsequently recruited to be Director of Microcosm’s Space Systems Division,managing space system technologies, serving on the executive committee and directing corporate business development. In 2014, Shotwell was appointed to the United States Export Import Bank's Advisory Committee and the Federal Aviation Administration’s Management Advisory Council. Shotwell has been awarded the World Technology Award for Individual Achievement in Space, has been inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame and was elected to the honorable grade of Fellow with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. SpaceX supports science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs locally as well as national engineering programs and competitions. Shotwell has helped raise over $1.4 million for STEM education programs reaching thousands of students nationwide. Shotwell received, with honors, her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern University in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics, and serves as both a University Trustee and a member of the Advisory Council for Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. She has authored dozens of papers on a variety of space related subjects.Links: https://www.spacex.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode 2: In this episode, join XPRIZE founder and Star Trek superfan, Peter H. Diamandis for a special recording at Visioneering with LeVar Burton, Marina Sirtis and Rod Roddenberry from Star Trek: The Next Generation live from Paramount Studios. XPRIZE’s vision of a future of abundance is inspired by Star Trek’s IDIC (Infinite Diversity Infinite Combinations) and this incredible line-up discusses their inspiration from the franchise including female empowerment, living in a post-scarcity world and how Star Trek’s technology predictions are starting to come true. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”LeVar Burton is an American actor, director, producer, and author. Burton first came to prominence portraying Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots, based on the novel by Alex Haley. He is also well known for his role as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as the host of the PBS children's program Reading Rainbow.Marina Sirtis is a British-American actress. She is best known for her role as Counselor Deanna Troi on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and the four feature films that followed, as well as other appearances in the Star Trek franchise.Rod Roddenberry Rod Roddenberry is a producer, CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment, and son of Gene Roddenberry, screenwriter, producer and creator of the original Star Trek television series, and its first spin-off The Next Generation. Links: Levarburton.com roddenberry.com/https://www.diamandis.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

NEW SEASONWelcome to Future Positive from XPRIZE. This season we aim to bring you the most future-forward topics, covering everything from AI to avatars, to climate change, and more. We will share conversations from game-changing leaders, tech entrepreneurs and heavyweights from the creative industry - revealing their inspirations, and how and why they will change the world.Captured during Visioneering at Paramount Studios, Peter H. Diamandis is joined by Harrison Ford and Wes Bush from Conservation International. In a thrilling discussion, they discuss the urgency to change the economics, behaviors and political will in order to save the planet. It requires the support of everyone, and will rely on technological innovation and new economic incentives to move in the right direction, quickly. Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is cofounder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Celularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World. His newest book in this series of exponential technologies—The Future is Faster Than You Think—was released on January 28, 2020. He earned degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Diamandis’ favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”Harrison Ford has become one of the most popular and acclaimed actors of our time. His works include 35 feature films, ten of which have exceeded $100 million each at the box office. Through his starring roles in such cinematic blockbusters as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, The Fugitive, Air Force One, Patriot Games and K-19 he has come to embody the quintessential hero for moviegoers around the world. Strongly committed to environmental concerns, Harrison Ford has served on the board of Conservation International for more than 10 years, actively participating in its design and growth. During this time CI has emerged as a leading force in global conservation. He presently serves as vice chair of the board and is on CI's Executive Committee.He has played an instrumental role in the establishment at CI of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, the first early warning system for global conservation efforts. Additionally, he played a key role in the design and development of CI's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, a coalition of conservation and business interests searching for ways to reduce the impact of development on the earth's biodiversity. Mr. Ford serves as a board member of Conservation International's Global Conservation Fund, which has secured the protection of over 40,000,000 acres on 3 continents in the past 18 months. Mr. Ford lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he donated 389 acres of his property for a conservation easement to the Jackson Hole Land Trust.Prior to becoming CEO of Northrop Grumman, Wes Bush held numerous leadership roles at Northrop Grumman including President and Chief Operating Officer; Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and President of the Space Technology division. He joined the company as a systems engineer at TRW in 1987 and was the President and CEO of TRW’s Aeronautical Systems business when Northrop Grumman acquired the TRW in 2002. He earlier worked at Aerospace Corporation and Comsat Labs. Bush received both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a graduate of the Executive Management Program at UCLA. He serves on the board of directors of Conservation International and the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation, and he chairs the boards of the Aerospace Industries Association and the Business-Higher Education Forum.Links: https://www.conservation.org/https://xprize.org/blog See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the final episode of our new XPRIZE podcast series, Not Going Back To Normal, Imagining Life After COVID-19, featuring Caroline Kolta. In this episode, Caroline questions what role our food system played in leading to COVID-19, and what the future of our food systems will look like as we emerge from the pandemic. Caroline’s own work in food and agriculture led her to realize that it’s time to recognize the interconnectedness of animal health, people’s health, and planetary health. Caroline Kolta comes to the XPRIZE Foundation with over 5 years of experience in development programming in the Middle East and North Africa. As a member of the Global Impact Strategy team, she will contribute to XPRIZE’s prize design and global impact strategies and processes.Prior to joining XPRIZE, she worked with the Carter Center, UNICEF, and other nonprofits as a researcher, program officer, and policy advisor. She is interested in advancing human rights and freedoms, civic engagement, and empowering marginalized populations. She holds a Bachelor of Political Science from Cairo University and a master’s degree in Sustainable International Development and Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.Enjoy listening and if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you get your pods.Linkshttps://impactmaps.xprize.org/food See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the latest episode of our brand new XPRIZE podcast series, Not Going Back To Normal, Imagining Life After COVID-19, featuring Anousheh Ansari, Anya Shakhmeyster, Catherine Connors, and Lisa Bilyeu. In this episode, Anya gets inside the minds of three women who are disrupting traditional gender stereotypes every single day. Lisa, Catherine and Anousheh share their personal mission for female progress, and some positive disruptions they see happening in our world due to COVID-19. Catherine Connors is the CEO of League of Badass Women and is the co-author of The Feminine Revolution: 21 Ways to Ignite the Power of Your Femininity for a Brighter Life and a Better World. She’s the former Editor in Chief of Babble and head of content for Disney Interactive’s Women and Family portfolio. She has been featured in media like The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and Good Morning America. As featured on entrepreneur.com, Lisa Bilyeu is living proof that Darwin was right when he said it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. She began her professional career in film, moved briefly into administration, and then, as a founding team member at Quest Nutrition, she took on logistics - building the company’s fulfillment department from scratch and helping facilitate the company’s rise to #2 on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies. She then returned to media helping build the company’s revolutionary in-house media team, producing content that has been viewed over 100,000,000 times. As co-founder of Impact Theory, she’s looking to combine her highly developed skills as a creative producer with her drive to help people build things that matter.Anousheh Ansari is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Ansari, along with her family, sponsored the organization’s first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, a $10 million competition that ignited a new era for commercial spaceflight. Since then, she has served on XPRIZE’s Board of Directors. Prior to being named CEO of XPRIZE, Ansari served as the CEO of Prodea Systems, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) technology firm she co-founded in 2006, and continues to serve as the executive chairwoman. She captured headlines around the world when she embarked upon an 11-day space expedition, accomplishing her childhood dream of becoming the first female private space explorer, first astronaut of Iranian descent, first Muslim woman in space, and fourth private explorer to visit space. Ansari serves on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Future Council and has received numerous honors, including the WEF Young Global Leader, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and STEM Leadership Hall of Fame, among others. She is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and serves on the board of Jabil and Peace First, as well as several other not-for-profit organizations focused on STEM education and youth empowerment. Ansari also co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, announced in October 2018 at the Tri Hita Karana (THK) Forum on Sustainable Development in Bali, with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies by 2020.She published her memoir, My Dream of Stars, to share her life story as inspiration for young women around the world. Ansari holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University; and honorary doctorates from George Mason University, Utah Valley University, and International Space University. Enjoy listening and if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you get your pods.Linkshttps://impacttheory.comhttps://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Revolution-Ignite-Femininity-Brighter/dp/1580058124https://go.xprize.org/gendergap See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the latest episode of our brand new XPRIZE podcast series - Not Going Back To Normal, Imagining Life After COVID-19 featuring Chris Classen.This June marks 50 years since the first permitted Pride Parade, taking place in Los Angeles in 1970, an audacious act in a time when your sexuality could leave you in handcuffs. In this week’s episode, Chris reflects on the beginnings of Pride, and with guest John D’Amico, former mayor and current council member of the City of West Hollywood, and explores all the ways things have changed since those first steps helped spread a unique brand of radical optimism -- despite the challenges faced in the fight for equity. As Vice President of Events & Experiences at XPRIZE, Chris Classen drives engagement and enthusiasm for the XPRIZE experience and oversees its annual Visioneering event. Prior to joining XPRIZE, he served as the President of Christopher Street West, the non-profit organization that produces the annual LA Pride Festival and Parade, and most recently worked with Google on top-tier events. During his career he has driven events and created strategic partnerships with brands like W Hotels, Delta Airlines, Prada, B&B Italia, and the LA Dodgers. After receiving a BFA in Art & Design from the University of Nebraska he moved to Los Angeles for his Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc). He has received accommodations from both the City of Los Angeles and the City of West Hollywood for his cultural and economic contributions.As a resident of West Hollywood for more than 25 years, Councilmember John D’Amico’s love of West Hollywood has only grown with time. Councilmember D’Amico has an unwavering commitment to issues that reflect the spirit of what makes West Hollywood unique. For more than 20 years, Councilmember D’Amico has participated in city leadership as a member of Advisory Boards and Commissions, and for the past several years, as a member of the City Council. He is helping shape the city we are becoming. As an architect and Project Manager, Councilmember D’Amico understands the vital importance of balancing development and livability, particularly in West Hollywood, where residents have come to love the special, “urban village” atmosphere. Professionally, Mr. D’Amico has more than 20 years of experience in large-scale project planning management at UCLA, ABC, the Walt Disney Studios, and the affordable housing developer, Los Angeles Housing Partnership. At LAHP, he was responsible for overseeing the renovation and construction of well over 300 affordable housing units. Formerly, Mayor D’Amico was the co-Director of Policy and Planning at AIDS Project Los Angeles. Councilmember D’Amico holds two Master’s Degrees, one in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of Houston and the other in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts.Enjoy listening and if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you get your pods.LinksLA Pride - https://lapride.org/Virtual Pride Events Around the World - https://proudlyresilient.com/ XPRIZE - https://xprize.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.