Singularity University: Where today's tech titans teach the next generation

Sitting in a classroom, listening to students explain their approach to an assignment to develop an initiative to impact the lives of a billion people over 10 years, one could be forgiven for taking it all with a grain of salt.

After all, student projects like this are usually peppered with holes, naive assumptions, and unrealistic goals.

But here at Singularity University, things are a little different. This group project, which aims to flip the car sharing movement on its head and bring affordable transportation to the masses, started less than two weeks ago but has already won a prize and attracted venture capital interest.

That's because Singularity University is no run-of-the-mill academic institution, and its students are not the usual breed of dreamers with good intentions. Founded by leading futurist and The Singularity is Near author Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, the nine-week course examines exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing. As well, the 40 students in the programme are focusing on future studies and forecasting, and finance and entrepreneurship.

Vint Cerf, the 'father of the internet,' is one of the many thought leaders that students at Singularity University get a chance to learn from (photo credit: Singularity University)

Those chosen for the programme are truly the cream of the crop. After all, they have regular access to superstar teachers like George Smoot, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; Dan Kammen, co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, Nasa Ames' chief scientist. Speakers also include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalf.

According to programme director Ismail, this summer's inaugural Singularity University class of 40 students was chosen from among more than 1,200 applicants from around the world. Ismail said there were three main criteria for selection: students who already had top-level academic rigor and who are already at the top of their respective fields; those who have demonstrated leadership and entrepreneurial skills; and those who have demonstrated interest in global issues.

The result? A class of doctors, advisers to prime ministers, CEOs and successful start-up founders, just to name a few.

So when I showed up on Wednesday to observe the programme in action and first sat in on the car-sharing group project demonstration, I realised this was something I should take seriously.

The 40 students are split into four teams, which get three weeks to come up with a project that, as stated above, could impact a billion people over the next 10 years. The presentation I saw was by a group that was calling itself Gettaround, and which has set as its goal the creation of a new car-sharing programme that would incentivise car owners to rent out their vehicles to members, while also making it easier for people to find cars to use for short drives in many more places than are served today by companies like ZipCar or CityCarShare.

Ultimately, the idea is to spread the programme to developing countries around the world, ideally helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

At the heart of Gettaround's proposal was an iPhone application designed to make it possible for members to locate available cars and, then, when physically approaching them, to start the engines via a low-priced kit installed in the vehicles.

The app was awarded the best money-making iPhone app prize at a recent iPhoneDevCamp event in California, and on the strength of that, the team members said they've already identified interested venture capitalists and are most likely going to pursue the project as a real business upon completion of Singularity University.

Students speak
After the presentation, I got a chance to speak with some of the programme's students about their experiences at Singularity University over the last eight weeks.

This is an amazingly diverse group. Among the 40 students, half are from other countries, and 35 per cent are women. The average age is 31.

I first talked to Sarah Sclarsic, 25, of Boston. She's a former medical school student who had previously designed her own emerging technologies major at Harvard University and who has a deep interest in health care and public health.

Sclarsic said the Singularity University course has been hectic, "but for me, that's good".

Among the most valuable aspects of the programme, she said, is that students are shown, from the beginning, how the various fields being taught here relate to each other or, at least, can cross over in real-world practice.

She pointed out how she had never before thought about how someone working in quantum computing might have their research converge with healthcare, or how fields like computational biology, quantum computing, and protein folding intersect.

The results of such convergence down the line? That doctors may be able to design new therapies meant for specific patients, a "huge ability we've never had before".

But this isn't the distant future, she pointed out. The main focus of...