Singularity Summit Promises to Stimulate Your Brain

The Singularity Summit, held in San Francisco this past weekend, is not new to me since I helped market the very first one, which was held at Stanford in 2006. The goal of the first Summit was to further the understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress.

The idea over time is to improve people’s thinking about the future and increasing public awareness of radical technologies under development today and of the transformative implications of such technologies understood as part of a larger process.

It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether that be as a scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

Speaking of skeptics, the last talk of the event was by James Randi, who some think of as a magician, but he is also known as a debunker.

I first learned of Randi's work at TED where he spoke several years ago. The title defunker equates to his strong and very vocal skepticism, which he writes and speaks about extensively. Fascinating as ever, Randi has the ability to draw you into his logic even if you don't necessarily agree with him.

Gregory Stock is a renown biophysicist who I had the pleasure of meeting at PopTech in Maine more than five years ago. What I love about Stock is his ability to move from academic, physicist and author to entrepreneur and philosopher all within a one hour window. He also has a very engaging curiosity about random things outside his world when you talk to him one-on-one that most experts lack. He wrote the book Redesigning Humans, which is considered a transhumanist classic, now eight years ago.

You can't have a Singularity Conference without a bunch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) geeks running around, which at this event, included Eliezer Yudkowsky (also a profilic writer about human rationality), Ben Goertzel, who is Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente and Ray Kurzweil, who joined us remotely via video and as always, delivered a rivoting and mind-expanding talk.

My favorite line all day was a Kurzweil one: "My feelings about the brain, the mind and AI - If it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If it seems conscious it is conscious" -- meaning a conscious being.

Below Ben Goertzel on the Singularity Summit Stage

Psychologists Irene Pepperberg and John Tooby (considered a pioneer of evolutionary psychology) also brought their perspective to the table as did neurobiologists Terrence Sejnowski, Brian Litt, Dennis Bray and Demis Hassabis, who is a research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at the University College of London.

"Futurists like to predict how genetic engineering and computational implants will allow humans to become a super-species, but few examine the application of similar technologies to nonhumans," says Pepperberg.

David Hanson, who I first met at TED more than six years ago, is a well known roboticist. When I first met him, he was working at Disney Imagineering and while you may not think of a roboticist as an artist, this one is. Formerly a sculptor, he has merged his artistic way of looking at the world with his left brain ability to design and develop a robot with human-like expressive capabilities. He holds a patent on Frubber, a novel material that imitates the look and feel of human skin. I had an opportunity to touch it while I was talking to their very human robot named Zeno. (a video of my experience coming later this month).

Below David Hanson and his very human-like robot Zeno, who has a sexy British accent and has accepted a date with me as soon as he is given 'legs' - I told David I'd fly to Dallas for the occasion.

Also on the agenda was Anita Goel, who works at the intersection of physics, nanotechnology and medicine, Lance Becker, a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Venezuelan born Jose Luis Cordeiro who is the Director of the Venezuela node of the Millenium Project. Jose, who I met at the cocktail party the night before the event, has been working in Asia. Prior to that however, he lived in Ecuador for a year around the time the currency changed over to the dollar.

Engaging and witty on stage, Steve Mann doesn't look like your ordinary professor. A pioneer in the study and practice of virtual reality, he has been dubbed the world's first cyborg. He even published a book with its name in the title: Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. Together with collaborator Ryan Janzen, a Canadian researcher, scientist and composer, they demoed the very powerful and mesmorizing Hydraulophone, a tonal acoustic musical instrument played by direct physical contact with water where sound is generated or affected hydraulically.

Below Toronto-based Steve Mann is engaging, interactive and wows the audience with his examples of virtual reality and demo of the Hydraulophone on stage.

Other impressive talks from other disciplines included Shane Legg, who won the 2008 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research Prize, Ellen Heber-Katz whose research focuses on molecular biology and genetics of healing, and Ramez Naam, who is the author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement.

Since I'm a right brain, I must admit that my favorite part of the day was playing the Hydraulophone, which I'm doing below with Ryan Janzen's guidance and interacting with Hanson's robot, the very endearing Zeno.

Jeff Bezos: We Are What We Choose

The below is a moving and inspirational talk that Jeff Bezos made to the Princeton University Class of 2010 at the end of May -- reposted from the Princeton website.

I particularly love his reference to the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

Read Jeff's speech below in its entirety: "We are What We Choose."

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers.

I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff.

At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man.

He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs.

This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year.

I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job."

That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

Gideon Diagnoses Infectious Diseases & More

I learned a bit about Gideon's product at this year's Israel Conference. Gideon is an easy to use online application, updated weekly, that helps you diagnose infectious diseases and stay up to date on the latest trends in epidemiology, treatment and microbiology. More in the video below.

Udemy Wins VatorSplash On-Stage Stand-Off

At last night's VatorSplash event in San Francisco, ten companies made it to the stage to present in front of Splash Box judges, which included Howard Hartenbaum, Jeff Clavier, Jeremy Liew, Ezra Roizen, Dave McClure and Charles Moldow.

Of the ten who presented to the judges and audience - Arkayne, Mindbloom, Udemy, MyToopi, YouHaveIWant, Pana.ma, Hey!Your Up There!, DormNoise, iChange and Envolve, Udemy won the vote hands down.

Udemy is a site that enables anyone to create an online course. Their goal is to provide their teachers with everything they could possibly need to create a great learning experience over the Internet.

Why the need? Currently, educators are constrained by the physicality of their course. Whether an SAT tutor or an IT education company, instructors can only teach those in proximity to their location. Online education breaks down those barriers, but publishing an online education course is time-consuming and expensive. Online education is dominated by large businesses that have spent millions on developing the infrastructure necessary to create, distribute and monetize their content. A video clip of their 'win' below.

Willow Garages Gives Away 11 Robots to Institutions Worldwide

Willow Garage today, announced that it is giving away 11 robots worth over $4 million to accelerate robotics applications & research.

The robots, which will be given away this month, are the new PR2s (Personal Robot 2’s), an open and robust hardware platform developed by Willow Garage. Today’s launch of their important PR2 Beta Program is the start of a new long-term initiative to enable scientific breakthroughs in personal robotics and to accelerate research. Each participant in the program will contribute their research to the open source robotics community so that the community as a whole can build on each other’s results.

The PR2 Beta Program is a two-year program in which the selected institutions will pursue their research and development goals as well as meet regularly to share their progress and explore new applications together. The PR2 Beta is a robust robot platform that includes a mobile base, two arms for manipulation, a rich sensor suite and sixteen CPU cores for computation. The total value of the PR2 Beta Program robots is more than $4 million.

Each PR2 comes pre-installed with the free and open source ROS robotics framework, which offers full control of the PR2, including libraries for navigation, manipulation, and perception.

By making the PR2 platforms available to researchers and developers, Willow Garage hopes to:

• enable scientific breakthroughs in personal robotics worldwide.

• expand the open source robotics community.

• develop reusable components and tools to improve productivity.

• explore new applications for personal robots that may never have been possible without community and institution contributions.

• accelerate overall robotics development. Because the ROS platform is open source, robotic developers avoid wasting time rewriting software from scratch that may already exist on other platforms.

IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES

Earlier this year, a graduate student at Berkeley University worked with a PR2 robot. Within two months the robot was folding towels with impeccable accuracy. Imagine what could happen when 11 institutions have 11 robots for two years, with many more students per robot.

The work is being contributed back into the open source community, which only further expands the development efforts and helps to expand on new ideas and projects. Consider the industries that could benefit from advancements in personal robotics, ranging from retail, healthcare and automotive to homecare, manufacturing and housework/daily tasks.

Willow Garage’s goal is to facilitate progress in the area of personal robotics by developing initiatives such as this one, sponsoring community-building activities and events, as well as through internship programs and with visiting scholars. The PR2 robotic platform evolved from the PR1 prototype robot in Professor Ken Salisbury’s Lab at Stanford University in 2007.

AND, THE LUCKY 11 RECIPIENTS ARE.........

 Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg with the proposal TidyUpRobot

The University of Freiburg will program the PR2 to perform tidy-up tasks such as clearing a table, while also working on difficult underlying capabilities such as understanding how drawers and refrigerators open and how to recognize different types of objects.

 Bosch with the proposal Developing the Personal Robotics Market: Enabling New Applications Through Novel Sensors and Shared Autonomy

Bosch will bring their expertise in manufacturing, sensing technologies and consumer products. In addition to software contributions, Bosch will be making robotic sensors available to members of the PR2 Beta Program, including a limited number of "skins" that will give PR2 the ability to feel its environment.

 Georgia Institute of Technology with the proposal Assistive Mobile Manipulation for Older Adults at Home.

The Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech will be placing the PR2 in an "Aware Home" to study how robots can help with homecare and creative assistive capabilities for older adults. Their research includes creating easier ways for people to interact with robots and enabling robots to interact with everyday objects like drawers, lamps, and light switches.

 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with the proposal Unified Framework for Task Specification, Control and Coordination for Mobile Manipulation

KU Leuven in Belgium is a key player in the open source robotics community. As one of the founding institutions for the Orocos Project, they will be improving the tools and libraries used to program robots. They will also be working on getting the PR2 and people to perform a task together, such as carrying objects in a crowded environment.

 MIT CSAIL with the proposal Mobile Manipulation in Human-Centered Environments

The MIT CSAIL group will use the PR2 to study the key capabilities needed by robots that operate in human-centered environments, such as safe navigation, interaction with humans via natural language, and planning for complex goals. Without a good map, a robot is lost. Their work will allow robots to build the maps they need in order to move around in buildings as large as MIT’s 11-story Stata Center.

 Stanford University with the proposal STAIR on PR2

PR1 was developed in Kenneth Salisbury's Lab at Stanford and ROS was developed from the STAIR (Stanford AI Robot) Project. The team will work on several applications, which include navigating a building, identifying objects, retrieving items scattered about a building, and clearing a table after a meal.

 Technische Universität München with the proposal CRAM: Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine

TUM will research giving PR2 the artificial intelligence skills and 3D perception to reason about what it is doing while it performs various kitchen tasks. These combined improvements will help PR2 perform more complicated tasks such as setting a table, emptying a dishwasher and other kitchen-related tasks.

 University of California, Berkeley with the proposal PR 2 Beta Program: A Platform for Personal Robotics

The PR2 is now known as the "Towel-Folding Robot", thanks to the impressive efforts of Pieter Abbeel's lab at Berkeley. In two short months they were able to get PR2 to fold fifty towels in a row. Berkeley will extend on its work with the PR2 folding towels and tackle the much more difficult challenge of doing laundry, from dirty laundry piles to neatly folded clothes. In addition, Berkeley's team is interested in assembly and manufacturing tasks through learning by demonstration.

 University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Laboratory with the proposal PR2GRASP: From Perception and Reasoning to Grasping

The GRASP Lab proposal aims to tackle a variety of challenges, including tracking people, planning in the presence of moving obstacles, and planning for tasks such as opening spring-loaded doors. They will also develop systems that allow people to control the robot using a motion capture system, and provide the PR2 with a tool-belt that lets it change it's gripper on the fly.

 University of Southern California with the proposal Persistent and Persuasive Personal Robots (P^3R): Towards Networked, Mobile, Assistive Robotics

USC has already developed software that enables teaching the PR2 basic motor skills so it can adapt to different situations, such as the motions necessary to pour liquid into a cup. They will continue to expand on this work in imitation learning and building and refining skill libraries, while also doing research in human-robot interaction and tools to use sensors more accurately.

 University of Tokyo, JSK Robotics Laboratory with the proposal Autonomous Motion Planning for Daily Tasks in Human Environments using Collaborating Robots

The JSK Lab's goal is to see robots safely and autonomously perform daily, human-like tasks such as retrieving objects and cleaning up environments. They'll also be working on getting PR2 to work together with other robots. The Jouhou System Kougaku (JSK) laboratory at the University of Tokyo is one of the top humanoid robotics labs in the world.

Watch this video to better understand the program and the possibilities.

Female Students Speak Out on Social Media in Classroom

Female students speak out on social media in the classroom at the recent 140 Character Conference in New York. (#140conf) They talk about how they use Twitter and other tools to share information about homework, books they're reading and more.

Economist Innovation Event: On Education

The team breakout sessions from this week's Economist & Berkeley Haas School of Business presented on-stage: innovative ideas around the areas of finance, new business models, education, healthcare, energy and sustainability. Below is the idea presented for education. Also refer to the more extensive summary of the event.

Answers.com Calls for Submissions for Scholarship Fund: $20K to Students

Client Answers.com calls for submissions for its 2nd annual scholarship fund, which are due by March 31, 2010. Now in its second year, they have a $20,000 Scholarship Fund for students planning to enroll in undergraduate college studies during the 2010-2011 academic year.

The scholarship is open to students attending universities in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and India. Applicants must answer a minimum of fifty questions in any of the 6,000-plus categories on Answers.com to be eligible.

The Scholarship Fund, administered for Answers.com by The Center for Scholarship Administration, will award scholarships based on answer accuracy and quality as follows: a first-place $5,000 scholarship, two $2,500 scholarships, and ten $1,000 scholarships. The deadline for application submission is March 31, 2010.

Visit Scholarship Answers for further details on the scholarship program, qualifications and the application submission process.

New Stuff from Goal For It

Goalforit, the free online resource to help people set, manage and achieve their goals, came out with two new features recently.

The biggest change is the Habits & Daily Goals Chart, a great way to help you maintain your focus on setting and achieving goals. You can create interactive graphs that showcase your step-by-step progress on practicing the daily habits that help you achieve your goals. You can also set up a points-based reward system to provide additional motivation.

A few of the features include:

• To Do List (new): Users can easily create and keep track of all types of lists, daily tasks and routines so they can get organized, manage priorities and get things done.

• The Chore Chart (for children 4-12). With the Chore Chart, parents can create a custom behavior charts that reward children for doing chores and good behavior. Given the epidemic of childhood obesity; it also makes a great tool for parents that want to create a structured way to make sure their kids are consistently getting more exercise and eating healthier.

• Goal Tracker: A simple to use application that allows users to set specific goals and action plan steps. Great for tracking New Year’s Resolutions.

• Community: Members can share their personal experiences and knowledge and create personal networks consisting of family and/or friends to provide mutual support, motivation, and the opportunity to work together in overcoming challenges and celebrating achievements. All tools on Goalforit can be set to private if the user chooses.

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on Social Media #tg09 #leweb

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah gave an amazingly inspirational talk....on social media and how powerful it can be to mobilize social issues and causes, on passion, on having a voice, on Twitter, on taking action because action is so easy for all of us now with the free and easy-to-use online tools we have at our fingertips.