3 Boston Geniuses Present at ‘Solve for X’, Google’s TED Competitor
Last week Google announced its new ‘Solve for X’ initiative, a “forum” in which some of the world’s top thinkers speak about the nexus between major world problems and breakthrough technology. Solve for X has been compared to the popular TED conference and video series, and kicked off with a small face to face event last week out of which a series of initial videos have been posted.
Among the first batch are three Boston visionaries, whose videos are posted below:
David Berry on efficient nutrition production
About the speaker: David Berry is a Partner at Flagship Ventures and CEO of Essentient. David has MD & PhD degrees and has founded several life science and sustainability ventures.
About the topic: The cow is, to put it mildly, not the most efficient mechanism to turn basic ingredients like CO2, water, and sunlight into calories and nutrition. Soy beans are better, but it is still an extremely inefficient process. What if we could skip many of the intermediate steps and directly convert the basic components of food into calories and nutrition. Such a solution would leap us forward by more than an order of magnitude in our ability to feed the world.
Nicholas Negroponte on learning by themselves
About the speaker: Nicholas Negroponte founded the MIT Media Lab (1980), WiReD Magazine (1990), and One Laptop per Child. Nicholas has recently launched a reading experiment to learn whether poor, remote and primitive kids (5-10 years old) can learn to read on their own with a solar powered, Android tablet suitably loaded with immersive and constructionist material.
About the topic: Few people question that education is the most critical problem for to solve – both in the developed and in the developing worlds. The temptation is to see this as a social engineering questions and not as a technology challenge though. What if you just asserted it was possible for a device to be smart enough, cheap enough, rugged enough, and connected enough that it could be dropped into any village square and could not only teach children how to read, but teach them how to learn and inspire them that learning was fun. What would that take?
Kevin Dowling on stretchable electronics
About the speaker: As VP of R&D at MC10, Kevin Dowling is responsible for driving high-performance stretchable electronics technology into products and applications.
About the topic: Every time we find a way to reduce the size of electronics by a factor of 10, we reinvent what electronics means in our lives and how much more they can be used to solve the world’s problems. At this point, the fragility of electronics has become a bottleneck – the housing to protect the electronics we make is now usually more than 90% of the scale of the device. What would happen if we could break this assumption? We would have to totally rethink medical imaging, wearable computers, ubiquitous computing and so much more.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/02/18/3-boston-geniuses-present-at-solve-for-x-googl...