Future Positive

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.org

http://xprize.org 

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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.org

http://xprize.org

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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.org

www.spaceil.com

www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar

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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

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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

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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

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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.org

http://avatar.xprize.org

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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.org

http://ai.xprize.org 

https://aiforgood.itu.int    

https://iris.ai

https://amandapalmer.net/  

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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/blog

Perseverance Rover Landing

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/videos/?v=461

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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 

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