Future Positive

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.org

Alchemizing Sky Tours Tweet

https://twitter.com/duncantrussell/status/1358948891169861639  

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast

http://www.duncantrussell.com/episodes

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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

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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 Good

https://www.xprize.org/AIforgood 

Elektra Labs 

https://www.elektralabs.com/

Time Study Inc.

https://www.timestudy.co/ 

Women @ The Table

https://www.womenatthetable.net/ 

Clue

https://helloclue.com/ 

https://xprize.org/blog

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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. 

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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

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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

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AI 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

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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 at AI for Good, a global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, 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.

Links:

xprize.org/blog

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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

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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 recorded at AI for Good, a global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, 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

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