Watch the live onstage debate with Paul Gilding that followed Peter Diamandis' 2012 TEDTalk >>
Peter Diamandis is the founder and chair of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is simply "to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." By offering a big cash prize for a specific accomplishment, the X Prize stimulates competition and excitement around some of the planet's most important goals. Diamandis is also co-founder and chairman of Singularity University which runs Exponential Technologies Executive and Graduate Student Programs.
Diamandis' background is in space exploration -- before the X Prize, he ran a company that studied low-cost launching technologies and Zero-G which offers the public the chance to train like an astronaut and experience weightlessness. But though the X Prize's first $10 million went to a space-themed challenge, Diamandis' goal now is to extend the prize into health care, social policy, education and many other fields that could use a dose of competitive innovation.
Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Print your own pharmaceutical factory. As part of an ongoing quest to make pharmaceuticals easier to manufacture, chemist Lee Cronin and his team at the University of Glasgow have designed a way to 3D-print a portable “factory” for the complicated and multi-step chemical reactions needed to create useful drugs. […]
Continue readingAs usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are in […]
Continue readingToday at TED2016 in Vancouver, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize joined Dave Kenny of IBM Watson to announce a thrilling new prize in cognitive computing: The IBM Watson AI X Prize presented by TED, a $5 million competition to develop and demonstrate a powerful collaboration between human and artificial intelligence. The winner of this competition […]
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