Rotating buildings, petrofuel, and ICT in Africa – Day 2 of the World Technology Summit

Here are my notes from Day 2 of the World Technology Summit. I’ve been hangin’ with Dr. John Nash, my colleague at ISU. Today we learned about India’s Barefoot College (impressive!), Microsoft’s vision for the future, rotating buildings, petrofuel, ICT in Africa, and much more.

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Bunker Roy, The Barefoot College

150 barefoot professionals reach over 70,000 people in 110 villages within a 150-mile radius

225 night schools in 6 states are attended by 7,000 children (5,500 girls) that can’t attend during the day – school is lit by solar lanterns and run by the children

Solar-powered campus – first solar-powered desalination plant in India – has extended its solar electrification work beyond India (e.g., 27 women in Afghanistan have solar electrified 100 of their villages)

The cost of solar electrifying 5 villages in Afghanistan is the cost of one UN consultant sitting in Kabul for 1 year

Have electrified a number of villages in Africa – men in Africa are untrainable – focus on women, particularly grandmothers

Disposable, hidden, unobtrusive, personalized health devices

Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College, London

Sensium digital patch / BandAid – sits on chest and wirelessly monitors health signs 24-7 (e.g., for Type 2 diabetes) – can send signals to doctor – replaces tethered monitors

Wireless silicon pancreas chip helps monitor glucose – therapy and diagnosis functions are combined

Have figured out how to turn on/off semiconductors with DNA – trying to replace big DNA sequencers with small lab-on-a-chip

Micro-crops (algae, angiosperms, cyanobacter, diatoms, etc.) are grown and turned into renewable, green fuel for cars, etc.

125x more productive than macro-crops (corn, soy, rapeseed, etc.)

98% of water is recycled – can use gray or brackish water – doesn’t even need clean, drinking-quality water

Micro-crops absorb twice their weight in carbon dioxide – can be placed next to carbon dioxide-emitting factories

Physics combined with biochemistry – its light-management techniques are what put PetroAlgae ahead of competitors

Micro-crops are the only economically viable answer to the biofuels feedstock problem – protein meal byproduct adds to the food supply

Does not compete with the food supply, does not produce any toxic waste

Large-scale open bioreactors – 4,700 to 6,000 gallons per acre per year – product can be run through existing petroleum refineries and pipelines – this green diesel system uses same infrastructure as current gasoline-based system – functions as a ‘drop-in’ replacement for fossil fuels

1 unit (5,000 hectares) produces ~75 million gallons of biofuel / year AND 140,000 tons of protein meal / year (the latter alone offsets the biofuel production costs)

In charge of articulating Microsoft’s collective long-term vision both internally and externally – a fine balance between dreaming and plausible

Microsoft’s video, A Glimpse Ahead, shows its future vision and embeds a number of principles, including natural user interfaces, mobile technologies, etc. 

Buildings generate own energy, plus energy for other surrounding buildings – wind and solar

Costs and construction time are lower than traditional building processes

Core tower surrounded by rotating floors, which are built with modular components

Drive car into core tower, elevator takes car up to your floor, floors can contain garages, swimming pools, etc.

Harnessing RNA interference (RNAi) technology – potential for a whole new class of drugs that achieve therapeutic ‘gene silencing’

There are a number of ‘undruggable’ targets that might be addressed using RNAi

Genomic medicine opens up a whole new class of possibilities

Clinical trials have been published in a number of top medical and scientific journals

Every country in the world starts buying automobiles like crazy when average income hits $10K/year – China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and Russia are about to hit that threshold

Imagine 2 directions in which the trend could go, and write a newspaper headline for each – avoid a simplistic utopia/dystopia approach

GROUP 4: The evolution of learning

Speed of access to learning materials is much faster

We scan, find, and access information differently than before

More likely to find exactly what you want – also leads to self-selection of learning

Are we losing social interactions (or are they just changing)

Are we losing opportunity to be exposed to disparate opinions

Does it facilitate access to education by everyone

Learning will become even more powerful as mobile devices become more prevalent

Principles and process are more important than discrete facts

Current Internet can’t handle tactile / sensory information

Current text-based Internet still doesn’t work for many students

Are we seeing the emergence of a post-literate society?

Geography and time are no longer barriers to learning?

What does the role of a teacher mean in a computer-aided environment? Choreographers / facilitators / mentors instead of knowledge suppliers?

Greater individualization of learning is possible

Strength in diversity or latent costs that accompany the nichification of learning?

Is there still a place for face-to-face interactions, learning environments?

Is virtualization of learning more good than bad?

Who controls these learning environments (if anybody)?

Internal motivation to learn becomes more important?

HEADLINE 1: Barefoot College surpasses MIT in Engineering graduates

HEADLINE 2: Server farm failure erases all of human history

Other generated headlines

Continued turmoil in online education leads to more students living with parents past age 30

Be careful what you wish for: last traditional school (or textbook publisher) closes its doors

All printed materials now obsolete

SmellTube & haptic interfaces revolutionize the Internet experience

The cyberwar between evolutionists and creationists continues to rage

Learn what you need for your career in 6 months

Over last decade, there has been an ICT revolution on the African continent

Between 1995 and 2005, over $25 billion was invested in ICT in Sub-Saharan Africa

African mobile phone companies are regional and, sometimes, global players – leaders in innovation and entrepeneurship

Africa is fastest-growing mobile phone company in world

Working on a national fiber backbone to facilitate broadband access to corporations and individuals

Electronic records system to deliver social, health, and education services

National databases to help combat HIV/AIDS and target appropriate medical services

Nationwide food stocks database / marketplace that can be accessed by individuals’ mobile phones

Digital content from world’s leading universities now available to Rwandan schools, universities

Rwandan economy grew at 11.2% last year; wages have increased as much as 30% each of the past 8 years?

The future of Rwanda is dependent on its investments in technology and children

Presentation panel

Jessi Hempel, Writer, Fortune magazine

John Borthwick, CEO, betaworks (Summize, bit.ly, TweetDeck)

Brad Burnham, Partner, Union Square Ventures

Patrick Keane, CEO, Associated Content

Associated Content: where folks can put their content and get compensated for it – a content monetization engine (makes money through ads, companies that pay to have content created for them) – has over 250,000 content contributors

Twitter, for example, represents not only the atomization of content (140 characters) but also the atomization of distribution (inviduals rather than large organizations)

The problem is not the production of content but the filtering of content – people now relying on others that they trust, rather than big companies, to provide much of their information

The Internet is a medium of cannibalization

The light bulb of tomorrow is not a lightbulb – microplasma is a planar light source

The problem with compact fluorescents (CFLs) is that they contain mercury

Embedded lighting – floors, walls, windows, surfaces, furniture, ceilings – all will be able to contain lighting

Very thin (2 to 3mm) – currently 4x as energy-efficient as CFLs (even greater efficiency is expected soon) – can be molded into different shapes

Surface brightness 10x greater than OLED

Lighting market: US = $15 billion, global = $75 billion

Photo credits

New York City traffic

Radio City Music Hall

Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda