Chatter about ensuing plans permeates any graduation, though it’s not common for the talk to surround which class projects will receive venture capital funding.
This was a hot topic at the first commencement at Singularity University, a school that is backed by Google, operates on NASA’s Silicon Valley campus and gets its name from futurist and co-founder Ray Kurzweil’s favorite term for our technologically enhanced future.
Founded last year with the idea that rapidly evolving technologies can be harnessed to solve problems like poverty and climate change, Singularity University does not offer a traditional degree — though it is working to get some universities to accept students’ coursework for credits.
More than a graduate school, it resembles an incubator for technological ideas that, at the end of a nine-week program, may turn into actual companies with a humanitarian edge.
Starting in June, students spent three weeks attending lectures by faculty members and visiting luminaries such as Vint Cerf — one of the founding fathers of the Internet — to get a basic grounding in fields ranging from networks and computing systems to artificial intelligence and robotics. After that, they chose one of four subjects to study more closely for three weeks. For the privilege, the 40 members of the initial class paid $25,000 apiece.
Singularity is working bring the cost down, by starting monthly sessions for executives in November. Those will fund scholarships for the summer program, said Peter H. Diamandis, Singularity co-founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation. The school also has been bolstered by $2 million in seed donations, $250,000 of which came from Google.
Despite the cost, there were 1,200 applicants. Executive director Salim Ismail said the next session — which is slated for mid-June 2010 — will include 100 or 120 students, and added that even that expansion may not fulfill…