Introduction
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the c3d three weeks ago so it's still brand-new it's got that new design smell
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on it so you should go check it out before we get going tonight I just we're
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not going to ask you to kind of give me a second to I and just ask you to take a
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moment of silence and reflection for the victims of the and the families of the
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17 killed and always 14 injured in yesterday's latest and worst school shooting this time at Marjory Stoneman
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Douglas High School in parkland Florida so I just like to have a moment of silence and reflection for them
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I appreciate it thank you it's a it's very exciting to be able to gather with
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folks who are choosing to come out and gather together in a moment of celebration and and to learn something
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which i think is wonderful tonight it's my distinct pleasure to welcome you all to the second event of the 2018 UWF how
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Marcus college a science ninja Engineering's great minds distinguished lecture series tonight's esteemed speaker is dr. Joe
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dica Vermont dr. Vermont is the senior director for prise operations for the shell ocean
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Discovery XPrize competition which is part of the XPrize planet and environment division as you're gonna
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hear tonight XPrize describes our competitions as a highly leveraged incentivize prize competitions that
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pushes the limit of what's possible to change the world for the better the show ocean Discovery XPrize is one of several
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active competitions launched to pursue bold and audacious goals that advanced
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technological innovations in science education and Health past XPrize
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competitions include the Northrop Grumman lunar lander X challenge the progressive automatic automotive x prize
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and the Wendy Schmidt ocean health XPrize for which dr. Ramani was the director of technical operations the
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show ocean Discovery XPrize is one of several ongoing XPrize competitions it was established to engage research teams
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to design and build new remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles capable of exploring
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the deep ocean floor to develop ocean floor maps and provide images of biological archaeological and geological
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features currently the show ocean Discovery XPrize competition includes 19
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international teams from across Europe Asia Africa and North America before
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joining XPrize in 2014 dr. Ramani served as the associate director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography and as a
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senior scientist at the UK Met Office and as the executive director of the Florida coastal ocean observing systems
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consortium def goos shared a PhD in physical oceanography from the University of South Florida and MS and
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marine environmental science from SUNY Stony Brook and a BSC in physics from Imperial College London
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dr. Ramani is an associate of the Royal College of Science and a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and asked
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you to all join me in welcoming her to our stage tonight thank you very much [Applause]
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thank you man right gotta dodge the dodgy one here so
What is XPRIZE
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thank you all for coming out tonight and it's it's a thrill to be here back in
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Florida and in Pensacola so I'm going to talk about incentivizing technology
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development globally and so as as matt said i'm the i'm a senior director i'm
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the senior director for the planet and environment domain XPrize so i have to say that may be the best job title i'm
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ever going to have senior director of the planet and environment I think the only step up is like I know
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intergalactic Overlord of the universe or something but let me see oh here we
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go so for those of you who are not familiar with XPrize we're a nonprofit
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organization and we're based in Los Angeles and we run large-scale competitions multi-million dollar global
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competitions to incentivize technology development and through those competitions we inspire the belief that
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we can create a better future and we and our prizes they as I said the main the
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means of doing this is through competitions and prizes and our prizes Drive radical breakthroughs that are for
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the benefit of humanity but before I delve into those prizes I just want to take a few steps back to about 150,000
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years ago so for most of our history as humans we've evolved in a local and
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linear world you walked to to the next village you knew about a hundred people
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or less those who were in the community that you lived in it was a very slow steady pace of life but as you're all
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well aware we live in an exponential and global world if you look on anyone's social-media
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page there's probably a few hundred people that they know you can go from one place to another across the planet
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in almost next to no time and so things are evolving really quickly and it's
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evolving on an exponential scale so what does exponential mean so exponential
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growth looks different from linear growth if you were to take 30 linear
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paces you'd walk around 30 meters also however I don't know how many if if you
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know how many paces how far you would travel if you took 30 exponential paces does anyone know and anyone who was here
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when I was going through the slides earlier is not allowed to say anything you would actually go 26 times around
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the world so each so by exponential you're essentially doubling the distance that
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you travel in the previous step okay so that's how fat that's the rate of change the technology is also working on so to
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give you some examples data storage so in 1956 for data storage five megabyte
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drive would require a forklift and an aeroplane to move it would cost 120
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thousand dollars chump change for some I'm sure in London the 1950s interestingly enough that five megabyte
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drive would hold six of those photographs so that's what storage capacity had in the 1950s and now you
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fast forward to 2016 you can get you could get 128 gigabyte drive for $40 and
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in 2017 I bought a two terabyte drive
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for around $100 so that's how fast the change is happening it's not linear it's
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exponential so let's look at another example let's look at computers okay so currently your average laptop or so
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operates at around 10 to the 11 calculations per second which is around the mouse the speed that a mouse's brain
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works the projection is that if you look at this exponential curve in
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15 years your avenues laptop will operate around 10 to the 16 calculations per second
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that's the speed of a human brain add another 25 years to that and you're
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looking at 10 to the 26 calculations per second that's the brains of all the humans on the planet that's how fast the
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computer power will be at your fingertips so this is a really big shift we're in this technology shift that
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we're in it's a really interesting time in human in our history basically to be
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here so where does this kind of change apply so it's applying in the areas of
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sensor technology they're changing a very rapid pace artificial intelligence
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and I know many of you at the University of Florida are working in this arena actually robotics synthetic biology
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virtual reality have any of you had a chance to try virtual reality goggles or
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that experience I see a handful under - amazing what you see through those
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goggles versus a two-dimensional photograph is like night and day it's incredible 3d printing so there's a
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whole host of areas where technology is changing on a very rapid scale and so
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what we do XPrize and what the technology competitions are designed for are really to pull these in two
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different arenas and to do that through prize competitions and so through doing
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that the goal our massively transformative purpose XPrize is to build a bridge to abundance for all so
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by making technology more accessible cheaper you allow more people to participate so now I want to take a step
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back and talk about prize competitions and why do we use prizes that's our main mechanism of doing this okay so everyone
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is familiar with prizes as children you go for gold stars or the blue ribbon as
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adults if you're watching the Olympics for example we're rooting for those
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athletes we thrill when they win an award and we if it's the team you're supporting then
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you know you may go and have an extra beer if they don't win the award or the prize surprises and competitions and
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we're not strangers to those it's part of human psychology when prizes for technology development
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have been around for a long time so going back to the 1700s the British
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government launched the longitude prize and this was because they were the ships that they had the sailing vessels of the
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time were crashing into islands and rocks because they had no way of knowing
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the longitude and back then of course astronomy was an astronomical type of
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the the navigation was an astronomical means that's how you worked out where
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you were so of course all the astronomers of the day figured out that this would be an astronomy problem so
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the British government put up what would now be 4.2 million dollars the equivalent off and and it was actually
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let me go back a second it was actually won by a clockmaker not an astronomer in
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rural England his name was John Harrison it took him almost all of his life to
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convince the people running the competition that he'd actually won but he invented the marine chronometer he
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finally got his money I think it took in 50 years he got his money two years before he died but he did get it but he
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most of all he's best known for having invented the marine chronometer which has led to navigation as we know it
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today so so that was a prize moving forward in history in 1795 Napoleon
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needed to get food to his troops on the front lines right so he put up prize
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money and this was for food preservation and again this this was won by a
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Parisian a candymaker Nicolas a pair who invented the process
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of canning so the reason we have cans today is because of a prize competition and so a pair is considered the father
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of canning at the canning process moving forward again to the 1900s the early
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1900 it's again it was a French hotelier this time who lived in New York who wanted to
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get back to France faster than the sailing vessels of the day which would take about a week
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Raymond Orteig so and I know we have a French gentleman in the audience I apologize for any mispronunciation of
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the names here but the Raymond Orteig put up $25,000 back in the early 1900s
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which is the equivalent of two hundred ninety thousand dollars in 2006 and that
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was for the first person who could fly across the Atlantic it was launched it
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was established in 1919 it was finally won in 1926 six people died in the attempt to win
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this prize and it was finally won in 1926 by an unknown maverick pilot from
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the US does anyone know his name yeah Charles Lindbergh so Limburg won that he
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won it by getting rid of one of his engines and making the plane as light as he possibly could basically on the
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premise that if he was gonna die I was going to die and there's no point having an extra engine so he won it it made him
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a household name but beyond that what it did was kickstart the private aviation
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industry so the reason I'm here today because I flew in from Los Angeles's
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because of a prize the reason we have a private airline industry at all is is this is what kick-started it and he flew
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on the spirit of st. Louis and in competing for that prize team spent over
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$400,000 so within 18 months passenger traffic increased again it really kick-started
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that private aviation industry number of aircrafts increased aviation stock
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soared so that was the impact from that competition so that brings us to the
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modern era so our founder Peter Diamandis grew up watching Star Trek and he always wanted
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to go into space but of course space travel and going to space was the purview of government agencies such as
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NASA and so his friend gave him the book the spirit Louis he read the book and he thought
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well if this kick-started the private speed aircraft industry why can't I kick-start the private spaceflight
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industry and so in 1996 he launched the Ansari X PRIZE and that was for private
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spaceflight the goal there it was a ten million dollar prize purse the goal
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there was to have a fully privately funded spacecraft that could launch
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three people to 100 kilometers twice in two weeks and the reason that it's three
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people is because it was looking forward at the market a pilot a co-pilot and a
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paying passenger so that was the goal there it took eight years for someone to
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win this competition so in 2004 it was finally won and so they won the ten
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million dollars but what that what this competition has done has opened private
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spaceflight so now it's in excess of three billion dollars so from 2004 to
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2008 een in 14 years we now have a private spaceflight industry and I'm
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sure you all know you know Elon Musk's latest achievement SpaceX's latest achievement last week so
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the significance of this is huge of course it's hanging if you go to the
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Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington is hanging next to the spirit of st. Louis and you know you've made it
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when you're a Google Doodle obviously so so it was it was a good it was a good
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competition but that's also the competition that launched XPrize I think
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I've covered covered this so I'm going to move on so XPrize we we've currently
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awarded thirty four million dollars in competitions not just in the space arena
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but Anne and Matt alluded to some of these the Progressive Automotive XPrize
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we've had the Northrop Grumman lunar lander challenge which I'm going to talk
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a little bit more about the Wendy Schmidt oil cleanup Nokia sensing
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Oshin health and tricorder and these all cover different arenas so it's not just
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space we also have had prizes in the past on automotive industry we've had
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them on environment we've had them on medicine or medical issues we currently
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have 57 million dollars in active prize competitions the one I'm currently
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running is the Shell ocean Discovery XPrize which is a 7 million dollar competition which I'll talk about more
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in a little while but we have prizes in education we have the NRG Casilla Carbon
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XPrize that I'll mention we have an IBM Watson artificial intelligence XPrize a
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woman's safety XPrize so technology for women to address safety around the world
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for them and then also water abundance so can we get clean drinking water for
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everyone on this planet so just to look at some of the prizes that we've
Progressive Automotive XPRIZE
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launched in the past and have awarded so the Progressive Automotive XPrize was a 10 million dollar competition I think it
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was launched around 2008 right on the cusp of when fuel efficiency was being
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discussed for cars or always was on the rise there and the idea there was for a hundred mile per gallon equivalent cars
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so there 136 teams from 11 countries that competed to that for this
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competition and it was war awarded in 2010 September of 2010 and I think some
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of the technologies that emerge from this are being used in some of the more fuel-efficient cars that we see on the
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roads today the Qualcomm tricorder X Prize so who here is a Star Trek fan oh
Qualcommtricorder XPRIZE
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good there's a number great so you all know what a tricorder is for everyone
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else tricorder is essentially a handheld device from Star Trek that you can use
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to scan over someone and it will tell you a number of different what's wrong with them disease states and what's
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wrong with them if they've a broken bone etc so the Qualcomm tricorder X PRIZE is
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actually the development of that technology so something that's ultimately handheld that you can scan
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and you'll be able to with Oh contact say what's wrong with the person so this was awarded in April of
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last year so 2017 the the winning
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technologies are around this big right now and there is like you have to put
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little like little pads on your hands and things so it's not totally non-contact at the moment but that's the
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prototype you can take it home it will detect a number of different disease states and I don't mean just take your
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temperature and pressure but if you've had a stroke if you have diabetes just
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just a whole host of things those technologies are under further development but if you imagine back or
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think back to when telephones were big devices on the wall and now we all have them in our pockets this is the future
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of this technology right now it's a it's about this big but in the future I'm
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expecting something about this big that will say whether you've had a stroke or whether you don't need to go and see a
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doctor so that's the Qualcomm tricorder X PRIZE which i think is very exciting
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the Wendy Schmidt oil cleanup egg challenge this was a 1.4 million dollar
Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup Egg Challenge
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prize purse this was following the spill in the Gulf of Mexico that you're all more than aware of and this was in
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recognition that the technology that was used to clean up that oil spill in 2010 was the same that was used for Exxon
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Valdez they'd been Ord really since since that time so Wendy Schmidt who's
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the funder of this prize and Peter got together and you know discussed the situation and they put up this prize and
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it was a very short this is our shortest X Prize at 15 months so at 15 months the
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bar the XPrize set which was for cleaning up the oil three times faster and 75% oil to water separation that bar
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was met and exceeded by ten technologies so in 15 months you went from something
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that was not at that level to we have ten of those amongst those were a tattoo
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parlor artist from Las Vegas yes so so amongst those 10 final teams
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that exceeded that minimum bar the XPrize had set you have a diversity of
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people this tattoo parlor artist from Vegas my what I've heard is he was
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tattooing a businessman engineer and they were lamenting over the auspi land
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they'd heard about this and he had an idea I assume it's based on oil from skin
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kind of cleanup so they developed it built a prototype tested it in the bathtub built a full-scale version and
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they made it to the finals we also had a fisherman from Alaska who went on the
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premise that if I can catch small fish I can catch oil he has a very great oil to
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water separation so so the ideas can come from anywhere that's the point of these competitions it doesn't have to be
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through people who know that industry inside out if you have an idea you can
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go for it I joined XPrize with this competition the Wendy Schmidt ocean health XPrize is
XPRIZE Ocean Health
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which I was technical director for this was a two million dollar competition to develop ocean sensors to detect ocean
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acidification so we know that the climate is changing we know it's changing the ocean but we didn't have
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the pH sensor technology that you could leave in the deep sea or that could
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profile a very high resolution in the ocean and also along the coast so this
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was a - this was split into two prizes a 1 million dollars for the most accurate
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sensor and 1 million dollars for the most affordable sensor that reached a certain level of accuracy the same team
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entered two different entries - both of those parts and one so the same team won
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one and a half million dollars that team is from Montana which is not known these
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days for its ocean environment but what that did was showcase to the people of
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Montana that there is an ocean out there and that you can make money from it so so that was a great you know
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outcome of this competition however also in this competition we had University
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students and I know there might be one or two here so this is mostly as
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encouragement for you so these guys were from Duke University Electrical Engineering mechanical engineering and I
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think others in the team were computer sciences as well as oceanography so they
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all got together they entered they got to the semi-finals and they were undergraduates following
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this the gentlemen there on the left has gone towards hold to do a PhD in ocean
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engineering so that's the University students we actually also had a high school student team who also made it to
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the semi-finals their mum was their manager serve the mum manager it was Jack and his friends
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from high school as well as his family so that the siblings down the line there all took part in this competition all of
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these students got to meet the world's experts in ocean acidification they got
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to travel around they took part in this global competition so it really added to
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that and Jack and his colleagues have gone on to Stanford University and to
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other other universities and we've written you know letters for them to assist them by the way their device
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looked like a 1950s Raygun because they basically potted it in epoxy so they put
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all the electronics in epoxy and it was it was fun this this shot is also from
XPRIZE Winners
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the ocean health XPrize it's the finals we were out for six days off Hawaii testing these entries so what you see
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here is a device that collects water at different depths there rosette and then you have the five and finalist entries
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that that don't look so circular mounted on this so that we could measure the
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exact pH in a lab and compare it to what the entries had one of the second-place
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winners they won two hundred and fifty thousand dollars they gave their money away to an ocean observing program to
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make sure that they were going Herbal pH sensors out there on the Argo program the other second-place winner
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the day of the award they were walking around New York City wondering where they were going to get the funding to
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continue the company that they had set up to do this because they were a startup company because they were pretty
25:44
sure they hadn't won so it was a nice surprise for them and they've continued as a as a company so in addition to the
Global Learning XPRIZE
25:54
ocean prizes currently I'm going to talk about some of our more active current prices now the Global Learning XPrize
26:01
this was actually partially funded by Elon Musk but this is for the development of software on tablets to
26:08
allow children to self learn reading writing and arithmetic so there's around 250 million children
26:15
around the world that have no access to schools or teachers or adults who can help them so this is being tested right
26:23
now in Tanzania the idea here is if you can raise the education level of
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children in a community you've raised the community and by raising the community education level you'd
26:35
eliminate a number of other societal problems so this is currently under test phase we have the Barbara Bush
Adult Literacy XPRIZE
26:42
Foundation adult literacy XPrize and this is for a similar kind of thing for
26:48
teaching adults in the u.s. to learn to read and write so these are people
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who've come here they have a family they're holding down three jobs each someone who is so exhausted at the end
27:00
of the day to take up something else and to learn to read and write especially
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when their children are reading and writing ahead of them so that's what this is addressing the Carbon XPrize
Carbon XPRIZE
27:13
this is the NRG Co Co carbon XPrize this is - again looking at the climate issues
27:20
and the increasing co2 in our atmosphere is while we work out our Energy and
27:26
Climate future we need to take some action now so this is to extract carbon
27:31
dioxide from the atmosphere at power plants in the flu and to convert it into
27:37
an economically valuable product so the idea though is you're essentially
27:43
showing the some of this point-source largest polluters that you're throwing
27:48
money away so make it into something of value and then and then we come to the shallow
Deep Sea Discovery XPRIZE
27:54
ocean Discovery XPrize which is where I sit and and this is what I run so as I
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said it's a seven million dollar competition six million dollars is the main
28:04
competition for mapping and imaging the deep-sea one million dollars is from
28:10
NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and this is for something that we're nicknaming a
28:15
smart sniffer so something they can autonomously detect a biological or chemical signal
28:21
underwater and then track it to its source with no human intervention so it's an it's smart sniffer it's a
28:30
three year competition we launched it in December of 2015 so we're going to
28:35
conclude towards the end of this year or early next year and and the other big thing that we have pushed on this is
28:43
there's no ships no humans at sea it's all robotics as all autonomous the
28:48
reason being that one of the reasons we do not have a good map of our seafloor is because it's super expensive to take
28:54
ships out to sea to map the seafloor it can cost 120,000 dollars a day and if
29:00
you're sailing for 10 days before you start mapping you've already dropped a ton of money right
29:07
so we're removing the need for ships so all of these have to go from the shore whether it's by drone or on the sea
29:15
surface or underwater so we're really pushing on that autonomy front so I want
Ocean Discovery XPRIZE
29:21
to play a short video for you which will explain this a little better than I just
29:26
did there I'm sure and this is something that we created when we were recruiting
29:33
teams for this competition unnatural explorers we can't help
29:38
ourselves whether it's new world to cross treacherous landscapes or planets and galaxies beyond our imagination the
29:46
unknown calls to us and we are driven to discover what's out there but in all of our centuries of exploring
29:52
we've barely scratched the surface of one of the most fascinating places in the universe
29:57
Oshin it covers two-thirds of our planet yet since the dawn of time we've only
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explored 5% of it crushing pressures extreme temperatures
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and all-consuming darkness make exploration nearly impossible the ocean remains the greatest mystery
30:15
on earth what's going on down there what discoveries await us what new and
30:22
fascinating forms of life will we find the seven million dollar shell ocean
30:28
Discovery XPrize is a global competition challenging teams that push the boundaries of existing ocean
30:33
technologies and create safer faster and affordable ways of exploring the deep sea this includes a 1 million dollar
30:40
bonus funded by NOAA for breakthroughs and chemical and biological sensors by
30:46
harnessing the power of autonomous underwater robotics teams will eliminate the deep with high resolution mapping
30:52
and advanced imaging systems on a scale never seen before the answers to some of
30:58
humanity's oldest questions or the cures to our most deadly diseases could be waiting to be discovered
31:05
imagine a future in which our ocean is healthy valued and understood be part of
31:11
the discovery form a team or follow the competition online the shell motion
31:17
discovery XPrize getting to the bottom of our ocean find out more at ocean
31:23
discovery XPrize org so that was a video
31:29
we developed during team recruitment as I said we're much further along but some
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of the impacts that we want from this competition are to accelerate the technology so if we use state-of-the-art
31:40
technology today that's existence today to map the seafloor a very high
31:46
resolution would cost around three billion dollars and would take around six hundred years what we're aiming for
31:54
is to have a high-resolution map by 2030 using some of this technology so that's
32:00
a huge push forward there we want to catalyze new markets so right now the
32:06
deep sea is for those who can afford to go out there but by removing ships you
32:11
now open it up for others so deep sea environmental management deep sea conservation or deep sea ecotourism for
32:18
example and then we another impact is to inspire the public and this is because
32:25
it is an alien planet it's four kilometres away but it's an alien planet there are aliens down there they've got
32:32
eight legs they glow in the dark they conduct electricity they do all sorts of weird things change color and camouflage
32:39
themselves and cetera so the ocean is an amazing place there's a but it is an alien planet and so through that we want
32:46
to inspire the public because that's what they are with space so why can't we try doing that with oceans so starting
32:55
on that track our marketing department made a series of these posters just to
33:01
tap into that whole idea and as I said so the prize will not will we will award
33:09
around enter this year early next year hopefully when we launch an award a
33:14
prize the day of the award the final award is towards the beginning because that's just the prototype
33:20
development stage and so beyond that if you have a little more time our goal is 10 years after that we will
33:27
like I said by around 2030 half a sea floor high-resolution seafloor map and
33:33
just to give you an example of how little we know this and I mentioned this earlier today in conversations when they
33:41
weren't looking for the Malaysian airline they didn't find the airline in fact there's a new mission out right now
33:46
looking for it they found two new volcanoes instead amongst a whole bunch of other things
33:51
one of which is bigger than Mount Vesuvius so this is how little we know our own planet we live here we don't
33:59
know it so where are we in this timeline we're actually about halfway through
34:05
maybe a bit more than halfway through we are about to announce in March the
34:11
finalist teams we've had quite a journey to get to this point actually but let me
34:17
let me go back to last February February of 2017 we announced 1975 list teams
34:25
that Matt mentioned they are from all over the world the team members come
34:31
from 25 countries there are over 350 brains working on solving this problem
34:37
at this point from around the world 170 of those are students from middle school
34:43
to PhD they're all students and by the way I should just point out I don't know
34:49
which the clicker the pointer is here ha so actually so this is from Duke University their approach is to use a
34:55
drone to carry the pods out to the deep sea to drop down deploy the pods to map
35:02
the seafloor so that's a much easier faster mechanism of transport this group
35:08
is from Japan they have a number of autonomous underwater vehicles this
35:14
group is from Portugal very similar this group is the Jeb Co NF alumni team
35:21
they're an international team that are affiliated with Nippon foundation this
35:28
is a team from Northern California there are you esteem middle school students they
35:34
actually have had technology on the International Space Station so this school has anyway so so they're very
35:40
excited and then this team is from Germany and just just for your benefit
35:46
their name is Argonauts and I just found out today that the University of West Florida has Argonauts team so if you're
35:53
going to root for a team I guess this would be it the German team but yeah so
Autonomous Vehicles
36:00
here are some of the some of the technologies we have autonomous vehicles
36:06
we have novel designs on the surface platform carriers to carry these
36:11
vehicles out to sea as I mentioned we have drones we have these are small
36:18
maybe 2030 centimeters they're like marine bees using cell phone technology
36:24
and then we have different ways of mapping the seafloor the traditional way
36:29
is to do a lawnmower type pattern to do the map but teams have actually come up
36:36
with other ways of mapping the seafloor so we'll see if that's more efficient so
Round 1 Testing
36:43
let me talk a little bit about this composition so our round one of testing was going to be in Puerto Rico from
36:50
September to December of last year as you know there were a couple of hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and so
36:57
we had to do a rather large pivot given the scale of an XPrize this was quite an
37:04
undertaking so what we had already set up was we had a very high-resolution
37:09
baseline map the teams were going to come to us in Puerto Rico they were going to map the same area the judges
37:16
would compare the great map we had to the maps the teams produced and then
37:21
we'd know who would move forward instead we had to take a step back and we have
37:27
now just completed testing all the teams for their technology readiness level so there are a number of different criteria
37:34
that the judging panel are looking for regarding their technology so instead of
37:39
the teams coming to us we ended up going to them I've been on the road since just before thanks
37:44
giving up into 11 different countries back and forth Norway India Germany you
37:52
name it to test these teams and we're just wrapping up the judging process so
37:59
in March we will be announcing who the finalists are so this talk had been
38:04
slightly later on may even have enough to tell you who the finalists are but but we're still working through that
38:09
stage so so stay tuned for that and that's coming soon to to hopefully a
XPRIZE Ocean Initiative
38:18
newspaper or radio station or something near you I also want to mention the X
38:24
PRIZE ocean initiative so this is a commitment that XPrize made to launch a
38:30
series of ocean x prizes and the idea is collectively that they would address our
38:37
vision for the oceans which is for a healthy valued and understood ocean and
38:43
the reason it's in that order is because in order to make something healthy you have to value it and to value it you
38:51
need to understand it so the shell ocean Discovery XPrize in a way is a core piece of that is the understanding when
38:58
you land in a foreign place or go somewhere else the first thing you do is look at a map it's a core element of
39:04
understanding where you are in the world so we've had three competitions already
39:10
as I've mentioned the oil clean up the ocean health and ocean discovery we're
39:15
looking at what should be the next two and as I said our overall goal is for
39:21
healthy valued and understood oceans in addition to the competitions of the
39:27
technology development we actually ran a side competition with our sister company here o X for mobile app development
39:35
using ocean data so this came out of the ocean health XPrize we recognized you know if you have more sensors out there
39:41
you can have more data but what do you do with all that data so one thing we
39:46
wanted to do was have apps that turn ocean data into products and services that anyone can use so we just more or
39:55
less wrapped up on this competition it was hundred thousand dollars in a number of different areas for app development over
40:03
there is listed a few of the finalists that were on the App Store it ranges from visualizing ocean acidification to
40:11
looking at and looking at using your phone and being able to see what the bathymetry is like so if you remove the
40:18
water what does the landform look like underneath the water so there's a whole
40:23
host of different things and part of this again goes back and ties it to that business piece of this right so we are
40:30
always also looking at the business side of this because that's the economy is part of what drives things and so in the
40:37
next five years apps are going to be worth was at six point three trillion dollars which is up 1.3 trillion from
40:44
last year so this is a big business the app development portion and so this is why you know we kind of focused on this
Disaster Prediction
40:53
but looking at other prizes we are hoping this year to start work on a
40:59
disaster prediction whether it's in earthquakes or hurricanes can we improve
41:05
potentially and this is just for example just to get you all thinking can we improve the lead time on prediction by
41:11
10 so if you have a one minute earthquake warning can it be a 10 minute if you have a one-day hurricane warning
41:18
can it be 10 days so can we improve disaster prediction by 10 that's that would be my vision I don't know what's
41:24
actually going to happen with this but I would like to have a disaster prediction XPrize another competition that we may
41:32
be doing some initial work on is how will we nourish 9 billion people by 2050
41:39
population isn't is growing so that that's another area of potential
41:44
interest of course everyone's heard a lot about ocean plastics to us it's not
41:51
so much about the cleanup side which is crucial but stopping it getting in there
41:56
in the first place as you increase the population you're going to increase the waste and so you need to put a stem to
42:04
that to stop it getting in in the first place looking outside the ocean realm can
42:10
machines help the elderly lead better lives and I think I the tour that I was
42:16
given earlier today at the University of West Florida touches upon this kind of thing can nanobot search-and-destroy HIV
42:24
cells or any other kind of cell for example another another potential
42:30
example is we may have under development soon an ALS XPrize so an Ironman XPrize
ALS XPrize
42:37
so for people who have ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease where the brain is still active but the body is giving up
42:46
can we develop an exoskeleton suit that will integrate a number of different
42:51
technologies to allow them to have better lives and then the progression from there is for those who've had accidents or for the elderly I
42:59
personally would like cancer XPrize so something so one of the issues for
43:05
cancer is that you you can cure 99% of
43:11
cancers if you can catch them early enough the problem is catching them early enough right in some parts of the
43:17
world there are no facilities and other parts it takes weeks to get results you
43:23
have to go into a hospital use big clunky machines the results are not always accurate in the future wouldn't
43:29
it be great if you had something as simple as a mouthwash you use it every day it's cheap
43:35
it could change color it tells you to go see a doctor so you can catch something early enough so there are some really
43:42
great things that I think you know technology and advances can assist us
43:47
with so I'm going to leave you with this what do you prize so you can all think
43:54
about what what would you have for to tackle if you had an opportunity and
44:00
with that I'd like to thank you all thank you
Questions
44:08
and I'll take any questions if anyone has any yeah we have a mic for folks who
44:14
might be interested in asking a question
44:20
just a bit about the mechanism did the teams submit proposals and then you fund
44:27
them at intermediate stages the teams are all actually self funded so there
44:33
are different ways they get funding some get sponsorship of course some get funded by their eight their entity some
44:41
actually the height the high school student team in ocean health crowdfunded their competition funds and one of the
44:49
other teams gave $1000 to them through that crowd funding mechanism right to
44:54
encourage the kids to to participate so there are different mechanisms for forgetting funding you can go if you
45:02
have a great idea you know go to investors who there are people who will
45:07
back this kind of stuff so because you know you're there for the tea you're there representing your hometown or your
45:15
country or whatever the thing might be so the teams fund themselves the team's
45:21
own their own intellectual property so at the end of the day if they want to set up their business if they want to
45:28
put in a garage if they want to sell it to someone else that's their prerogative whatever they want to do and we find a
45:38
lot of them set up their own business so from a competition we will get five or six companies that emerge so it really
45:46
creates this field where there was very few companies and you could only buy the
45:52
very expensive thirty thousand dollar machine from that one place because it's such a small market too there is no
45:59
competition and competition actually becomes healthy then in the marketplace thank you as folks are thinking about
46:06
other questions I have one which is related to your previous slide about what do you prize can you describe the
46:12
vetting process that goes into actually setting the these prizes as they're
46:18
moving forward yeah yeah so we actually have a four pillar structure XPrize the first one is more of a
46:27
roadmap impact map planning process for the future so what's the future and how
46:33
do we go from here there which may include ideas for technology shifts it may include policy shifts and
46:40
regarding policy I should say that the Ansari X PRIZE the private spaceflight one we already had the Space Shuttle I
46:47
mean the technology was not hugely new when that competition was going on the big shift the big impact was policy
46:55
shift that's what that competition did was paved was open the doors for private spaceflight so it could be a policy
47:02
shift that we either do through a prize mechanism or independently so from that
47:07
will emerge maybe five or six areas both potential change right and then from
47:13
there it goes to the second pillar where there is some prize design work that goes on that gets vetted by our
47:20
ecosystem which includes global entrepreneurs and board of trustees and
47:26
others you know people who have a global sense of what's going on and and what
47:32
we're about they really do a thorough vetting of those and and when they get
47:37
the green light from that point and they get funded that's how we move enterprise
47:43
stage well basically my my question was
47:51
that are the steps where you lessen the heard where you make your cuts the same
47:57
across most of the X prizes concept demonstratable concept modeling whatever
48:05
and what are typically how what are the typical cut downs and where do you get
48:10
your judges great questions so they vary from price to prize the the steps that
48:17
are taken so some will have a paper like you submit what you're intending to do
48:23
the judging panel will look at that and decide if it's feasible or not there's pros and cons to that because some of
48:30
these ideas are so far out there it's hard to tell from paper if it's truly a breakthrough versus this is just
48:38
a crazy idea right so that's a difficult one it really comes down to the testing
48:43
so that's where I think the real cuts get made and you I think at this point
48:49
most of them have a two-step process on the on the downselect there for the
48:55
ocean Discovery XPrize the first round of testing which would have taken place in Puerto Rico was to go down to 2,000
49:03
meter depth map hundred square kilometers at 5 meter or higher
49:09
resolution in 16 hours the second round which is what the teens will now have to
49:15
do is go to 4000 meters depth map 250 square kilometers at 505 meter or higher
49:22
resolution in 24 hours so we've really increased that level of difficulty for
49:30
them so there is so each prize is different but there is there are definite quantitative things that they
49:36
have to overcome and then the judging panel so we have a science advisory
49:41
board that we set up and they actually pick the judging panel so there's a level of Independence from XPrize on the
49:49
judging panel and the names for the judging panel come from either the board or from us or from other people to say
49:56
well this would be a good person to consider and we have a certain set
50:02
characteristics that you look for in a judging panel both collectively you want
50:07
to have broad expertise to address all areas of the competition and then as far
50:14
as characteristics of the people who are involved you need to have do you need them to be able to come to a consensus
50:19
at some point but also to stand their ground when you know there's something
50:25
clearly obviously amiss there so sad zero so request
50:32
oh yes yeah you know not virtual
50:37
modeling very little paper it's really we have three years to go from zero to
50:44
actual prototype technology that we've tested yeah it's a real it's a push yeah
50:55
yeah thank you
51:06
great yeah so great another question so
51:21
XPrize kick-started this again in the modern era if you go back kings and queens of old
51:28
would do prizes that was their mechanism it wasn't grants through governments etc
51:33
so in the 1990s this this kick-started it however since then there have been
51:39
others both within the US there's now a lot more competitions that go on even
51:44
the US government runs competitions at this point and there are other countries where competitions go on so for the
Competitions
51:52
three hundred anniversary year anniversary of the original longitude prize which was by the British
51:58
government there was the new longitude prize so that was 2014 I think that was
52:04
launched and they are looking at antibacterial resistance so my yeah I
52:12
think that's what they're looking at so we keep an eye on each other so that
52:18
there is no duplication right so and to give you an example of that we were working on an ocean plastics prize but
52:25
there's another group the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that actually went ahead and we were working with them and
52:31
then things just didn't work out they went ahead and launched a two million dollar to competitions to $1,000,000
52:37
competitions so we pulled back to see what the outcome of that competition is
52:43
going to be and then we will re-engage on that particular topic if we have to but at
52:49
this point there are so many areas that can be tackled I mean the list is so
52:54
long right now you can take from science fiction you can look around you that
53:00
there's room for a lot of competitions out there thank you very much that's
53:13
really exciting I was curious how the teams divvy up the money that's up to the teams so we when
How the teams divvy up the money
53:22
we launch a competition we set the rules by the beginning so for the ocean discovery first place will get for
53:29
millions second place will get 1 million the finalists that we're announcing in March they will divide 1 million between
53:37
them in March so so yeah so any if
53:43
whatever the team structure is is up to the team's work get involved in that
53:48
they so if it's a university and an industry partnership it's up to them to
53:54
figure out how it's divided or if it's and I'm going to talk about some of the more academic interactions we have but
54:01
if it's a two-person team and we've had those as well where it's like father and
54:07
son for example it's up to them that that's that's the team to decide what
54:13
they do with their intellectual property and what they do with their winnings and how they divide it if they go on holiday
54:18
then that's that's that that's up to them yeah someone was just mentioning
54:29
lionfish right I think the University of West Florida is working yeah I did see I
54:36
saw a video of the lionfish zapper but but I don't I don't know if that's from
54:42
the University or other people you were mentioning earlier but yeah lionfish
54:47
I've heard that say he so that might be broadened for example this is how we would think into an invasive species
54:55
XPrize so is there something that not just addresses lionfish here but other invasive species have no
55:02
idea what kind of approach that would take but see but you can broaden it out
55:07
right
55:19
you