CHENNAI: It is one of the most elite universities in the world — where each graduate is expected to go on to become a billionaire, future world leader, or both. Yet despite its being more exclusive than Oxford, MIT and Harvard, most people have never heard of it.
Singularity University, a small unaccredited institute based at NASA’s research centre in northern California, is attracting the brightest minds in America and beyond. It may not offer traditional degrees, and students leave without formal qualification, but their every step is keenly watched by Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest.
“The best way to describe the experience of being a student at SU is to say that it is an Ivy League university from the future: the curriculum is from the year 2020,” said Dr Roman Yampolskiy, a student from Latvia.
The university gets its name from the theory of ‘singularity’ — the inevitable moment when machines will surpass human intelligence — written about by its co-founder Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist.
Rather than feel threatened by the advance of technology, students are taught to harness it to help solve some of the planet’s greatest problems, such as famine and climate change.
At the start of the 10-week summer course, they are set the “grand challenge” of coming up with ways to help a billion people within a decade. By its end, they are expected to have workable ideas to pitch to investors.
More than 4,000 people from as many as 120 countries apply each year for the $-25,000 course — the longest of a range of different programmes offered throughout the year. With only 80 places each summer, the acceptance rate is just 2 per cent.
To keep up with what the university calls the “exponential growth of technology”, the syllabus has to be rewritten five times a year, while the roster of guest speakers changes almost as frequently. Over the past few years, the students have been addressed by figures ranging from Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome, to actress Jodie Foster.
The world of technology was quick to embrace the university’s ethos: Google, Cisco, Nokia and Genentech all lined up to be partners when it opened in 2009.
Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, a member of the “founding circle”, said of Singularity, “If I was a student, this is where I would want to be.”
Lessons take place in a classroom a stone’s throw from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. When The Sunday Telegraph visited, students were hard at work on their grand challenge projects, before the final presentations later this month. They are momentarily interrupted by a robot clattering into the room. After a digital introduction, it is identified as the embodiment of Dr Daniel Kraft — who chairs the university’s neuroscience department — on a call from Los Angeles, controlling a screen mounted on a motorised stand. A touch of his keyboard several hundred miles away takes the robot back out of the room and minds focus again on the task at hand.
Each student has gone through a rigorous selection process to be here — and many will have already founded at least one company. This summer students are from all over the world, including Germany, Israel, Brazil, India and China as well as four from America. The university’s youngest student so far was 19 and its oldest 63.
Cosima Gretton, 26 — the only British participant this summer — is a few years younger than most of the others, but her academic record is just as impressive. She has a first-class degree in experimental psychology from Oxford and is about to finish a four-year medical degree at King’s College.
She was 23 when she co-founded her first company, and won a place on the course for her work on a mobile app that helps people assess moles on their skin for signs of damage by ultraviolet light.
“Coming to Singularity is one of the most intellectually challenging things I think I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s one of the rare times you can achieve something as a student that actually has real-world implications.”
For her final project, she is working with four others on creating carbon nanotube transistors to test saliva for the presence of biomarkers that indicate illnesses such as gastric cancer and diabetes.
If the transistors can be made in the form of microchips they could be mass produced, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives through early detection and treatment.
Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google and author of a book on artificial intelligence called The Singularity is Near, in 1999 made 108 predictions of where the world would be in 2009. He was correct on 89 of them, including the creation of the e-reader, the 3G Internet, and the year in which computers would beat the best human chess players. His estimate for the year computers will overtake humans? 2045.
Asked why he started the university, another founder Peter Diamandis said, “I realised there was no place on the planet where people can really learn about the fields that are in rapid exponential growth — artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, quantum computing. Yet these are the things that together can be used to solve humanity’s problems. Singularity enabled us to cast a global net, to find people at the top of their game and bring them together....”
Some start-ups are well on their way. Made in Space, a company formed by students from the 2010 intake, developed a 3D printer that allows astronauts to design and build their own tools and shuttle parts on the International Space Station.
“The whole education system needs to take a big step forward,” said Ross Shott, managing director of the graduate studies programme. “Things are moving so rapidly it’s being left behind.” Ours is a first-of-a-kind curriculum — what we teach here, people would pay millions to know. Who needs academic accreditation?”
© The Sunday Telegraph