Every year the XPRIZE foundation defines new breakthrough challenges tackling humanities’ biggest and most acute problems at their Visioneering Event. For the 2018 round 10 groups from all over the world competed in a mix of “Shark Tank” and “the Voice” – to see which will be the next Grand Challenge to become an XPRIZE. The Explainables supported the teams in preparation for their pitches and lobbying sessions. And met some interesting people…
In August 2018 the German Federal Foreign Office started the “Year of Germany in the US” initiative at an event on historic Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Our own Daniel Angerhausen presented a science slam and answered questions about academic cooperation between the two countries. As someone living in both of these cultures for quite some time it's also a cause close to his heart.
What do you get when you combine the World Cup with short science presentations for the public?
Probably something similar to the Trilateral Science Slam at Berlin's famous S036 venue and hosted by Fulbright Germany and the Deutsch-Russisches Forum with the generous support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
At NASA frontier development lab (FDL) Machine learning experts and space scientists will spend the summer in Silicon Valley to work on some of NASA’s most important challenges. Explainable Daniel Angerhausen is an FDL science advisor and mentor for the Exoplanet and Astrobiology challenges. For the last week of the program Explainables Sally Blumenthal, Amran Salleh and Jesse John will join him to prepare the group for their final "TED-style" presentations.
For the second workshop in 5 days and the first one in Germany the Explainables headed out to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy Heidelberg for a short 'communication and branding for scientists' bootcamp. One group of participants at Heidelberg came up with one of the all time best analogies we had at Explainables workshops: observations of the cosmic microwave background explained with a notebook.
