Grand Challenges

We didn't appreciate at the time how much of a core route that was.

Between that and the Grand Challenge projects, seeded a big percentage of the autonomous driving space and autonomy in general that we know today.

Yeah, so there we were allowing these systems to automatically train and improve and bootstrap their perception system and behavior using their own experiences and feedback loop and be able to adjust this in real time, which is a pretty...

Thematically, it continues to be a very important kind of capability domain where you want to automate that feedback group as much as possible.

lens on all this development.

And you naturally spawn people that get excited by that and you attract others like it.

And that puts them in a great position to do things like the Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, which then becomes Waymo eventually.

And even though other teams spun up, like Stanford and others who were incredible, like Mike Monomero and Sebastian Thrun, they also came from CMU, right? And so it was like the roots really kind of were there.

He is passionate about helping people understand how nature based design and working with circularity can reverse our climate crisis, transform our cities and better our livelihoods, delivering his core message to both the young and experienced professional.

My name is Peter Marcus Bach, and this is the Grand Challenges podcast, a show about inspiring individuals who are stepping up to tackle the global challenges that our world is facing in their own unique ways.

We reflect on the many out-of-the-box ways our guests have navigated the complexity and intricacies of our environment at the cutting edges of science, engineering, technology, and design.

On today's show, Josh and I embark on an epic journey across diverse topics, unraveling how his early childhood experiences have shaped his views, from Silent Spring to America's major cultural and political events.

Give me some feedback or suggest a future guest so that I can keep improving this show.

The podcast's intro and outro song is called Starsky by Alex Karin.

Stay tuned for our next episode and next guest to hear how they are tackling the grand challenges.

At its core, this paper asks a simple question.

How can a government solve massive, urgent societal problems? We often call these grand challenges.

Right.

Grand challenges.

Usually government is seen as just a passive rulemaker or maybe a bank handing out grants.

But this paper proves that a government can act as a master conductor of an orchestra.

We need to understand what Professor Adner refers to as the ecosystem as structure.

So let's define that grand challenge first.

And he and I were very impressed with what the global mental health community had done.

And they'd come up with this initiative called Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health.

We said, well, why can't we do this? For skin disease, the Grand Challenges in Global Skin Health.

So we had a meeting in London with a number of experts and looking at epidemiology and what were the sort of you know, the important things that we needed to address.

And one of those was psoriasis and inflammatory skin disease.

And so what are some other kind of wide reaching issues or larger initiatives that you want us to keep an eye on in the podcast as we consider future topics?

Well, one of the spaces I think is really interesting is the grand challenges initiatives that are happening.

We've got six named challenges for this year.

and a call for new challenges for the future will be coming out soon.

And so as it trickles down through the grades, We're still seeing those impacts and still needing to think about what the changes to how education happens continue to impact our students and continue to have meaning for what we do with our students in the classroom.

were not familiar with George Mason's Grand Challenge Initiative.

So this is a comprehensive research framework to align university resources, faculty expertise, and educational programs around six interconnected solution areas addressing humanity's ultimate grand challenges.

so brianna kind of already mentioned that there were these six areas and i just wanted to let you guys know what that is so those six points are advancing 21st century education for all building a climate resilient society driving responsible digital innovation and sustainable infrastructure improving human health well-being and preparedness pioneering space exploration, research and collaboration, and finally strengthening peace, trust and engagement in democracy.