LIFE is a journey of answering questions. Some questions take us seconds to answer and others take us weeks, months or maybe years to find our own answers. These questions can vary from time to time and from place to place. How can I get money? What is the best subject for me to study? How will the next technology impact my life? Or let's ask Siri: What is the most challenging question you have ever had? However, are we always asking the right questions? And how many of them do we answer or maybe avoid? Now, allow me to ask you a different question which I was asked in the summer of 2015 and am still trying to find an answer to: How can you impact a billion people's lives in 10 years? That was the first and only task that was assigned to me and 78 other exceptional people from all over the world to answer. I am Samar Samir, a masters degree student in electrical and computer engineering at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I am from Saudi Arabia and I would like to welcome you to one of the most defining experiences that I have ever had at the sleepless university, where the curriculum was designed for 10 intensive weeks of Graduate Studies Program in the summer of 2015 (GSP15) to help us find our way to answering this question. This is Singularity University. Everything is exceptional! The campus is located in the futuristic NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. In the SU building, there was an innovation lab where you can work or "play" with technology such as Google Glass, Bitcoin Miner, Virtual Reality, 3D printers, the latest CAD software, laser cutters, drones and our dear friend NAO robot. Lastly, there was my escape place: a big tree where I liked to go to relax and write after learning so many new things and big ideas on a daily basis. Being a student at Singularity University felt like being in a university from the future where the admissions process is from the year 2015, but the curriculum is from the year 2040 including all the futuristic fields that you can imagine. SU is the only university that I know of where your homework assignment is to help a billion people. There is no place for people with linear thinking at SU. It might take you something like 10 weeks at Singularity University to be an exponential thinker. Each GSP15 member came with unique motives, questions, achievements, stories and goals, but the common thing that brought us together is that we all want to make the world a better place to live in. This is the responsibility that we hold, the desire that we carry; this is not a dream, but the near future that we are building starting now. SU is the place that I always wanted to be in and those are the people that I always wanted to be surrounded by. They are the real treasure I got from this experience. I paid attention to everyone, and I learned from them all. I learned how to be dedicated to my work and passion, how to sleep less and harvest more, how to be humble with fame, how to enjoy the diversity, how to speak less and impact more, how to reach the sky and live in my own universe, and how to create "Artificial Intelligence (AI) Sparkles." In this experience, I had the pleasure to be the first Saudi Arabian female who got a scholarship from Google to attend the Graduate Studies Program at SU. This experience exposed me to the most cutting edge technology used to develop solutions for humanity's challenges such as poverty, health, education, energy, space, etc. Now, lets talk a bit about the program which was delivered by outstanding speakers from all over the world at SU. This summer program was designed to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technology to address humanity's grand challenges in an exceptional environment. It was divided into two main stages, each of which were five weeks. The first half was focused on intensive lectures and workshops covering all 11 categories of global grand challenges delivered by experts in their field. The classes started usually at 9:00 am, and finished sometime between 5:00 pm and 11:00 pm. Late nights would happen when we had a fireside chat with special guests who were invited to share their experience or success stories. The second half was for team projects, where we had to form teams with two to five members and choose a project from the humanity's grand challenges theme. There was no fixed schedule for that period. We as a team were responsible to get the work done in the timeframe we set. It is hard to express all of my thoughts and feelings about my time at Singularity University. There were so many thoughts, questions and experiences that I had there. Words cannot tell us everything, but they can guide us to go beyond what we read. I will leave you with a quotation from Yehuda Berg who wrote: "Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble."
