Bamgladesh offerrs best intelligence wwe have seen for sdgs 5 through 1 up to 2008, Search eg 4 1 oldest edu 4.6 newest edu ; .620th century intelligence - ending poverty of half world without electricity -although Keynes 1936 (last capter general theiry money inetrest emplymen) asked Economists to take hipocrati oath as the profession that ended extreme poverty, most economists did the opposite. Whats not understandable is how educatirs failed to catalogue the lessons of the handful who bottom-up empowered vilages to collaboratively end poverty. There are mainly 2 inteligences to understand- Borlaug on food; fazle abed on everything that raised life expectancy in tropical viage asia from low 40s to 60s (about 7 below norm of living with electricity and telecomes). Between 1972 and 2001, Abed's lessons catalogued in this mooc had largelu built the nation of Bangladesh and been replicated with help of Unicef's James Grant acroo most tropical asian areas. What's exciting is the valley's mr ad mrs steve jobs invted Fazle Abed to share inteligences 2001 at his 65th birthday party. The Jobs and frineds promised to integrate abed's inteligence into neighborhod university stanfrd which in any event wanted Jobs next great leap the iphone. The Valley told abed to start a university so that women graduates from poor and rich nations could blend inteligence as Abed's bottom of the pyramid vilage began their journey of leapfrog modles now that gridd infarstructures were ni longer needed for sdiar and mobile. Abed could also help redesign the millennium goals which were being greenwashed into a shared worldwide system coding frame by 2016. There re at Abed's 80th birtday party , the easy bitwas checking this mooc was uptodate. The hard bit - what did Abed mean by his wish to headhunt a taiwanese american to head the university's 3rd decade starting 2020?

Saturday, December 31, 2011

4.4 1.4

 It is a great pleasure for me to be present at the 10th Anniversary Celebration of BRAC University (BU). It is good to be with you all – members of the Board of Trustees, Faculty, Staff Alumni and Distinguished Guests and Friends of the University.

The three institutions, in the founding of which, I have been intimately involved are of course BRAC, BRAC Bank and BRAC University. I recall that by the time BRAC celebrated its 10th anniversary it had not of course achieved anywhere near the eminence the organisation has now achieved. But BRAC was then involved in a nationwide programme to promote Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) to combat morbidity and mortality from Diarrhoea. We visited every household in rural Bangladesh promoting the use of oral saline from house to house reaching 13 million households. As a direct result of this programme Bangladesh later experienced the fastest decline of child mortality in South Asia and our Prime Minister received UN MDG prize in 2010. By 1980, the 8th year of the founding of BRAC I was awarded the Magsaysay prize – known as the Asian Nobel.

BRAC Bank also celebrates its 10th Anniversary this year. Started in 2001 as the 30th smallest commercial bank it is now the 6th largest, pioneering small and medium enterprise (SME) lending through 151 branches and 420 unit offices through out the country serving 1.2 million clients. One technological innovation BRAC Bank is scheduled to launch next month is bKash through which millions of cell phone owners will have access to bKash account at BRAC Bank and will be able to deposit and withdraw money through thousands of bKash agents throughout the country and transfer funds through their cell phones without requiring any intermediaries. This will allow millions of hitherto un-banked people to access banking services.

How far have we come in 10 years with BRAC University?
We have set sail for the moon – in the ambitious entry by the University’s Electrical Engineering department to a NASA competition has already taken us part of the way there.

On the ground as well we have made great progress. We wanted BRAC University to provide broad based education which focused on both professional and personal development. Towards this end we have successfully introduced a residential semester in our Savar campus which has become a distinguishing feature of the undergraduate education at the BRAC University.

In order to better equip our teachers to help students unlearn unproductive practices such memorisation and nurture their creativity, we have established a Teaching Learning Centre (TLC). All faculty, however experienced, will be required to be acquainted with modern methodologies of student centred teaching.

Our Architecture and Law faculty has distinguished themselves for not only their excellent academic programme but also for their involvement in community service activities – both faculty and students of the Law department through their moot court society have been zealously involved in promoting better understanding and awareness of our liberation war to the present generation throughout the country – our Architecture department have been involved in designing cyclone shelters after the cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh and in designing and building low cost housing which is currently on-going in Haiti which experienced a devastating earthquake of December 2009.

BU is well known for its post graduate institutes the oldest of which is the Institute of Educational Development (IED). The Institute offers M. Ed degree course in Educational Leadership, Planning and Management for Upazilla Education Officers and MSc in Early Child Development (ECD) in collaboration with Columbia University. These courses are not available in any other university in Bangladesh. The Institute is presently deeply involved in supporting the government in designing and developing curricula and textbooks for primary education in Bangladesh.

The School of Public Health (SPH) is now undergoing transition from public health to Global Health. In collaboration with ICDDR,B and other national institutions the School is planning to offer courses to other health care professionals such as midwives and nurses in addition to an expanded M. Ph programme catering to students from Bangladesh and other developing countries in Asia and Africa. The Institute also has a substantial research agenda and conduct short training courses for Bangladeshi health care professionals.

The Institute of Governance Studies (IGS) offers M.A. in Governance and Development and have so far trained three batches of mid-career civil servants. It brings out annually a very influential State of Bangladesh’s Governance Report and has been working on accountability issues to improve governance in Bangladesh.

BRAC Development Institute (BDI) the newest of the Institutes offers a Masters in Development Studies (MDS) and new course on Development Practice which started this year. BDI has been involved in cutting edge research on pathways to women’s empowerment and is slated to contribute to new knowledge creation for a better understanding of developmental dynamics – economic, social and political.

We believe that really a good education not only challenges students to learn what is known in a discipline but also teaches them to grasp how knowledge is created. We want to develop an institution that would contribute not only to disseminating knowledge but to the creation of it. Towards this, we envision that research would form an integral part of the regular activities not only in the postgraduate institutes but also in BU’s undergraduate programme.

I should be remiss in my duty if I don’t mention the seminal research being carried out by Dr. Mumit Khan and his team in furthering our national ambition to achieve digital Bangladesh, or the effort of Centre for Languages (CfL) toward improving English language skills among our students and BRAC staff waiting to be deployed in its international programme. CfL also offers our students opportunities to learn modern Asian languages such as Mandarin and Korean in addition to more readily available French, Spanish and Arabic.

It may be interesting for you to know about level of support BRAC has provided to the University over the past 10 years. The support has been both intellectual and financial.
Three of BRAC’s Deputy Executive Directors have previously served as Pro-Vice Chancellor, Dean of the School of Public health and Director of Governance Studies. Four of BRAC’s directors currently serve as Pro-VC, Director IED, Director CfL and Honorary Treasurer. Two of BRAC Governing Body members have left the board to serve as Vice Chancellor and Dean of the School of Public Health.Over the years BRAC has mobilised and disbursed donor support of Taka 63.65 crore to the University and has paid cash grants of Taka 27.62 crore. BRAC is in the process of transferring 4.17 acres of land to the University for its New Campus. The current value of this land is Taka 215 crores.

Ten years in the life of an institution is not significant especially for a university. Universities tend to have a very long life. In 1994 while receiving an Honorary Degree from the Queens University in Canada I met a student awaiting his Ph. D degree. His research topic was sustainable institutions. He had looked at 500 European Institutions of the 16th century but found only 33 survive today. Twenty nine of these 33 are universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbourn, Heidelberg, Bologna,Upsala – 2 churches one parliament and one business.

A day indeed will come when for Bangladesh society, development organisations like BRAC as they are today will be redundant and will need to redefine their goals. But it is our dream that BRAC University as a Centre of Excellence in Education and Research will thrive and prosper through the centuries ahead and provide vigor and vibrancy to the society as is still being provided by Heidelberg, Sorbonne, Oxford and Harvard.

Thank you all very much.

Tracking AI Startups 2025 - 2011

 With AI being expected to be the soul of the world's largest companies, the idea that eg Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang designs his conpany to track (even friend) 18000 start ups may sound weir. In truth the ai ecosystem needs (probably more) seeds than ay other ecosyem - brain tools, channels to specific contxts, and in some cases eg climate ai and life scoeces ai is effectively the future of most of that market's innovation


take 2024 top 50 strtup compiled by forbes and originally tracked with Seqoia - of 50 startups early 2024 https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/?sh=3585c09f290f less than 10 claim fundinf over hald a billion - of course its true that by time a startup is nearing unicirn status it may well end strtup life beung ipo'd or aquired

but here are the mainly american big fish in AI start up pool of early 2024 


OPEN AI - one off case a musk funded n go that turned profit -and became llm chat gpt4 producer- seems to have too many partners to be ipo'd unless microsoft buys it -  valued at over 11 billion (when it comes to llms its an unique valuation league - it is said that while the first llm cost about 1000 $ , to launch a new one as a potential world leadwr would cost over 100 billion; of course llms leverage really big computing so the bigget digital companies may well see company and main llm arcitectire as insperable


Adunil Ai Defence 2.8 bn

Anthropic 7.2 bn - another llm with an odd stoiry- probably forst funded by nft notoriety banker-freeman; timely enough toi build an llm but seems to have found mixed partner to leverage computing caacity with eg amazon

cerebras 720 million chips manufacturer

Databricks -stata strage and analytics  4 bn dollar (get this field right and you emerge with data warehousing's Snowflake

Here is some commentary from Sequoia 2023 which clarifies:

When we launched the AI 50 almost five years ago, I wrote, “Although artificial general intelligence (AGI)… gets a lot of attention in film, that field is a long way off.” Today, that sci-fi future feels much closer.

The biggest change has been the rise of generative AI, and particularly the use of transformers (a type of neural network) for everything from text and image generation to protein folding and computational chemistry. Generative AI was in the background on last year’s list but in the foreground now.

The History of Generative AI

Generative AI, which refers to AI that creates an output on demand, is not new. The famous ELIZA chatbot in the 1960s enabled users to type in questions for a simulated therapist, but the chatbot’s seemingly novel answers were actually based on a rules-based lookup table. A major leap was Google researcher Ian Goodfellow’s generative adversarial networks (GANs) from 2014 that generated plausible low resolution images by pitting two networks against each other in a zero sum game. Over the coming years the blurry faces became more photorealistic but GANs remained difficult to train and scale.

In 2017, another group at Google released the famous Transformers paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” to improve the performance of text translation. In this case, attention refers to mechanisms that provide context based on the position of words in text, which vary from language to language. The researchers observed that the best performing models all have these attention mechanisms, and proposed to do away with other means of gleaning patterns from text in favor of attention.

The eventual implications for both performance and training efficiency turned out to be huge. Instead of processing a string of text word by word, as previous natural language methods had, transformers can analyze an entire string all at once. This allows transformer models to be trained in parallel, making much larger models viable, such as the generative pretrained transformers, the GPTs, that now power ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft’s newly revived Bing. These models were trained on very large collections of human language, and are known as Large Language Models (LLMs). 

Although transformers are effective for computer vision applications, another method called latent (or stable) diffusion now produces some of the most stunning high-resolution images through products from startups Stability and Midjourney. These diffusion models marry the best elements of GANs and transformers. The smaller size and open source availability of some of these models has made them a fount of innovation for people who want to experiment.

As does this visual on the top 50 at 2023


our trends in this year’s list

Generative AI Infrastructure: OpenAI made a big splash last year with the launch of ChatGPT and again this year with the launch of GPT-4, but their big bet on scale and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is only one of many directions LLMs are taking. Anthropic and their chatbot Claude use a different approach called Reinforcement Learning Constitutional AI (RL-CAI). The CAI part encodes a set of human-friendly principles designed to limit abuse and hallucination in the outputs. Meanwhile Inflection, a secretive startup founded by DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman and Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, is focusing on consumer applications.

5.6 how nomination of fazle abed as first global education hall of fame began 2011 qatar

 The International Association of University Presidents (IAUP) and the Institute of International Education (IIE), two of the Qatar Foundation's partners in WISE,


NEWS PROVIDED BY


PARISMarch 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Five prominent international figures will select the winner of the world's first major international prize for education.

The WISE Prize for Education was announced by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, at the conclusion of the second World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar, in December 2010. The first Laureate will be named at WISE 2011 in November.

The Jury members are:

- Dr James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, USA

- Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia UniversityUSA

- Mrs Fatma Rafiq Zakaria, Chairman of the Maulana Azad Educational Trust, India

- H.E. Naledi Pandor, Minister of Science and Technology, MP, South Africa

- H.E. Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, PhD, Chairman of WISE, Qatar Foundation, Chairman of the Jury

The WISE Prize for Education will reward an individual or team for an outstanding, world-class contribution to education. The Laureate's achievements should have had a significant, lasting impact upon education at any level, and should demonstrate an inspiring and visionary approach.

The Prize will support the WISE mission of raising the status of education internationally by establishing an award of similar standing to those that already exist in other fields such as science, literature, peace and economics. The winner will receive $500,000 and a gold medal.

Nominations are invited until the end of April from individuals and institutions such as universities, schools, NGOs, teachers' organisations, the media and private corporations.

From mid-July to mid-September 2011, the Jury will examine the candidacies of 15 finalists pre-selected by a committee responsible for screening all submissions.

Dr Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, Chairman of WISE, Qatar Foundation, explains: "As Chairman of the Jury, I am pleased to welcome this group of eminent people to form the WISE Prize for Education Jury. They have been selected because of their international vision, professional achievements and expertise. I believe their rich experience and diverse competencies will enable us to identify a Laureate of the highest calibre, and the WISE Prize for Education will become the world standard for achievement in this field."

Qatar Foundation inaugurated the World Innovation Summit for Education - WISE - in 2009 to harness the knowledge, skills and experience of multiple stakeholders in addressing the challenges facing 21st-century education.

Find out more about the WISE Prize for Education: http://www.wiseprizeforeducation.org

About the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE)

WISE is dedicated to building the future of education through innovation. This global collaborative initiative was inaugurated in 2009 by the Qatar Foundation, under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. Its mission is to address the challenges facing 21st century education, to expand dialogue around the world and to implement practical and sustainable solutions. With this purpose, WISE holds an annual international summit that provides a unique platform and meeting place for thought leaders and experts to share best practices about education. WISE is also a year-round initiative devoted to reaching outside the traditional circles of the education community to promote innovation and implement concrete actions. The WISE 2011 Summit will take place in Doha, Qatar1-3 November 2011. Full details on the WISE website:


https://www.wise-qatar.org/wise-works/wise-prize-for-education/

Laureates by year

Larry Rosenstock photo

2019 Laureate: Larry Rosenstock


Larry Rosenstock is CEO and founding principal of High Tech High, a network of sixteen K-12 public charter schools in California, and is the Special Advisor to the President of the HTH Graduate School of Education. Larry taught carpentry in urban high schools in Boston and Cambridge and was principal of the Rindge School of Technical Arts, and of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. A member of the Massachusetts and U.S. Supreme Court Bars, he served as an attorney at the Harvard Center for Law and Education, and was an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the University Of California at Berkeley. He directed the federal New Urban High School Project. 

2017 Laureate: Dr. Patrick Awuah, Ghana


Dr. Awuah co-founded Ashesi University in 2002, established as one of Ghana’s premier universities. Overlooking the capital city, Accra, Ashesi is home to nearly 900 students who are poised for leadership in growing entrepreneurial sectors across Africa as well as in building responsible government.

Dr. Patrick Awuah’s vision for Ashesi is driven directly by a determination to build a standard of leadership motivated not by the promise of entitlement but by a strong sense of community responsibility for the greater social good.

WISE Prize Sakena Yacoobi 2015 Laureate

2015 Laureate: Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, Afghanistan

 

Dr. Yacoobi founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1995 in response to the lack of education and healthcare in Afghanistan.

When girls’ education was banned under Taliban rule, the AIL organized underground home schools for 3,000 girls across the country. AIL offers teacher training programs for Afghan teachers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with continuous training allowing them to deepen and strengthen their skills.

WISE Prize Ann Cotton 2013 Laureate

2014 Laureate: Ms Ann Cotton, United Kingdom

 

The 2014 WISE Prize for Education was presented to Ms Ann Cotton, Founder and President of Camfed.

In 1993, Cotton founded the Campaign for Female Education, which sponsors programs designed and implemented by communities to fully suit their unique needs. The organization takes a holistic approach by working in partnership with all the constituencies that influence a girl’s education and life choices to break the cycle of poverty, child marriage, high birth rates, and high rates of HIV/AIDS.

2013 Laureate: Ms Vicky Colbert, Colombia

 

Ms Vicky Colbert, winner of the 2013 WISE Prize for Education, is Founder and Director of Fundación Escuela Nueva.

Ms Colbert recognized that education is the keystone of human development. Combining her experience as a researcher, policy maker, and social entrepreneur, Ms Colbert’s initiative brought student-centered methods to neglected regions of Colombia. 

2012 Laureate: Dr. Madhav Chavan, India

 

Dr. Madhav Chavan, Co-founder and CEO of Pratham, the largest education NGO in India, won the WISE Prize for Education in 2012.

Dr. Chavan devised a simple formula to bring basic education to millions of under-privileged children in India. The organization’s programs are now active in 17 of the country’s 28 states. Pratham’s initiatives address the pre-school education needs of both in-school and out-of-school children –including computer literacy, vocational training, and special programs for vulnerable and working children.

WISE Prize Fazle Hasan Abed 2011 Laureate

2011 Laureate: Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Bangladesh

 

The innaugural WISE Prize for Education was presented to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder and Chairman of BRAC, one of the world’s leading development organizations.

For over 40 years, BRAC has contributed directly to the education of more than 10 million students, from pre-primary through secondary levels. Now active in nine other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, BRAC is one of the largest non-governmental organizations in the world.

xxxhttps://www.iie.org/en/Why-IIE/Events/2011/11/2011-WISE

2011 WISE

The 2011 WISE Summit, which takes place from November 1–3, 2011, in Doha, Qatar, explores the theme of "Changing Societies, Changing Education." On Day 1 of the Summit, the focus will be on how innovation and change happen in different sectors, and whether and how these models may inspire new strategies for education, as well as intersectoral collaboration for development. Discussion on Day 2 will sharpen the focus on innovation in the education sector. Participants will explore models for whole-system reform of education, as well as individual "break-the-mold" projects that may inspire broader reforms. On Day 3, the discussion will turn to the future, inviting new visions and new thinking about how education and lifelong learning systems may better meet the needs of changing societies, and better prepare learners for the unknown future.

Throughout the Summit, 1,200 decision-makers, practitioners, and thought leaders from different sectors will share and debate ideas, discuss new ways to address major challenges, and ways to promote purposeful action.

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is a global collaborative initiative established by Qatar Foundation under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned. Qatar Foundation works in partnership with international organizations involved in global educational issues. These partners are closely associated with the WISE event, helping conceive high-quality debates and promoting the WISE initiative through their international networks. IIE is one of six partner organizations. IIE will organize two special workshops at the WISE Summit:

Building the Knowledge Economy: Human Capacity Development through Scholarship Programs

In today’s global economy, development of human capacity is more important than ever. A key factor is the ability to offer access to tertiary education opportunities for motivated and often under-served students that will help build a country’s knowledge economy and workforce. Major stakeholders—national governments, universities, the private sector, and foundations—all have a responsibility to work together to offer education opportunities that meet changing domestic, regional, and global needs. In this workshop, participants will discuss examples of how strategic scholarship programs have been game changers, lessons learned from their achievements, and challenges and visions for the future.

Beyond Rankings: Classifying Diverse Institutions of Higher Education Globally

This session will explore initiatives in the Arab world and other countries such as China and Germany that have been successful in implementing rigorous higher education classifications and rankings systems. Participants in the session will discuss the value of developing these types of assessment systems, how key countries have leveraged institutional data to improve the quality of domestic higher education and position their universities as world-class, and what steps can be taken to develop similar indicators and systems for measuring higher education performance and quality.


WISE Awards

The WISE Awards are designed to identify, showcase and promote innovative educational projects from around the world. Every year, since 2009, six winners are selected by a prestigious Jury for their concrete and positive impact on education. In addition to this recognition given by eminent experts from the education world, they receive $20,000 and are given access to international exposure.The 2011 edition of the WISE Awards will continue to celebrate successful models and innovations from around the world within the theme Transforming Education: Investment , Innovation and Inclusion. Application forms should be downloaded from the website and submitted online, once completed, before 31 May 2011.

WISE Prize for Education

The WISE Prize for Education will reward individuals - or teams of individuals - who have made an outstanding contribution to any field or level of education. Nominations are currently invited from institutions with a demonstrable commitment to education, such as universities, schools, colleges, teachers' organisations, research facilities, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, governments and private corporations. Some individuals of internationally high repute may also be asked to submit nominations. Self-nominations will not be accepted. The nominees will be screened by an 11-person WISE Prize Committee which will make a pre-selection of no more than 15. A Jury of five distinguished individuals will consider the 15 final nominations and select a winner who will receive an award of $500,000 and a gold medal.

Qatar Foundation For Education, Science And Community Development

Founded in 1995 by decree of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, Qatar Foundation is a non-profit organization focusing on education, scientific research and community development. Under Qatar Foundation’s umbrella are Education City, which comprises elite universities, several academic and training programs and Qatar Science and Technology Park, which boasts more than twenty-one world-class companies involved in scientific research and development. Chaired by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al- Missned, Qatar Foundation also aims to enhance lives through community development initiatives including Doha Debates, Reach out To Asia and Al Jazeera Children's Channel. Joint venture partnerships in the areas of design, ICT, telecommunications, policy studies and event management contribute to fulfilling the objectives of the Qatar Foundation.


previously

The six WISE Awards 2010 Laureates are:


Name: Mushtaq Chhapra

Country: Pakistan

Project: The Citizens Foundation


Name: Ayla Goksel

Country: Turkey

Project: Mother Child Education Program


Name: Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu

Country: Nigeria

Project: The Smallholders Farmers Rural Radio (Farm 98.0 FM)


Name: Cecilia D'Oliveira

Country: USA

Project: MIT OpenCourseWare


Name: Tove Romsaas Wang

Country: United Kingdom

Project: Rewrite the Future


Name: Neil Turok

Country: South Africa

Project: AIMS Next Einstein Initiative