Chatter about ensuing plans permeates any graduation, though it’s not common for the talk to surround which class projects will receive venture capital funding. This was a hot topic at the first commencement at Singularity University, a school that is backed by Google, operates on NASA’s Silicon Valley campus, and gets its name from futurist and co-founder Ray Kurzweil’s favorite term for our technologically enhanced future. The premise for the school is that change is occurring exponentially from the frenetic pace of technology and globalization.

Founded last year with the idea that rapidly evolving technologies can be harnessed to solve problems like poverty and climate change, Singularity University does not offer a traditional degree–though it is working to get some universities to accept students’ coursework for credits. More than a graduate school, it resembles an incubator for technological ideas that, at the end of a nine-week program, might turn into actual companies with a humanitarian edge.

Starting in June, students spent three weeks attending lectures by faculty members and visiting luminaries such as Vint Cerf–one of the founding fathers of the internet–to get a basic grounding in fields ranging from networks and computing systems to artificial intelligence and robotics. After that, they chose one of four subjects to study more closely for three weeks. In the final weeks of their studies, students split into four groups and created projects whose only requirements were that they needed to focus on one of the world’s great challenges and have the potential to improve the lives of a billion people over a decade.

Read the full story from eSchool News.