July 2012 Breakfast - Exponential Technologies and Its Impact on Industry

Singularity University was established 3 years ago as a non-profit University based in NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley sponsored by the likes of Google, Nokia, Cisco, Autodesk, Kauffman Foundation, ePlanet, etc. Every year SU select about 80 people from around the world to attend its prestigious Graduate Studies Program which runs for 10 weeks.  The mission of SU is   to assemble, educate and inspire a new generation of leaders who strive to understand and utilize exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges. 

Dr Clarence Tan is a graduate of the GSP'11 program at SU and was the team leader for a project in the security area to shine a light on the problem of corruption using crowd sourcing technologies. He will speak about his GSP experience, the meetings with luminaries like Steve Wozniak, Chris Anderson etc and the various site visits including Google, Facebook, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, NASA, etc. More importantly, the talk will focus on the exponential technologies that are happening now and how they will impact industries.

Bio:

Dr Clarence N.W. Tan is the founder  of Bond Wireless, an Australian-based award-winning wireless software applications and services company. Dr Tan was selected as one of the 80 individuals from 35 countries from an application pool of 2200 for the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program in 2011 at NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley. He was also the recipient of the Queensland government’s prestigious Entrepreneur in Residence Fellowship for 2010 at Bond University and the Gold Coast Innovation Centre at Griffith University. He is an Adjunct Professor at Bond University and Griffith University. Dr Tan is a founding member of the Gold Coast Angel Investors Group which has funded a number of innovative companies such as GrassAds, Seasafe, etc.

Dr. Tan obtained his Ph.D. from Bond University and his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (Computers) from the University of Southern California, where he went on to simultaneously complete a Master of Business Administration (Finance), and a Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Dr Tan has also been the Principal Research Fellow in a AUD2 million joint Queensland government, Coastalcom, Lifesaving Australia and Griffith University’s beach safety monitoring and modeling project in 2009.

He was selected to be on the panel of International Judges representing Australia for the Asia Pacific IC & T Awards in 2002. He was the Chair of the Gold Coast Chapter of the Australian Computer Society for a number of years. Dr. Tan is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS) and a Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia (F Fin). He is a member of a number of other professional bodies, including Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Eta Kappa Nu, Omega Rho and Alpha Pi Mu and a Fellow of the Institute of Business Administration (UK).

He has over 45 academic publications including a book, book chapters and peer-reviewed papers in the area of soft computing and mobile applications. In addition Dr Tan holds a number of patents in mobility technology globally.