Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Prize Watch

Given my research interests of prizes for technological invention, I've decided to start a list of such prizes in order to keep better track of them. This is an ongoing list and if you discover any technology prizes, please let me know via comments or e-mail.

-The Grand Challenge, a DARPA prize. Robotic vehicles traversing an urban or desert course.
-The Lander Challenges, X-Prize and NASA prizes. Landing on and breaking the Moon's gravity.
-The Auto X PRIZE, an X-Prize contest. Creating a new order of magnitude of fuel efficiency.
-The Genome X PRIZE, an X-Prize challenge. Speeding up the ability to sequence the human genome.
-Centennial Challenges, NASA, et al. prizes. A plethora of space-related prizes intended to ease humanity's jounery into the final frontier.
-The M Prize, a Methuselah Foundation contest. Extending human life starting with mice.
-The NetFlix Prize, improving the accuracy of predictions of who loves which movies.

Notable for the list is the X Prize Cup, an annual exposition where some of these competitions are held.

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