Sharing Ideas with the World Economic Forum
ETH Zurich hosted an IdeasLab at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China this week. The Annual Meeting of New Champions afforded ETH Zurich a valuable opportunity to portray its research activities in an international forum including leaders from politics and multi-national corporations to academia.
An ETH delegation led by Ralph Eichler, President of ETH Zurich presented ideas, technology, and innovative research at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in China this week. The Annual Meeting of the New Champions, held in Tianjin from 10 – 12 September 2014, hosted participants from more than 90 countries including leaders from politics and multi-national corporations to academia. The event attracted leaders from multi-national corporations, international government bodies, major media outlets, and academia affording ETH Zurich with a valuable opportunity to portray its research and educational activities and the real world impact of such activities in an international forum. Ralph Eichler said, "The meeting offered fellow university presidents the opportunity to discuss the future of science and technology education." During the Annual Meeting of the New Champions, he launched the ETH Zurich IdeasLab. The IdeasLab looked at the latest approaches to detecting and building resilience into emerging global risk with a discussion on the institution's strategic approach to identify, understand, and model risk. His presentation was followed by engaging sessions with Peter Edwards, Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre; Wolfgang Kröger, ETH Risk Center; Wanda Mimra, Professor of Risk and Insurance Economics; and Sonia Seneviratne, Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics. The ETH IdeasLab explored the paradigm shift taking shape in the field of integrated risk management.
As the world becomes increasingly complex, the economic, political, environmental, social, and technological infrastructure that shapes our lives faces a greater exposure to risk. The 2011 tsunami that triggered the disaster at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power facility in Japan demonstrated how human-factors in corporate decision making can be less than optimal in the face of catastrophic circumstances. Innovation will be necessary to support the interdependent and large scale urban ecosystems of services – electrical power, for example, that will be required of future megacities. The IdeasLab focused on strategizing new models to defray risk by sharing it between the public and private sectors; it explored new models for adapting to extreme climate changes; and bolstering resilience in urban spaces to sustain future megacities. Peter Edwards continued the resilience theme as a panelist during a special session that brought art and science together.
Jennifer Rupp, Professor of Electrochemical Materials, ETH Zurich, also presented at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in China in a special session titled, "Discover! New Material Science" and was selected as a scientist on "The Energy Revolution," a WEF panel that discussed smart grid technologies and off-grid energy storage solutions with politicians and economists.
"It was an incredible opportunity and an honour to be selected among my peers at other top tier universities as one of the 40 World Economic Forum 2014 Young Scientists. Connecting science, economics, and politics with new technologies to more efficiently generate, store, and transmit energy is an asset of tomorrow's global development on renewable energy use. The WEF China is a fantastic forum to contribute and exchange on this important change in the energy landscape," says Rupp who reported on new material architectures and tech trends for new energy storage solutions, low energy data storage, and computing devices. Today`s scientific, technical and political challenge is to profit most efficiently on new storage of renewable energy (solar, wind, bio mass) at a high enough density to enable the transition away from nuclear and fossil fuel-based energy. Smart new material architectures and tuning their electrochemical-structure properties in solids to new devices is the key. On behalf of her research team, Rupp presented a concept for the first Swiss All Solid State Battery that allows the efficient recycling of waste heat (e.g., from industry processes) to accelerate the charging time and to increase storage density by the use of new Li-garnet-based solid electrolyte materials.
In addition, Jennifer Rupp presented the novel "memristor" information storage and logic materials and devices that show high potential to replace classic transistors in computing and storage circuits due to their ns-speed write/read operation and high storage density at low power consumption. Read more about Jennifer Rupp.