TEDS Global speakers

TED PROGRAM SPEAKERS 2012

TED Global 2012 here...

TED Speakers program

Boaz Almog
Quantum Researcher Boaz Almog uses quantum physics to levitate and trap objects in midair. Call it "quantum levitation."

In October 2011, Boaz Almog demonstrated how a superconducting disc can be trapped in a surrounding magnetic field to levitate above it, a phenomenon called “quantum levitation.” This demonstration, seemingly taken from a sci-fi movie, is the result of many years of R&D on high-quality superconductors. By using exceptional superconductors cooled in liquid nitrogen, Boaz and his colleague Mishael Azoulay at the superconductivity group at Tel-Aviv University (lead by Prof. Guy Deutscher) were able to demonstrate a quantum effect that, although well known to physicists worldwide, had never been seen and demonstrated in such a compelling way.
quantumlevitation.com

Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Michael Anti
Blogger Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a key figure in China's new journalism, explores the growing power of the Chinese internet.

One morning in 2001, Michael Anti work up to find himself a nonperson: His Facebook profile, with 1,000+ contacts, had been suspended. Anti, whose given name is Zhao Jing, ran up against Facebook's real-name policy--but he points out that for Chinese bloggers and information activists, the pseudonym is an important protection for the free exchange of information.

Facebook itself is blocked in China (along with Twitter and YouTube), but the country boasts some 500 million netizens--including 200 million microbloggers on sites like Sina Weibo, a freewheeling though monitored platform for text and photo updates that offers, perhaps for the first time, a space for public debate in China. It's not a western-style space, Anti clarifies, but for China it is revolutionary: It's the first national public sphere. Microblogs' role became clear in the wake of the high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in 2011, when Weibo became a locus of activism and complaint--and a backchannel that refuted official reports and has continued to play a key role in more recent events.
@MRanti

Session 12: Public Sphere
Fri Jun 29, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Vicki Arroyo
Environmental Policy Influencer Vicki Arroyo uses environmental law and her background in biology and ecology to help prepare for global climate change.

The climate is quickly changing. Scientists increasingly talk of a new period in the Earth's history, the "anthropocene", in which human impact on the planet has become dominant. Yet we remain unprepared to deal with the consequences: specifically, the disruption and cost. Lawyer Vicki Arroyo, the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, works on climate mitigation and adaptation policies as viable solutions to climate change’s inevitable disruptions to current practices. Using the best available science, Arroyo collaborates with US policymakers at both the state and federal level to develop "planetary management" strategies.
GeorgetownClimate.org
@Climate_Center
Session 7: Long Term
Wed Jun 27, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
B
Massimo Banzi
Physical Computing Guru Massimo Banzi co-founded Arduino, which makes affordable open-source microcontrollers for interactive projects, from art installations to an automatic plant waterer.

Computer-based interactivity used to be beyond the reach of most artists, designers, and other electronics amateurs who wanted to make their work respond to light, sound and other stimulus by moving, beeping, tweeting. Then, in 2005, Italian engineer Massimo Banzi and his team created the Arduino microcontroller, a small, cheap programmable computer, bringing interactive technology to the masses.

With a variety of sensors, the Arduino is versatile and easy to use. Since its inception, the device has popped up in projects as varied as an exhibit on brains at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to a DIY kit that sends a Tweet when your houseplant needs water.
massimobanzi.com
@MBanzi
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Mina Bissell
Cancer Researcher Mina Bissell studies how cancer interacts with our bodies, searching for clues to how cancer's microenvironment influences its growth.

Mina Bissell's groundbreaking research has proven that cancer is not only caused by cancer cells. It is caused by an interaction between cancer cells and the surrounding cellular micro-environment. In healthy bodies, normal tissue homeostasis and architecture inhibit the progression of cancers. But changes in the microenvironment--following an injury or a wound for instance--can shift the balance. This explains why many people harbor potentially malignant tumors in their bodies without knowing it and never develop cancer, and why tumors often develop when tissue is damaged or when the immune system is suppressed.

The converse can also be true. In a landmark 1997 experiment, mutated mammary cells, when dosed with an antibody and placed into a normal cellular micro-environment, behaved normally. This powerful insight from Bissell's lab may lead to new ways of treating existing and preventing potential cancers.
Bissell Lab

Session 11: Taking Another Look
Fri Jun 29, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Cognitive Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies the social brain--the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people--and how it develops in adolescents.

Remember being a teenager? Rocked internally with hormones, outwardly with social pressures, you sometimes wondered what was going on in your head. So does Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. And what she and others in her field are finding is: The adolescent brain really is different.

New brain imaging research and clever experiments are revealing how the cortex develops--the executive part of the brain that handles things like planning, self-awareness, analysis of consequences and behavioral choices. It turns out that these regions develop more slowly during adolescence, and in fascinating ways that relate to risk-taking, peer pressure and learning.

Which leads to a bigger question: How can we better target education to speak to teenagers' growing, changing brains?
The Blakemore Lab
@SJBlakemore
Session 7: Long Term
Wed Jun 27, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Andrew Blum
Network Author For his new book, Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us.

In his first book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum wanted to capture the "spirit of place" of the Internet. Because as far-reaching and virtual as our connection to the Net is, the signals travel on good old-fashioned cabling, glass fibers jacketed in polymer, running through conduit under streets. The immaterial Internet runs on a very material, industry-like infrastructure. So that when Alaska senator Ted Stevens called the Internet "a series of tubes"...well, he was kind of right, and he did inspire the title of this utterly fascinating book, which explores the switches, data centers, sea crossings and many, many tubes that make up our online reality.

Blum is a writer for Wired, Popular Science, Metropolis, and more.
andrewblum.net
@AJBlum
Session 12: Public Sphere
Fri Jun 29, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Rachel Botsman
Sharing Innovator Rachel Botsman writes and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live.

Rachel Botsman is the co-author, with Roo Rogers, of the book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, and she writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live. Her more recent work focuses on trust and reputational capital.

She is the founder of CCLab, an innovation incubator that works with startups, big businesses and local governments to deliver innovative solutions based on the ideas of Collaborative Consumption. She has consulted to Fortune 500 companies and leading nonprofit organizations around the world on brand and innovation strategy, and was a former director at the William J. Clinton Foundation.

rachelbotsman.com
@RachelBotsman
Session 8: Talk to Strangers
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Hannah Brock
Guzheng Virtuoso 12-year-old Hannah Brock plays the guzheng, an ancient Chinese instrument she studies over Skype.

How lucky we are, those of us who find what we love early on. The daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, by age 3 1/2, Hannah Brock had started playing the drums at her school in Beijing, and by age 4 had started on piano and the guzheng, an ancient instrument that looks to Western eyes something like a zither. By 8 years old she was playing shows and giving short lectures on the instrument. Now, living in the UK, she's part of the Aldeburgh Young Musicians program and studies at Perse Girls School.

The guzheng itself, played by plucking, strumming and string-bending, allows for a huge range of expression in both classical and modern contexts. It's played around the world, but Brock's own master teacher, Ms. Guo, is based in Beijing. So when Brock moved to the UK, she and Ms Guo continued their classes -- over Skype.
Bio, Aldeburgh Young Musicians

Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Heather Brooke
Journalist Heather Brooke campaigns for freedom of information one secret document at a time.

Heather Brooke is a freelance journalist and freedom of information campaigner. In 2005, she filed one of the very first requests under the UK's Freedom of Information Act, asking to see the expense reports of Members of Parliament. The request was blocked, modified and refiled, and blocked again...but the years-long quest to view expense documents, and the subsequent investigation, led to 2009's parliamentary expenses scandal--causing the first forced resignation of the Speaker of the House in 300 years.

Brooke worked as a political and crime reporter in the US before moving to Britain, where she writes for the national papers. She has published three books: Your Right to Know, The Silent State, and 2011's The Revolution Will Be Digitised. It was while researching her latest book that she obtained a leak from Wikileaks of the full batch of 251,287 US diplomatic cables and worked with the Guardian newspaper on that investigation.
HeatherBrooke.org
@NewsBrooke
Session 9: The Upside of Transparency
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
C
Sarah Caddick
Neuroscientist and Policy Advisor; Guest Host at TEDGlobal 2012 Fifteen years ago, Sarah Caddick left the research lab to focus on “bigger-picture” things: science planning, policy and communication.

Sarah Caddick used to study neuroscience—specifically, the mechanisms responsible for epileptic seizures. But in 1998 she shifted from a person who does science to one who facilitates it.

Today, Caddick is the Neuroscience Advisor to David Sainsbury, a British businessman, philanthropist and politician, and serves as a senior advisor at his Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Gatsby is a key funder of scientific research in several areas, including neuroscience, and together with the Wellcome Trust is building a new research center in London to help explore the neural circuitry responsible for the behavior of human beings.

For TEDGlobal she has curated, and will guest-host, the session “Misbehaving Beautifully.”
gatsby.org.uk

Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Leslie T. Chang
Journalist In her reporting and writing, Leslie T. Chang explores the lives of workers in China, focusing on the experience of women.

Leslie T. Chang's book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China traces the lives of Chunming and Min, two young women working in Dongguan, a factory city in South China. Leaving their home villages far behind in pursuit of work, Chunming and Min are part of an estimated 10 million young migrants (estimated to be 70 percent women) who work in China's booming factories, living in a "perpetual present," forging individual and nontraditional lives amid the breakneck pace of manufacturing.

As Chang gets to know these two women and others, she reveals the harsh realities of China's spectacular industrial growth, and also explores her family's own history of migration from mainland China.

Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She is now based in Egypt.
leslietchang.com
@LeslieTChang
Session 5: Shades of Openness
Wed Jun 27, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Robin Chase
Transport Networker With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors.

If she weren't a proven entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, a dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. If she weren't such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a startup whiz. Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on a car-sharing scheme imported from Europe and co-founded Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key, location awareness and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one.

Now Chase has launched Buzzcar, a car-sharing service in France with a twist: instead of a fleet of green Zipcars, the service lets users share their own cars and make money off their unused capacity. Call it peer-to-peer auto rental.
buzzcar.com
@RMChase
Session 8: Talk to Strangers
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Keith Chen
Behavioral Economist Keith Chen's new research suggests that the language you speak may impact the way you think about your future.

Does the future look like a different world to you, or more like an extension of the present? In an intriguing piece of research, Keith Chen suggests that your attitude about the future has a strong relationship to the language you speak. In a nutshell, some languages refer to the future using verb helpers like "will" and "shall," while others don't have specific verbs to refer to future actions. Chen correlated these two different language types with remarkably different rates of saving for the future (guess who saves more?). He calls this connection the "futurity" of languages. The paper is yet unpublished, but it's already generated discussion. Chen says: "While the data I analyze don’t allow me to completely understand what role language plays in these relationships, they suggest that there is something really remarkable to be explained about the interaction of language and economic decision-making. These correlations are so strong and survive such an aggressive set of controls, that the chances they arise by random lies somewhere between one in 10,000 and one in 10^32."

Chen excels in asking unusual questions to yield original results. Another recent work (with Yale colleague and TEDGlobal 2009 speaker Laurie Santos) examined how monkeys view economic risk--with surprisingly humanlike irrationality. While a current working paper asks a surprising, if rhetorical, question: Does it make economic sense for a woman to become a physician?
Bio, Yale University
Facebook Page
Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Gabriella Coleman
Digital Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman uses ethnographic approaches to study online communities, hacker culture, and digital political activism.

What are the ethics of online communities? What are the legalities of digital political activism? Gabriella "Biella" Coleman draws from her training as an anthropologist to answer such questions about Internet cultures.

Starting in 2009, Coleman focused her talents on Anonymous, an amorphous community born in 2003 on the online image board 4chan. Anonymous started out online, where it remains very active through various campaigns, but in recent years it has also stepped out in the “real” world, playing pranks on The Church of Scientology and participating in Occupy Wall Street. Coleman’s ongoing chronicles of Anonymous reveal the groups’ fascinating evolution.
gabriellacoleman.org
@BiellaColeman
Session 5: Shades of Openness
Wed Jun 27, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Amy Cuddy
Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions—and even our own body chemistry—simply by changing body positions.

Amy Cuddy wasn’t supposed to become a successful scientist. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to finish her undergraduate degree. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish her undergraduate degree.

But she proved them wrong. Today, Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments impact people from the classroom to the boardroom. And her training as a classical dancer (another skill she regained after her injury) is evident in her fascinating work on "power posing"--how your body position influences others and even your own brain.
Bio, Harvard Business School
@AmyjcCuddy
Session 8: Talk to Strangers
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
D
Raghu Dixit
Fusion Musician Raghu Dixit plays a unique, rousing blend of Indian and Western influences.

With soulful vocals sung in his own language of Kannada, Raghu Dixit plays what he calls “Indian folk-rock, with world rhythms creeping in.” His mix of pop and regional Indian sounds, backed by his acoustic guitar and his band, the Raghu Dixit Project, has captivated a global audience and made him a star in his home province of Karnataka.

Dixit himself was trained as a microbiologist, and was a pharmaceutical researcher when he heard the call to play music for his living. Now he fills stadiums in India, writes music for dance and film, and plays festivals around the world (including multiple performances at Glastonbury last summer).
raghudixit.com
@Raghu_Dixit
Session 1: Critical Crossroads
Tues Jun 26, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Jamie Drummond
Anti-poverty activist Jamie Drummond co-founded the advocacy organization ONE, whose central themes are ending extreme poverty and fighting the AIDS pandemic.

ONE (whose co-founders include rock star Bono) advocates for aid, trade, debt cancellation, investment and governance reform to help the citizens of emerging countries drive and determine their own destiny. Right now, the group's focus is the UN's Millennium Development Goals, eight benchmarks for health, justice and well-being announced in 2000 and targeted to be achieved in 2015. ONE is working to accelerate attention on the MDGs in the last four years of the challenge.
one.org

Session 7: Long Term
Wed Jun 27, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
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Kirby Ferguson
Filmmaker and Remixer Kirby Ferguson explores creativity in a world where "everything is a remix."

What's a remix? In Kirby Ferguson's view, any piece of art that contains a recognizable reference to another work--a quote from a lyric, a borrowed riff, a filmic homage. Which makes almost everything a remix, from a Led Zeppelin song to a classic film from George Lucas. His deeply researched and insanely fun four-part web series, "Everything Is a Remix," dives into the question: Is remixing a form of creativity, a production of the new on the shoulders of what precedes it, or is it just copying? He comes out firmly on the side of creativity, calling for protections for people who, with good intentions, weave together bits of existing culture into something fresh and relevant.

His next web series is called "This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory," an attempt to explore how US politics got that way.
everythingisaremix.info
@RemixEverything
Session 12: Public Sphere
Fri Jun 29, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
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Pankaj Ghemawat
Globalization Thinker Our world is not flat, says Pankaj Ghemawat--it's at best semi-globalized, with limited interactions between countries and economies.

There seem to be two leading views of globalization: either that it is done and the world is flat (popularized by Tom Friedman) or that it has led to a world dominated by corporations (Naomi Klein). Pankaj Ghemawat disagrees with both--and his case is convincing. His most recent book, World 3.0, based on extensive research and backed up with abundant data, explores the true face of globalization--and shows that the world is not one vast market, but many small, interconnected, discrete entities, with varying degrees of openness to one another. That even the most open economies are still relatively closed. That we live in a world of semi-globalization at best. Ghemawat also refutes the assumption that globalization leads to homogeneization. According to The Economist, World 3.0 “should be read by anyone who wants to understand the most important economic development of our time.”

A professor of strategic management at IESE Business School in Spain, in his newest work, he explores another kind of networked economy--the cross-border "geography" of Facebook and Twitter followers.
Ghemawat.com
@PankajGhemawat
Session 4: Globality
Wed Jun 27, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Marc Goodman
Global Security Futurist Marc Goodman works to prevent future crimes and acts of terrorism, even those security threats not yet invented.

Marc Goodman imagines the future crime and terrorism challenges we will all face as a result of advancing technologies. He thinks deeply about the disruptive security implications of robotics, artificial intelligence, social data, virtual reality and synthetic biology. Technology, he says, is affording exponentially growing power to non-state actors and rogue players, with significant consequences for our common global security. How to respond to these threats? The crimefighting solution might just lie in crowdsourcing.

Goodman heads the Future Crimes Institute, a think tank and clearinghouse that researches and advises on the security and risk implications of emerging technologies. He also serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at Singularity University. MarcGoodman.net
@FutureCrimes
Session 9: The Upside of Transparency
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Antony Gormley
Sculptor Antony Gormley's work plays with the human form in space.

Antony Gormley's work places human forms into eye-opening new contexts, asking us to reconsider our own place in the world. In his 2007/2010 piece "Event Horizon," he placed several dozen life-size casts of his own body on urban rooftops, where they looked out over streets and squares. Does the viewer imagine herself watched by these looming figures--or imagine being one of them? More recently, his cast iron figures have been disseminated over 150 square km in the mountain pastures of the Austrian Alps, all standing at exactly 2039 meters of altitude. "They are a mediation between the domestication of the valleys and the idea of the peak,” Gormley said of the project, codenamed "Horizon Field." Or take his work "One & Other," in which he curated members of the public to stand on an elevated plinth over Trafalgar Square in London for one hour at a time, creating a constantly changing celebration of humanity.

This spring, he collaborated with the choreographer Hofesh Shechter to create the powerful "Survivor," a piece with hundreds of dancers moving their own forms through space and time.
AntonyGormley.com
@AntonyGormley
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Macy Gray
Singer/Songwriter Macy Gray's new album of covers are the "songs that I would’ve probably written in another life.”

You might know Macy Gray from her massive single “I Try”--but there's so much more to know. A gifted songwriter and idiosyncratically wonderful singer, Gray has been overturning expectation since her 2000 debut CD, On How Life Is, which became a global hit.

For her new release, Covered, Gray worked with producer Hal Wilner to re-imagine, and find new dark passages in, beloved indie-rock love songs from Eurythmics, Metallica, the Arcade Fire, and more. As she crawls inside the lyrics to "Creep" by Radiohead, you can hear her exploring both the swing and the pain of this classic confessional, reworking it and other songs on the record to reflect her worldview as an artist, a mom, an actor, a fan of big ideas (she hung out with Bill Gates at TED2011) and a creative force.
MacyGray.com
@MacyGraysLife
Session 3: Building Blocks
Tues Jun 26, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
H
Michael Hansmeyer
Computational Architect Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of algorithms and computation to generate architectural form.

Classical architecture is defined by "orders"--ways to connect a column to a building, to articulate the joining of materials and structural forces. Colloquially, these orders are based on elemental forms: the tree trunk, the plank, the scroll, the leaf. Michael Hansmeyer is adding a new elemental form: the subdivision algorithm. He turns his math and programming skills to making ornate, organic, hyperdetailed columns generated from lines of code and then comped up in cross-sections of cardboard, almost as if they're being 3D printed. His latest work with cupolas and domes is even more mesmerizing, like looking deep inside an organic form of near-unbearable complexity.
Michael-Hansmeyer.com

Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Neil Harbisson
Sonochromatic Cyborg Artist Neil Harbisson's "eyeborg" allows him to hear colors, even those beyond the range of sight.

Born with the inability to see color, Neil Harbisson wears a prosthetic device--he calls it an "eyeborg"--that allows him to hear the spectrum, even those colors beyond the range of human sight. His unique experience of color informs his artwork--which, until he met cyberneticist Adam Montandon at a college lecture, was strictly black-and-white. By working with Montandon, and later with Peter Kese, Harbisson helped design a lightweight eyepiece that he wears on his forehead that transposes the light frequencies of color hues into sound frequencies.

Neil's artwork blurs the boundaries between sight and sound. In his Sound Portraits series, he listens to the colors of faces to create a microtonal chord. In the City Colours project, he expresses the capital cities of Europe in two colors (Monaco is azure and salmon pink; Bratislava yellow and turquoise).
Harbisson.com
@NeilHarbisson
Session 5: Shades of Openness
Wed Jun 27, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Imogen Heap
Diva Imogen Heap's aching voice and surprising electronics infuse countless videos and iPods with bone-chilling atmospherics.

Classically trained composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer Imogen Heap finds her muse in unlikely places. She's mined sonic mystery from sources ranging from cardboard tubes to cheap samplers to the data gloves--not to mention her own vocal cords.

A relentless experimenter, Heap's latest song cycle is built around some 900 fan-submitted "sound seeds," or samples of everyday sounds. The first six of these "Heapsongs" have been released via her website, and include the lovely "Propeller Seeds," inspired by a chance meeting at a past TEDGlobal. During this year's TEDGlobal she will be recording a song in various locations in Edinburgh, "anywhere that has a piano and they let me turn up with a microphone."

She has also composed the orchestral score for the crowdsourced nature film "Love the Earth" and is just back from a residency in China.
imogenheap.com
@ImogenHeap
Session 11: Taking Another Look
Fri Jun 29, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Margaret Heffernan
Management Thinker Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns (like conflict avoidance and selective blindness) that leads organizations astray.

How do organizations think? In her new book, Wilful Blindness, and in trenchant articles, Margaret Heffernan examines why businesses (and people) ignore the obvious--and count the consequences, from the global financial crisis to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. We sidestep touchy issues to avoid conflict, but as she says: "Conflict is thinking. And organizations that don't have any conflict aren't thinking."

Coming from a TV production background, Heffernan became a serial entrepreneur and CEO in the wild early days of web business in the 1990s. She became a writer, as her biography puts it, "because nothing she read captured the reality of running companies."
MHeffernan.com
@M_Heffernan
Session 12: Public Sphere
Fri Jun 29, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Kathy Hinde
Bird Piano Creator Kathy Hinde is a musician and inventor whose latest musical instrument is played by birds.

Imagine the soundboard inside an old upright piano as a blank canvas for sound--strung with wires from post to post, but with no means of plucking them. Kathy Hinde's "Piano Migrations" transforms that soundboard into a kinetic sound sculpture. Videos of birds on electricity lines are projected directly onto the piano to provide an everchanging musical score: the birds’ movements trigger small machines to twitch and flutter on the piano strings. In this work, nature controls machines to create delicate music.
kathyhinde.co.uk
@BirdTwitchr
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
J
Ellen Jorgensen
Biologist and Community Science Advocate Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, which brings scientific exploration and understanding to the masses.

After many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotechnology industry, Ellen Jorgensen needed a change. So, in 2009, bolstered by her belief in public science literacy, education, and outreach, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, she founded GenSpace, the world’s first government-compliant DIY biotech lab.

Despite criticism that some research should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive. Amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research there on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen's own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants from Alaska, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily.
genspace.org
@FeyScientist
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
K
Parag Khanna
Global Theorist; Guest Host at TEDGlobal 2012 Geopolitical expert Parag Khanna foresees a future where American influence is waning, and the new powerhouses (and threats) may not be the players you'd expect.

Political scientist Parag Khanna travels the world with his eyes open--and has become a trenchant critic of the standard wisdom about the second and third worlds. Khanna's 2008 book, The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century, looks at the epic political manipulations of nations small and large struggling to end up at the top of the global heap.

In his 2011 book, How to Run The World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, he limns a 21st century that has much in common with the feudal 16th century, where non-state actors have as much influence on the course of world events as countries do.

And in a new short book for TED, Hybrid Reality, Parag and Ayesh Khanna explore our complex relationship with science and technology--and how it could create new and unexpected lifestyles and social structures. He's a director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, where he helps explore human-technology co-evolution.

For TEDGlobal he has curated and will guest-host the session “The Upside of Transparency”.
paragkhanna.com
@ParagKhanna
Session 9: The Upside of Transparency
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Daphne Koller
Educator With her startup Coursera, Daphne Koller is helping bring classes (and tests) from great universities online.

At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne's Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.

But her parallel passion is helping students around the world access the same great teaching that her Stanford kids get. She's developed innovative models for online learning and is a co-founder of a new startup, Coursera, that will do just that. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera's platform supports also the other vital aspect of the classroom: the tests and assignments that reinforce and pace learning.
Coursera.org
@Coursera
Session 3: Building Blocks
Tues Jun 26, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Ivan Krastev
Public intellectual From his home base in Bulgaria, Ivan Krastev thinks about European democracy--and how to reframe it.

Political scientist Ivan Krastev is watching the Euro crisis closely, fascinated by what it reveals about Europe's place in history: What does it mean for the democratic model? Will a fragmented Europe return to nationalist identity politics?

In his latest work, Krastev places recent events on a continuum of five revolutions since the 1960s: The socio-cultural revolution of the 1960s. Market revolutions of the 1980s. Central Europe in 1989 (which brought socio-cultural and market revolutions together). The communications revolution. And finally the revolution in neurosciences, which lays bare the irrationality and emotional manipulation in popular politics. As a result, we've become extremely open and connected, while on the flipside cementing a mistrust of elites. Can democracy flourish when a mistrust of elites is a permanent feature?

Krastev is the chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, in Sofia, a research and analysis NGO.
Centre for Liberal Strategies

Session 5: Shades of Openness
Wed Jun 27, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
L
Hassine Labaied
Wind Energy Innovator With his team in Tunisia, Hassine Labaied has developed a breakthrough technology for capturing the energy of the wind.

Leaving a career in banking, Labaied co-founded and is CEO of Saphon, a cleantech startup with a new design for capturing wind energy that contradicts the dominant technology of the three-bladed turbine. Instead of spinning a rotor like in a windmill, in the Saphon prototypes the wind is harnessed by a sail-like structure that creates a back-and-forth motion. The motion is converted into mechanical energy, then to hydraulic energy, which can be transformed into electricity or stored.
saphonenergy.com

Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Robert Legato
Visual Effects Guru Robert Legato creates surprising and creative visual illusions for movies.

Did we really see what we thought we saw? Robert Legato creates visual illusions for movies--thinking deeply both about vfx's expanding tech power and the truly new creative processes that can result. Legato won his first Oscar in 1998 for his work on James Cameron's Titanic, after several years in television supervising effects on two Star Trek series. His 2012 Oscar win for Hugo, the 3D film about a boy who lives alone in a Paris train station, underscores his fascinating partnership with Martin Scorsese--doing digital effects on documentaries and new classics like The Departed.

He's worked with the big effects houses like Sony Imageworks and Digital Domain, but is now fascinated with the nimble new workflows made possible with digital tools. He designed the "virtual cinematography pipeline" that let James Cameron shoot Avatar like a feature film, not a software project. We know that fx can create new worlds--but how can these tools unlock new creativity?
Bio, IMDB

Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Beau Lotto
Neuroscientist, Artist Beau Lotto is founder of Lottolab, a hybrid art studio and science lab. With glowing, interactive sculpture -- and old-fashioned peer-reviewed research--he's illuminating the mysteries of the brain's visual system.

"Let there be perception," was evolution's proclamation, and so it was that all creatures, from honeybees to humans, came to see the world not as it is, but as was most useful. This uncomfortable place--where what an organism's brain sees diverges from what is actually out there--is what Beau Lotto and his team at Lottolab are exploring through their dazzling art-sci experiments and public illusions. Their Bee Matrix installation, for example, places a live bee in a transparent enclosure where gallerygoers may watch it seek nectar in a virtual meadow of luminous Plexiglas flowers. (Bees, Lotto will tell you, see colors much like we humans do.) The data captured isn't just discarded, either: it's put to good use in probing scientific papers, and sometimes in more exhibits.

At their home in London’s Science Museum, the lab holds "synesthetic workshops" where kids and adults make abstract paintings that computers interpret into music, and they host regular Lates--evenings of science, music and "mass experiments." Lotto is passionate about involving people from all walks of life in research on perception--both as subjects and as fellow researchers. One such program, called "i,scientist," in fact led to the publication of the first ever peer-reviewed scientific paper written by schoolchildren ("Blackawton Bees," December 2010). It starts, "Once upon a time ..."

These and Lotto's other conjurings are slowly, charmingly bending the science of perception--and our perceptions of what science can be.
lottolab.org

Session 3: Building Blocks
Tues Jun 26, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
M
John Maeda
Artist John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

When John Maeda became president of the legendary Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2008, he told the Wall Street Journal, "Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology."

In his fascinating career as a programmer and an artist, he's always been committed to blurring the lines between the two disciplines. As a student at MIT, studying computer programming, the legendary Muriel Cooper persuaded him to follow his parallel passion for fine art and design. And when computer-aided design began to explode in the mid-1990s, Maeda was in a perfect position at the MIT Media Lab to influence and shape the form, helping typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web.

At RISD, Maeda is leading the "STEAM" movement--adding an "A" for Art to the education acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)--and experiencing firsthand the transformation brought by social media.
maedastudio.com
@JohnMaeda
Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Becci Manson
Photo Retoucher After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Becci Manson and her volunteer colleagues cleaned and restored hundreds of damaged photos.

Becci Manson flew to Japan after last year's disaster, determined to help with cleanup and rebuilding.

As she writes: "During those 3 weeks of digging ditches and gutting homes I discovered vast amounts of photos that had been found and handed into evacuation centers. The photos were dirty, wet and homeless. As I spent my first day hand-cleaning them, I couldnt help but think how easy it would be for me, my colleagues and my friends to fix some of them. So we did."

She spent the next 6 months organizing a worldwide network of volunteer retouchers, restoring these photos and training local All Hands volunteer teams to hand-clean the photos handed in to local authorities. These teams have restored hundreds and hand-cleaned well over one hundred thousand photos.
rebeccamanson.com

Session 11: Taking Another Look
Fri Jun 29, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Jason McCue
Lawyer Jason McCue litigates against terrorists, dictators and others who seem above the law, using the legal and judicial system in innovative ways.

Jason McCue uses the legal system of the UK (and increasingly the world) to fight for human rights. In 2009, he won a landmark civil case at the high court in Belfast that resulted in a settlement for victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing by the Real IRA--after attempts to prosecute the group in criminal courts had failed. It was a bold legal strategy now being copied for other victims, such as those of Libyan-supported terrorism and of the attacks in London and Mumbai. In September 2011 he and his firm launched another strategy for prosecuting Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, on counts of torture and hostage taking: creating a "prosecution kit" to be sent to courts around the world. Wherever Lukashenko travels, he now faces the prospect of prosecution.

McCue is also a partner, with his wife, TV star Mariella Frostrup, in the GREAT Initiative: the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust.
McCue Law
@JasonMcCue
Session 8: Talk to Strangers
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Jane McGonigal
Game Designer Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.

Jane McGonigal asks: Why doesn't the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we're surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. In her work as a game designer and director of game R&D at the Institute for the Future, she creates games that use mobile and digital technologies to turn everyday spaces into playing fields, and everyday people into teammates. Her game-world insights can explain--and improve--the way we learn, work, solve problems, and lead our real lives.

Several years ago she suffered a serious concussion, and she created a multiplayer game to get through it, opening it up to anyone to play. In “Superbetter,” players set a goal (health or wellness) and invite others to play with them--and to keep them on track. While most games, and most videogames, have traditionally been about winning, we are now seeing increasing collaboration and games played together to solve problems.
janemcgonigal.com
iftf.org
Session 8: Talk to Strangers
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Wayne McGregor
Dancer and Choreographer Wayne McGregor and his dancers explore the uncharted territory where mind and movement intersect.

Wayne McGregor is a man in perpetual motion. When not incubating new approaches to choreography with his company, Random Dance, he creates works for ballet, theatre and opera companies worldwide–including the Royal Ballet in London, where he's choreographer in residence, and contemporary dance powerhouse Sadler's Wells. In ongoing collaborations with psychologists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, Random dancers are helping researchers measure and analyze how the brain works in the creative process. Whatʼs emerged so far is that we can, and do, think with our bodies.

McGregor is no stranger to pop culture: he's designed movement for Thom Yorke of Radiohead and for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This spring he collaborated with DJ Mark Ronson on Carbon Life, a piece for the Royal Ballet with vocals from Boy George. And he's creating a new dance piece for thousands of dancers in Londonʼs Trafalgar Square on Saturday, July 14.
randomdance.org
@WayneMcGregor
Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Robyn Meredith
Journalist Robyn Meredith reports on the Asia-Pacific region for Bloomberg TV and writes brilliantly about China's changing place in the world.

Robyn Meredith is a correspondent for Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong, covering business and financial news across the Asia-Pacific region. She's the author of “The Elephant and the Dragon," a remarkable analysis of the rise of India and China over the past decades.

Her insights into China stem from extensive travel across Asia and a decade's reporting on the booming Asian markets. But her view spans across the vast landscape of globalization--as it reshapes business, military strategy, technology and the global labor market.

She has previously written for the New York Times and for Forbes magazine.
@RobynMeredith88

Session 1: Critical Crossroads
Tues Jun 26, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Read Montague
Behavioral Neuroscientist What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work.

Until recently, the world's curiosity about our brains seemed to focus on abnormal behavior. Which of course left a big question unanswered: Do we even know what "normal behavior" is? Through the landmark Roanoke Brain Study, Read Montague is hoping to find that out, exploring the everyday tasks of brains--making decisions, understanding social context, and relating to others--by neuroimaging some 5,000 people, ages 18-85, over a period of many years.

Montague's teams in Virginia and in London lead fascinating research in computational neuroscience (how the brain's "machinery" works), offering insight into the relationship between the social and cognitive functions. For instance, a recent study from his group found that in small social groups, some people will alter the expression of their IQ in reaction to social pressures--revising, in almost all cases, downward.
roanokebrainstudy.org
research.vtc.vt.edu
Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Catarina Mota
Maker A TEDGlobal Fellow, Catarina Mota plays with "smart materials"--like shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric structures that react to voltage--and encourages others to do so too.

A maker of things and open-source advocate, Catarina Mota is co-founder of openMaterials.org, a collaborative project dedicated to do-it-yourself experimentation with smart materials. This is a new class of materials that change in response to stimuli: conductive ink, shape-memory plastics, etc. Her goal is to encourage the making of things; to that end, she teaches hands-on workshops on high-tech materials and simple circuitry for both young people and adults--with a side benefit of encouraging interest in science, technology and knowledge-sharing. She's working on her PhD researching the social impact of open and collaborative practices for the development of technologies. In other words: Do we make better stuff when we work together? She is also a co-founder of Lisbon's hackerspace altLab.
openmaterials.org
@CatLX
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Daria Musk
Web Music Sensation Daria Musk created a new global music venue by turning Google+ video Hangouts into live interactive concerts.

A young singer and songwriter with big dreams, an entrepreneurial streak and a global-sized heart, Daria Musk is pushing the boundaries in music and social media. In the summer of 2011, a weekend of lugging her guitar amps through the rain and an invitation to join Google+ sparked the idea to perform a live concert via the social network's video chat feature, Hangouts. In just a few months she turned from a local unknown to a global star, with more than 1.3 million fans ("G+niuses", she calls them) all around the world.

Her breakthrough concerts last up to 8 hours, with audiences of hundreds of thousands watching and interacting online, live. She’s now taking her online connection to the live stage–creating interactive global concerts everywhere she goes.
DariaMusk.com
@DariaMusk
Session 12: Public Sphere
Fri Jun 29, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
N
Robert Neuwirth
Author To research his new book, "Stealth of Nations," Robert Neuwirth spent four years among street vendors, smugglers and “informal” import/export firms.

In his latest book, Stealth of Nations, Robert Neuwirth challenges conventional thinking by examining the world's informal economy close up. To do so, he spent four years living and working with street vendors and gray marketers, to capture its scope, its vigor--and its lessons. He calls it “System D” and argues that it is not a hidden economy, but a very visible, growing, effective one, fostering entrepreneurship and representing 1.8 million jobs worldwide.

Before this, for his previous book Shadow Cities (also, a TEDTalk), he spent two years exploring one of the most profound trends of our time: the mass migration of the world's population into urban shantytowns. A billion people live as squatters. Life in a favela, slum, shantytown is hard: no water, no transport, no sewage. But in the squatter cities of Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul and Mumbai, Neuwirth discovered restaurants, markets, clinics and effective forms of self-organization.

Our challenge, Neuwirth says, isn't to end squatter cities or shut down gray markets--but to engage and empower those who live and work in them.

StealthofNations.blogspot.com
@RobertNeuwirth
Session 4: Globality
Wed Jun 27, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Beth Noveck
Open-Government Expert A lawyer by training and a techie by inclination, Beth Noveck works to build data transparency into government.

How can our data strengthen our democracies? In her work, Beth Noveck explores what "opengov" really means--not just freeing data from databases, but creating meaningful ways for citizens to collaborate with their governments.

As the US's first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration. Among other projects, she designed and built Peer-to-Patent, the U.S. government’s first expert network. She's now working on the design for ORGPedia, a platform for mashing up and visualizing public and crowdsourced data about corporations. Her new book, The Networked State, will appear in 2013.
@BethNoveck

Session 9: The Upside of Transparency
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
O
Amy O'Toole
Student Amy O'Toole is a 12-year-old pupil who participated in a science experiment inspired by Beau Lotto's participative science approach.

Amy O'Toole is a 12-year-old pupil who participated in a science experiment inspired by Beau Lotto's participative science. One program Lotto led, called "i, scientist," inspired a science experiment by a group of 26 primary school pupils in Blackawton, Devon, UK, which included Amy. She was never interested in science before this project, but intends now to study the human mind and body. The project led to the publication of the first ever peer-reviewed scientific paper written by school- children ("Blackawton Bees," Royal Society's Biology Letters, December 2010). It starts, "Once upon a time..." Paper: "Blackawton Bees"

Session 3: Building Blocks
Tues Jun 26, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Eddie Obeng
Business Educator Our environment changes faster than we can learn about it, Eddie Obeng says. How do we keep up?

What will business look like in 5 years? (Er, what does it look like now?) Eddie Obeng helps executives keep up with a business and social environment that's changing faster than we can know. Through Pentacle , his online business school, he teaches a theory of management that focuses on adaptation to change. Called "New World Management," it's all about forming and re-forming workgroups, constantly re-evaluating metrics, and being open to all kinds of learning, from hands-on group exercises to a virtual lecture hall/meeting room called the QUBE.
@EddieObeng
ImagineAFish.blogspot.com
Session 3: Building Blocks
Tues Jun 26, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
P
Natasha Paremski
Pianist With her consistently striking and dynamic performances, 25-year-old pianist Natasha Paremski reveals the interpretive abilities of a virtuoso.

An electrifying and fearless pianist, Natasha Paremski was born in Moscow and started her piano studies at age 4 there. A few years later her family emigrated to the United States, but the Russian influence has remained strong. She decided early on to step away from competitions, which are the most common start for career pianists.

Her growing repertoire, carried by voracious artistic instincts, reflects a musical maturity beyond her age. In the 2010-11 season, she played the world premiere of a sonata written for her by Gabriel Kahane, which has been included on her first solo album. She has also collaborated with Sting, Trudy Styler and others on Twin Spirits, the story of Robert and Clara Schumann staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2007.
NatashaParemski.com

Session 4: Globality
Wed Jun 27, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Vikram Patel
Healthcare advocate Vikram Patel helps bring better healthcare to low-resource communities -- by teaching ordinary people to deliver health and psychiatric services.

In towns and villages that have few clinics, doctors and nurses, one particular need often gets overlooked: mental health. When there is no psychiatrist, how do people get care when they need it? Vikram Patel studies how to treat conditions like depression and schizophrenia in low-resource communities, and he's come up with a powerful model: training the community to help.

Based in Goa for much of the year, Patel is part of a policy group that's developing India's first national mental health policy; he's the co-founder of Sangath, a local NGO dedicated to mental health and family wellbeing. In London, he co-directs the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. And he led the efforts to set up the Movement for Global Mental Health, a network that supports mental health care as a basic human right.

From Sangath's mission statement: "At the heart of our vision lies the ‘treatment gap’ for mental disorders; the gap between the number of people with a mental disorder and the number who receive care for their mental disorders."
sangath.com
centreforglobalmentalhealth.org
Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Sanjay Pradhan
Development Leader Sanjay Pradhan is vice president of the World Bank Institute, helping leaders in developing countries learn skills for reform, development, and good governance.

The World Bank Institute is the piece of the World Bank that focuses on "capacity"--the piece of polite jargon that masks a big question: How do countries learn? And in a state with a history of corruption, failure and debt, how can leaders--both public and private-sector--gain the ability to grow, build, govern? The WBI teaches those skills, focusing on the key force behind real change: building teams and coalitions.

Sanjay Pradhan joined the WBI in 2008, and has worked since then to refine its strategy into three interconnected plans: Open Knowledge, Collaborative Governance, and Innovative Solutions. He is an advocate of transparency and openness as development tools.
wbi.worldbank.org/wbi
Bio, WBI.WorldBank.org
Session 9: The Upside of Transparency
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
R
Ramesh Raskar
Femtophotographer Photography is about creating images by recording light. Ramesh Raskar has invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.

Inspired by MIT professor Harold Edgarton, who pioneered stop-action photography and famously took in 1964 a photo of a bullet piercing an apple with exposures that were as short as a few nanoseconds, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could capture not just a bullet (travelling at 850 meters per second) but light itself (almost 300 million meters per second).

Stop a moment to take that in: photographing light as it moves. For that, they built a camera that can take pictures at 1 trillion frames per second. The same photon-imaging technology can also be used to create a camera that can can peer "around" corners, by exploiting specific properties of the photons when they bounce off surfaces and objects.

Among the other projects that Raskar is leading, with the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group, are low-cost eye care devices, a next generation CAT-Scan machine, and human-computer interaction systems.
Ramesh Raskar
Camera Culture Research Group
Session 10: Reframing
Thurs Jun 28, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Preston Reed
Revolutionary Guitarist Preston Reed’s hands have an otherworldly coordination. The fingers, nails, thumbs, and palms of both left and right dance, pluck, strum, and slap his guitar, which bursts with a full sound.

Conventional guitarists play their instruments in essentially the same way: the left hand holds the neck and applies pressure to each string to change notes, while the right hand plays the melody. Not so with Preston Reed.

In the 1980s Reed began playing his instrument in new ways, sometimes twisting his left hand to pick out a melody while the right hand strummed accompaniment or tapping the guitar’s body like a drum. A new playing style was born.

Twenty-five years later, Reed’s deep chords, complex percussion, and weightless melodies create an unparalleled one-man show.
PrestonReed.com
@PrestonReed
Session 7: Long Term
Wed Jun 27, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Usman Riaz
Percussive Guitarist Young guitarist Usman Riaz pulls a rich, swirling sound out of the acoustic guitar.

TEDGlobal Fellow Usman Riaz is a young Pakistani musician making a worldwide mark with his astonishing and fun-to-listen-to technique. Influenced by percussive guitarists--who move beyond strumming to striking, treating their fretboard like the soundboard of a piano--Riaz makes a sound that feels larger than the instrument itself, with a compelling pattern of repetition and variation that harkens to mystical music traditions.

In 2011, a viral video for his song "Fire Fly" helped bring his sound from the small-but-thriving Pakistani music community to a global audience. He's now collaborating with other musicians in Pakistan and working on a new album of original music.

Session 7: Long Term
Wed Jun 27, 2012
5:00 – 6:45
Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts
Technologists Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts come from Aurasma, a startup that makes augmented-reality technology for mobile phones.

Augmented reality is the process of adding layers of information onto the world we see, viewable only through technology. In this space, the Aurasma Lite app uses a smartphone and camera to lay "auras"--3D images, games, animations--onto real-world places. Point your phone at a movie poster on the street and launch a trailer; point at a building to pull up an interactive map... or create your own "aura" and upload it to the virtual space for anyone to see. Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts both joined Aurasma when it launched in June 2011.

They say: "This is the next step on from the Internet. It’s the beginning of the Outernet, where digital information is woven into the fabric of the world around us."
aurasma.com
@aurasma
Session 2: Tinker Make Do
Tues Jun 26, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
S
Elyn Saks
Mental Health Law Scholar Elyn Saks asks bold questions about how society treats people with mental illness.

As a mental health law scholar and writer, Elyn Saks speaks for the rights of mentally ill people. It's a gray area: Too often, society's first impulse is to make decisions on their behalf. But it's a slippery slope from in loco parentis to a denial of basic human rights. Saks has brilliantly argued for more autonomy--and in many cases for a restoral of basic human dignity.

In 2007, deep into her career, she dropped a bombshell--her autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold. In it, she reveals the depth of her own schizophrenia, now controlled by drugs and therapy. Clear-eyed and honest about her own condition, the book lent her new ammunition in the quest to protect the rights and dignity of the mentally ill.
weblaw.usc.edu

Session 6: Misbehaving Beautifully
Wed Jun 27, 2012
2:15 – 4:00
Alex Salmond
First Minister of Scotland The Hon. Alex Salmond, MSP, leads the Scottish National Party and is the First Minister of Scotland.

Salmond and his party support Scottish independence, and after securing an outright majority in Parliament in 2011 he intends to stage a referendum on the issue in the autumn of 2014. He is also a campaigner for sustainable development, renewable energy and climate justice. Trained as an economist, and after a career in the private sector, Salmond was elected to the UK House of Commons in 1987 and became a Member of the Scottish Parliament following its establishment in 1999. He was voted First Minister of Scotland in May 2007.
scotland.gov.uk

Session 4: Globality
Wed Jun 27, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Shyam Sankar
Data Intelligence Agent An advocate of human-computer symbiosis, Shyam Sankar looks for clues in big and disparate data sets.

Shyam Sankar is a Director at Palantir Technologies, a secretive Silicon Valley company where he oversees deployments of the company's core technology, which helps law enforcement teams and corporations mine giant, unrelated databases for clues to potential...anything. Palantir technologies has been used to find missing children, to detect banking fraud, and to uncover the Shadow Network, a cyber-spy ring that stooped so low as to hack the Dalai Lama's email.

As part of his work, Sankar thinks deeply about the place where human and machine intelligence meet. While artificial intelligence (AI) is the dominant paradigm, he is an advocate of JCR Licklider's "intelligence augmentation" (IA) approach, where algorithms and brains work together to solve problems.
shyamsankar.com
@SSankar
Session 1: Critical Crossroads
Tues Jun 26, 2012
11:00 – 12:45
Andreas Schleicher
Education Surveyor What makes a great school system? To find out, Andreas Schleicher administers a test to compare student performance around the world.

First, a few acronyms: Andreas Schleicher heads the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). What it means is: He's designed a test, given to hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds around the world (the most recent covered almost 70 nations), that offers unprecedented insight into how well national education systems are preparing their students for adult life. As The Atlantic puts it, the PISA test "measured not students’ retention of facts, but their readiness for 'knowledge worker' jobs—their ability to think critically and solve real-world problems."

The results of the PISA test, given every three years, are fed back to governments and schools so they can work on improving their ranking. And the data has inspired Schleicher to become a vocal advocate for the policy changes that, his research suggests, make for great schools.
PISA.oecd.org
@SchleicherEDU
Session 4: Globality
Wed Jun 27, 2012
8:45 – 10:15
Shimon Schocken
Computer Scientist, Educator Shimon Schocken is a computer science professor and dedicated educator.

Shimon Schocken is a former dean at Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, a new Israeli private university which he helped found in 1995. He's also taught at NYU, Harvard