TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. The goal is for Fellows to be financially independent and free from traditional restrictions of their academic departments in order to promote innovation in collaboration with leading professors in the field. Through a rigorous application and interview process, the Hertz Foundation seeks to identify young scientists and engineers with the potential to change the world for the better and supports their research endeavors from an early stage. Fellowship recipients pledge to make their skills available to the United States in times of national emergency.
Natasha Tsakos is a conceptual director, interactive designer, and performance artist from Geneva, Switzerland, living in Florida. Her work explores the symbiosis of technology and live performance. She is the president and founder of NTiD inc.
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.
X Development LLC, doing business as X, is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
Serge Soudoplatoff is an entrepreneur, commentator and author, noted for his ability to envision and explain technology trends, and to contextualise these for industry, government and corporations. He consults widely across English and French-speaking territories. In 2010 and 2012, technology magazine, '01net', nominated Soudoplatoff as one of France's top 100 influencers on the nation's digital economy. Serge created a logical explanation for the economy of abundance versus economy of scarcity known as "Soudoplatoff's law" : "When one share a tangible good, it divides. When one share an intangible good, it multiples".
Solve for X was a community solution engagement project and think tank-like event launched by Google to encourage collaboration, solve global issues and support innovators. The "X" in the title represents a remedy that someone or a team is already pursuing which ran from 2012 to 2014.
Roni F. Zeiger is an American physician and technologist. He is notable for his work as the Chief Health Strategist (2006–2012) at Google where he developed Google Health and Google Flu Trends. He is a co-founder of the Smart Patients project. In 2019, Zeiger announced he would be joining Facebook as the Head of Health Strategy.
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, it combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. It created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow neural networks to be used by the public, and multiple internal AI research projects, and aimed to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. It was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023.
Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME).
John Werner is the founder of Ideas in Action, Inc. (IIA) and Managing Director at Link Ventures. Prior he was a Vice President at an augmented reality company. He is also founding Managing Director for MIT Media Lab's Emerging Worlds Special Interest Group (SIG), and former Head of Innovation and New Ventures for the Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab for Ramesh Raskar, director of the Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Lab. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit organization Citizen Schools and the curator of TEDxBeaconStreet, and TEDxMIT with Daniela Rus - both independent event licensed by TED as part of TEDx. He started first ever AR-in-Action Augmented Reality Conference "ARIA" at MIT Media Lab in January 2017 and Blockchain+AI+Human = Magic Summit, now called Imagination in Action at MIT and Davos which he curates with Professor Sandy Pentland.
Fei-Fei Li is a China-born American computer scientist, known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
Jeremy England is an American physicist who uses statistical physics arguments to explain the spontaneous emergence of life, and consequently, the modern synthesis of evolution. England terms this process dissipation-driven adaptation.
Nadine Burke Harris is a Canadian-American pediatrician who was the Surgeon General of California between 2019 and 2022; she is the first person appointed to that position. She is known for linking adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress with harmful effects to health later in life. Hailed as a pioneer in the treatment of toxic stress, she is an advisory council member for the Clinton Foundation's "Too Small to Fail" campaign, and the founder and former chief executive officer of the Center for Youth Wellness. Her work was also featured in Paul Tough's book How Children Succeed.
Ted Ladd is an American entrepreneur and academic at Harvard University and Hult International Business School.
William Pomerantz is Vice President of Special Projects at Virgin Orbit. He was part of the team that created Virgin Orbit while working at Virgin Galactic. He is the co-founder of the Brooke Owens Fellowship and a trustee of the United States Students for the Exploration and Development of Space organisation.
Leila A. Takayama is an associate professor of Human–computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has previously held positions at Google X and Willow Garage. She was elected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013.
Tanzeem Khalid Choudhury is the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor in Integrated Health and Technology at Cornell Tech. Her research work is primarily in the area of mHealth.
Carl Flink is an American choreographer, dancer, director and academic based in Minneapolis, MN USA. He is the founder and artistic director of Black Label Movement, a contemporary dance company based in Minneapolis. He is also the Nadine Jette Sween Professor of Dance and director of the dance program at University of Minnesota. Flink was a member of the Jose Limón Dance Company from 1992 to 1998, among other NYC based dance companies including Creach/Koester Men Dancing, Janis Brenner & Dancers and Nina Winthrop & Dancers. He has been a frequent guest artist with Shapiro & Smith Dance.
