Program Speaker Bios A-Z

Gabe Barcia-Colombo creates madcap art inspired both by Renaissance era curiosity cabinets and the modern-day digital chronicling of everyday life. Think: miniature people projected in objects and a DNA Vending Machine.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo is an American artist who creates installation pieces that both delight and point to the strangeness of our modern, digital world. His latest work is a DNA Vending Machine, which dispenses vials of DNA extracted from friends at dinner parties. He's also created video installations of "miniature people" encased inside ordinary objects like suitcases, blenders and more. His work comments on the act of leaving one's imprint for the next generation. Call it "artwork with consequences."

As he explains it: "While formally implemented by natural history museums and collections (which find their roots in Renaissance-era 'cabinets of curiosity'), this process has grown more pointed and pervasive in the modern-day obsession with personal digital archiving and the corresponding growth of social media culture. My video sculptures play upon this exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which I render visually by 'collecting' human beings (alongside cultural archetypes) as scientific specimens. I repurpose everyday objects like blenders, suitcases and cans of Spam into venues for projecting and inserting videos of people."

Barcia-Colombo is an alumnus and instructor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Read about his latest work on CoolHunting and in his TED Fellows profile.

Karen Bass has traveled the world to explore and capture footage from every environment across the Earth.

Karen Bass is a director and producer with a passion for travel and natural history. In 20 years at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, Bass made wildlife films in almost every environment across the Earth, from the rainforests of the Congo (where she produced the first-ever film of our closest relative, the bonobo), to the deserts of Libya, Syria and Jordan, from the icy peaks of the Andes to the swamps of the Amazon, from erupting volcanoes in the Caribbean to the nocturnal world of raccoons in downtown Manhattan. Her series include Andes to Amazon, exploring the wildlife and extreme landscapes of South America; Jungle, an investigation of the world’s rainforests; Wild Caribbean, about the varied nature, weather and landscapes of the Caribbean; and Nature’s Great Events, a dramatic portrayal of six of the planet’s most spectacular wildlife events.

Bass is now producing Untamed Americas, an epic series on the natural history of North, South and Central America, for National Geographic Television. The series is set to premiere in June 2012.

Her passion for travel and natural history were evident from an early age, and she has travelled widely on all the continents -- on scientific expeditions, for pleasure and to make films. In recent years she has sought out dragons on Komodo, dived the remote coral reefs of New Guinea, hang-glided over the cliffs of Byron Bay in Australia, climbed active volcanoes in Ethiopia, rafted the length of the Grand Canyon, sailed a traditional dhow in the Indian Ocean and trekked with camels through the Sahara.

Ayah Bdeir is an engineer and artist, and is the founder of littleBits and karaj, an experimental art, architecture and technology lab in Beirut.

Sharon Beals photographs the work of “nature’s most fastidious architects” -- birds’ nests.

John Bohannon is a scientist and writer who runs the annual Dance Your Ph.D. contest.

John Bohannon is a biologist and journalist. After embedding in southern Afghanistan in 2010, he engineered the first voluntary release of civilian casualty data by the US-led military coalition. He studies the evolution of fame using data provided by Google, and writes for Science and WIRED. His research on the blurring line between the cuisine of man and pet caused Stephen Colbert to eat cat food on television.

Using an alter ego known as the Gonzo Scientist, he runs the "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. It's an international competition for scientists to explain their research with interpretive dance.

Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame.

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent more than a decade studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:

How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough -- that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy? 

Read the TED Blog's Q&A with Brené Brown.

As a producer, Julie Burstein builds places to talk (brilliantly) about creative work. Her book "Spark: How Creativity Works" shares what she has learned.

From where does creativity flow? In 2000, Julie Burstein created Public Radio International's show Studio 360 to explore pop culture and the arts. Hosted by novelist Kurt Andersen and produced at WNYC, the show is a guide to what's interesting now -- and asks deep questions about the drive behind creative work. Now, Burstein has written Spark: How Creativity Works, filled with stories about artists, writers and musicians (like Chuck Close, Isabel Allende, Patti Lupone). Burstein is the host of pursuitofspark.com full of conversations about creative approaches to the challenges, possibilities and pleasures of everyday life and work. She also "loves sitting in for Leonard Lopate."

Our world prizes extroverts, but Susan Cain makes a case for the contemplative. She's leading a social revolution that's showing people that looking inward is a virtue, not a problem.

Susan Cain is the "Chief Revolutionary" of the Quiet Revolution -- a growing movement championing introversion, spurred on by her viral 2012 TED Talk, "The power of introverts." Her talk has been viewed more than 20 million times, making it one of the most popular of all time.

Cain is the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking, which is in its seventh year on the New York Times bestseller list, and was named the best book of 2012 by Fast Company. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

During his term as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now at San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, Thomas P. Campbell aims to make museum offerings both narrative-driven and accessible.

Thomas P. Campbell became the ninth Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2009, with an agenda that focuses on scholarship and accessibility across exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and permanent collections, while encouraging new thinking about the visitor experience. Campbell led the Met through the fiscal setbacks caused by the 2008 recession without reducing hours, gallery openings or programs. During his tenure, the Met opened new galleries for its Islamic Art Department and American Wing, launched an innovative TEDx program, and pioneered a collaboration with the Whitney Museum's landmark Breuer Building on Madison Avenue. He resigned from the Met in 2017, and in 2018 became the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, overseeing the deYoung and Legion of Honor collections.

Campbell had worked in the Metropolitan's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts for fourteen years, rising steadily through the curatorial ranks from Assistant Curator, while conceiving and organizing major exhibitions "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence" (2002) and "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor" (New York, 2007; Palacio Real, Madrid, spring 2008). He also served as Supervising Curator of The Antonio Ratti Textile Center, which houses the Museum's encyclopedic collection of 36,000 textiles and is one of the preeminent centers of textile studies in the world.

Cameron Carpenter is bringing drama, improv -- and glitter -- back to the majestic organ, "the king of instruments."

Cameron Carpenter is a world-renowned organist who is revolutionizing the mighty instrument through his creativity, virtuosity, and questioning of its boundaries. The Los Angeles Times considers him "the most accomplished organist ever witnessed... And, most important of all, the most musical".

Jack is the CEO of Anatomage, a company specializing on 3D medical technology.

Jack W. Choi is the founder and CEO of Anatomage Inc., based in California. Beginning as an imaging software company, Anatomage now makes 3D imaging software, an image-guided surgical device, anatomy modeling contents and the virtual dissection table.

A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins captures readers with his understated wit, profound insight -- and a sense of being "hospitable."

Accessibility is not a word often associated with great poetry. Yet Billy Collins has managed to create a legacy from what he calls being poetically “hospitable.” Preferring lyrical simplicity to abstruse intellectualism, Collins combines humility and depth of perception, undercutting light and digestible topics with dark and at times biting humor.

While Collins approaches his work with a healthy sense of self-deprecation, calling his poems “domestic” and “middle class,” John Taylor has said of Collins: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

In 2001 he was named U.S. Poet Laureate, a title he kept until 2003. Collins lives in Somers, New York, and is an English professor at City University of New York, where he has taught for more than 40 years.

Credits for the animations in this talk:

"Budapest," "Forgetfulness" and "Some Days" -- animation by Julian Grey/Head Gear

"The Country" -- animation by Brady Baltezor/Radium

"The Dead" -- animation by Juan Delcan/Spontaneous
 

Drew Curtis is the founder and administrator of Fark.com.

In 1993, while a student in England, Drew Curtis began sending links to his friends. Over time that grew until he founded a website for the links: Fark.com. The site has now grown into one of the largest, and most irreverant, news aggregators on the web.

Along with managing Fark.com, Curtis speaks on behalf of other entrepreneurs targeted by "patent trolls" -- an epithet for companies or law firms that file aggressive, broad patent lawsuits against other companies.

Download a .zip file of Drew Curtis and Fark's court documents >>

A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

Wade Davis is perhaps the most articulate and influential western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” Trained in anthropology and botany at Harvard, he travels the globe to live alongside indigenous people, and document their cultural practices in books, photographs, and film. His stunning photographs and evocative stories capture the viewer's imagination. As a speaker, he parlays that sense of wonder into passionate concern over the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing -- 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language is much more than vocabulary and grammatical rules. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.  

Indigenous cultures are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the peoples of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the coming centuries.

Davis is the author of 15 books including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and The Wayfinders. His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series produced for the National Geographic. In 2009 he received the Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for his contributions to anthropology and conservation, and he is the 2011 recipient of the Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers’ Club, and the 2012 recipient of the Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. His latest books are Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest and The Sacred Headwaters: the Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and the Nass.

Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which offers large cash incentive prizes to inventors who can solve grand challenges like space flight, low-cost mobile medical diagnostics and oil spill cleanup. He is the chair of Singularity University, which teaches executives and grad students about exponentially growing technologies.

Watch the live onstage debate with Paul Gilding that followed Peter Diamandis' 2012 TEDTalk >>

Peter Diamandis is the founder and chair of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is simply "to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." By offering a big cash prize for a specific accomplishment, the X Prize stimulates competition and excitement around some of the planet's most important goals. Diamandis is also co-founder and chairman of Singularity University which runs Exponential Technologies Executive and Graduate Student Programs.

Diamandis' background is in space exploration -- before the X Prize, he ran a company that studied low-cost launching technologies and Zero-G which offers the public the chance to train like an astronaut and experience weightlessness. But though the X Prize's first $10 million went to a space-themed challenge, Diamandis' goal now is to extend the prize into health care, social policy, education and many other fields that could use a dose of competitive innovation.

Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice.

Liz Diller's firm, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, might just be the first post-wall architects. From a mid-lake rotunda made of fog to a gallery that destroys itself with a robotic drill, her brainy takes on the essence of buildings are mind-bending and rebellious. DS+R partakes of criticism that goes past academic papers and into real structures -- buildings and art installations that seem to tease the squareness of their neighbors.

DS+R was the first architecture firm to receive a MacArthur "genius" grant -- and it also won an Obie for Jet Lag, a wildly creative piece of multimedia off-Broadway theater. A reputation for rampant repurposing of materials and tricksy tinkering with space -- on stage, on paper, on the waterfront -- have made DS+R a sought-after firm, winning accounts from the Juilliard School, Alice Tully Hall and the School of American Ballet, as part of the Lincoln Center overhaul; at Brown University; and on New York's revamp of Governer's Island. Their Institute for Comtemporary Art has opened up a new piece of Boston's waterfront, creating an elegant space that embraces the water.

As director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Regina Dugan oversaw the US armed forces' innovation engine. Now she deploys the same research tactics at Google.

Businesswoman and technology developer Regina Dugan achieved national prominence when she became the first woman in charge of Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm. Dugan earned a reputation as a motivator and creative thinker, spurring non-traditional projects like a nationwide contest to find hidden balloons in order to test the power of social networks for intelligence gathering.

In a previous stint at the agency, Dugan investigated mine-detection technology, and her work wasn't limited to the lab. In Mozambique she drove a mine-clearing vehicle during a live detection exercise. Dugan currently is senior vice president at Motorola, where her mission is to advance the company's technology, which one day may include password tattoos. Ask her and she may show you hers.

Rafe Esquith teaches fifth-graders at a public school in Los Angeles.

For the past three decades, Esquith has taught fifth-graders at a public school in a Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by guns, gangs and violence. His exceptional classroom at Hobart Elementary -- known simply as Room 56 -- is unlike any other in the country. Esquith's students are mostly immigrants or children of immigrants, living in poverty, and learning English as a second language. Yet, under his tutelage, they voluntarily come to class at 6:30 in the morning, and often stay until five in the afternoon. They learn math, reading and science. But they also play Vivaldi, perform Shakespeare, often score in the top 1 percent on standardized tests, and go on to attend the best universities. For his work, Esquith is the only teacher to be awarded the president's National Medal of the Arts. He's also written three books: Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire, There Are No Shortcuts and Lighting Their Fires. His fourth book, Real Talk for Real Teachers will be published in 2012. Esquith has also been featured, along with his students, in the PBS documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans. 

In his day job, Jared Ficklin makes user interfaces at frog design. As a hobby, he explores what music looks like ... in light, in shapes, in fire.

Jared Ficklin is a Senior Principal Design Technologist at frog, where he builds user experiences for clients, playing with interactions including touch and multi-touch, and applying physics to enhance the user experience. A passion for music and making things introduced him to the hobby of sound visualization, which has led him on occasion to play with fire. (As Flash on the Beach puts it, "Jared Ficklin’s sonic experiments stood out for their individuality, drama and casual disregard for health and safety.") Every March in Austin, Texas, Ficklin organizes the frog party, a collective social experiment for a few thousand people attending SXSW Interactive. It's a form of playful R&D for social technology. And he has spent 10 years helping fund, design and  build quality free public skateparks for Austin as part of the Austin Public Skatepark Action Committee. 

Joshua Foer is a science writer who 'accidentally' won the U.S. Memory Championship.

In 2005 science writer Joshua Foer went to cover the U.S. Memory Championship. A year later he was back -- as contestant. A year of mental training with Europe's top memorizer turned into a book, Moonwalking with Einstein, which is both a chronicle of his immersion in the memory culture and wonderfully accessible and informative introduction to the science of memory. Much more surprisingly, that year of training also turned into a first-place victory at the national competition in New York and the chance to represent the U.S. at the World Memory Championship. Foer's writing has appeared in National Geographic, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura, an online guide to the world’s wonders and curiosities, and is also the co-founder of the design competition Sukkah City.

Surgeon and public health professor by day, writer by night, Atul Gawande explores how doctors can dramatically improve their practice using approaches as simple as a checklist – or coaching.

Atul Gawande is author of several best-selling books, including Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and The Checklist Manifesto.

He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation and chair of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.

In June 2018, Gawande was chosen to lead the new healthcare company set up by Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway.

Photo: Aubrey Calo

Leymah Gbowee is a peace activist in Liberia. She led a women's movement that was pivotal in ending the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, and now speaks on behalf of women and girls around the world.

Liberia's second civil war, 1999-2003, brought an unimaginable level of violence to a country still recovering from its first civil war (1989-96). And much of that violence was directed at women: Systematic rape and brutality used women's bodies as fields for war.

Leymah Gbowee, who'd become a social worker during the first war, helped organize an interreligious coalition of Christian and Muslim women called the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement. Dressed in white, these thousands of women staged pray-ins and nonviolent protests demanding reconciliation and the resuscitation of high-level peace talks. The pressure pushed Charles Taylor into exile, and smoothed the path for the election of Africa’s first female head of state, Leymah's fellow 2011 Nobel Peace laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Gbowee is the founder and president of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, which provides educational and leadership opportunities to girls, women and the youth in West Africa.

Paul Gilding is an independent writer, activist and adviser on a sustainable economy. Click through to watch the onstage debate that followed this talk.

Watch the debate with Peter Diamandis that followed this talk >>

Paul Gilding has spent 35 years trying to change the world. He’s served in the Australian military, chased nuclear armed aircraft carriers in small inflatable boats, plugged up industrial waste discharge pipes, been global CEO of Greenpeace, taught at Cambridge University, started two successful businesses and advised the CEOs of some the world’s largest companies.

Despite his clear lack of progress, the unstoppable and flexible optimist is now a writer and advocate, travelling the world with his book The Great Disruption alerting people to the global economic and ecological crisis unfolding around us, as the world economy reaches and passes the limits to growth. He is confident we can get through what’s coming and says rather than the end of civilization, this could be the beginning! He argues we will rise to the occasion and see change at a scale and speed incomprehensible today, but need to urgently prepare for The Great Disruption and “the end of shopping”, as we reinvent the global economy and our model of social progress.

Read his reaction to attending TED2012: "Will the techno-optimists save the world?" 

Edward Glaeser's work focuses on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transformation.

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1992. He is Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston. He regularly teaches microeconomic theory, and occasionally urban and public economics.  He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, and law and economics. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

Renny Gleeson helps navigate brands through fresh concepts, such as viral marketing and social media, to find the pulse of the modern consumer.

Renny Gleeson is a skeptical/optimist. He leads interactive strategy for ad agency Wieden+Kennedy who started his career as a game developer. He has been wondering what we can learn about ourselves through the millions of deaths taking place inside video games. He serves on the board of directors of Rhizome.org and is the co-founder of the PIE tech accelerator in Portland, Oregon. A mentor for tech accelerators and startups worldwide, he believes stories -- from cave paintings to interfaces to video games -- shape worlds.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes novels and nonfiction that explore questions of philosophy, morality and being.

In her latest book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein makes the case for the importance of philosophy -- even as neuroscience tells us more about our brains, and connective technologies teach us more about the world around us. It's written in the form of a Socratic dialog, a form that Goldstein is passionate about teaching and exploring.

Meanwhile, her novels, from The Mind-Body Problem (Contemporary American Fiction) to 2011's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Vintage Contemporaries), use techniques of fiction to untangle philosophical questions, such as: How should we balance heart and mind? What should we have faith in?

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize popularly known as the “Genius Award.” She was designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. She's also the author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, a combination memoir and history.

Gospel for Teens Program is a program of The Mama Foundation for the Arts and Vy's Higginsen's School of Gospel, Jazz and R&B Arts that has grown to be a highly respected and influential program for youth between the ages of 13 and 19.

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.

Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, has focused on unified theories for more than 25 years, and has written several best-selling and non-technical books on the subject including The Elegant Universe, a Pulitzer finalist, and The Fabric of the Cosmos — each of which has been adapted into a NOVA mini-series. His latest book, The Hidden Reality, explores the possibility that our universe is not the only universe.

Greene believes science must be brought to general audiences in new and compelling ways, such as his live stage odyssey, Icarus at the Edge of Time, with original orchestral score by Philip Glass, and the annual World Science Festival, which he co-founded in 2008 with journalist Tracy Day.

Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral and political creatures.

By understanding more about our moral psychology and its biases, Jonathan Haidt says we can design better institutions (including companies, universities and democracy itself), and we can learn to be more civil and open-minded toward those who are not on our team.

Haidt is a social psychologist whose research on morality across cultures led to his 2008 TED Talk on the psychological roots of the American culture war, and his 2013 TED Talk on how "common threats can make common ground." In both of those talks he asks, "Can't we all disagree more constructively?" Haidt's 2012 TED Talk explored the intersection of his work on morality with his work on happiness to talk about "hive psychology" -- the ability that humans have to lose themselves in groups pursuing larger projects, almost like bees in a hive. This hivish ability is crucial, he argues, for understanding the origins of morality, politics, and religion. These are ideas that Haidt develops at greater length in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Haidt joined New York University Stern School of Business in July 2011. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program. Before coming to Stern, Professor Haidt taught for 16 years at the University of Virginia in the department of psychology.

Haidt's writings appear frequently in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was named one of the top global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and by Prospect magazine. Haidt received a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

James Hansen has made key insights into our global climate -- and inspired a generation of activists and scientists.

James Hansen is Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. His early research on the clouds of Venus helped identify their composition as sulfuric acid. Since the late 1970s, he has focused his research on Earth's climate, especially human-made climate change. From 1981 to 2013, he headed the NASA Godard Institute for Space Studies. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hansen is known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. Hansen is recognized for speaking truth to power, for identifying ineffectual policies as greenwash, and for outlining the actions that the public must take to protect the future of young people and the other species on the planet.

Journalist and commentator John Hockenberry has reported from all over the world in virtually every medium. He's the author of "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence."

Three-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy award winner and Dateline NBC correspondent, John Hockenberry has broad experience as a journalist and commentator for more than two decades. He is the co-anchor of the public radio morning show “The Takeaway” on WNYC and PRI. He has reported from all over the world, in virtually every medium, having anchored programs for network, cable and radio. Hockenberry joined NBC as a correspondent for Dateline NBC in January 1996 after a fifteen-year career in broadcast news at both National Public Radio and ABC News. Hockenberry's reporting for Dateline NBC earned him three Emmys, an Edward R Murrow award and a Casey Medal.

His most prominent Dateline NBC reports include an hour-long documentary on the often-fatal tragedy of the medically uninsured, an emotionally gripping portrait of a young schizophrenic trying to live on his own, and extensive reporting in the aftermath of September 11th. In 2009 Hockenberry was appointed to the White House Fellows Commission by President Barack Obama where he participates in the selection of the annual Fellows for this most prestigious of Federal programs. Hockenberry is also the author of A River out of Eden, a novel based in the Pacific Northwest, and Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence, a memoir of life as a foreign correspondent, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. He has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, I.D., Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Details, and The Washington Post.

Hockenberry spent more than a decade with NPR as a general assignment reporter, Middle East correspondent and host of several programs. During the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), Hockenberry was assigned to the Middle East, where he filed reports from Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. He was one of the first Western broadcast journalists to report from Kurdish refugee camps in Northern Iraq and Southern Turkey. Hockenberry also spent two years (1988-90) as a correspondent based in Jerusalem during the most intensive conflict of the Palestinian uprising. Hockenberry received the Columbia Dupont Award for Foreign News Coverage for reporting on the Gulf War.

John Hodgman is a writer, humorist, geek celebrity, former professional literary agent and expert on all world knowledge. He was the bumbling PC in Apple's long-running "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ad campaign.

You may know him only as the PC in Apple's PC vs. Mac smackdown ads, or as the Daily Show with Jon Stewart's Resident Expert. But John Hodgman has many other claims to fame. He's the author of The Areas of My Expertise, which provides vital and completely fake details on the great lobster conspiracy, hoboes, nine US presidents who had hooks for hands, and how to win a fight; the followup More Information Than You Require; and his newest (and he claims last), That Is All.

He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine; host of the Little Gray Book Lectures, a monthly series that has aired on This American Life; and an actual former professional literary agent.

Reid Hoffman is co-founder and executive chair of LinkedIn, and a partner with Greylock.

Myshkin Ingawale is the co-founder of Biosense Technologies, which has built ToucHB, a portable, non-invasive device to test for anemia.

Steve Cosson and Michael Friedman create new work for stage and media with The Civilians Investigative Theater.

From The New Yorker: “The Civilians deserve credit as top-notch journalists, creating portraits that are vivid, agenda-free and marked by a benevolent irony.” Working with the company’s unique brand of in-the-field theatrical research, artists have created shows on such subjects as the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, the adult entertainment industry of Los Angeles, and a media project/play in which four actors play their parents to tell their stories of marriage and divorce. Over the past ten years, Civilians has created thirteen original works that have been performed Off-Broadway and in over 40 cities nationally and internationally. Civilians’ TED show takes inspiration from the new play The Great Immensity by Cosson and Friedman. Supported by the National Science Foundation, The Great Immensity is both a play about the effort to transform our thinking about climate change and also a media project exploring the confluences of art, activism and science: thegreatimmensity.org. The company also sustains an ongoing “investigative cabaret” and podcast series: Let Me Ascertain You. 

Steve Cosson is the Artistic Director of Civilians; other current projects include a play about a beauty pageant held in a Bogotá prison by José Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries), a new rock musical by singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, and a national crowd sourced media project about Occupy. Michael Friedman was recently represented on Broadway by Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and has created multiple works for Civilians. He received an Obie Award in 2007 for sustained achievement. Performers for TED: Emily Ackerman, John Ellison Conlee, Maria Dizzia. Choreography: Tracy Bersley. Projections: Jason H. Thompson. Costumes: Sarah Beers. 

With a camera, a dedicated wheatpasting crew and the help of whole villages and favelas, 2011 TED Prize winner JR shows the world its true face.

Working anonymously, pasting his giant images on buildings, trains and bridges, the often-guerrilla artist JR forces us to see each other. Traveling to distant, often dangerous places -- the slums of Kenya, the favelas of Brazil -- he infiltrates communities, befriending inhabitants and recruiting them as models and collaborators. He gets in his subjects’ faces with a 28mm wide-angle lens, resulting in portraits that are unguarded, funny, soulful, real, that capture the sprits of individuals who normally go unseen. The blown-up images pasted on urban surfaces -– the sides of buses, on rooftops -- confront and engage audiences where they least expect it. Images of Parisian thugs are pasted up in bourgeois neighborhoods; photos of Israelis and Palestinians are posted together on both sides of the walls that separate them.

JR's gained widespread attention for his project, "Women Are Heroes," which depicted women "dealing with the effects of war, poverty, violence, and oppression” from Rio de Janeiro, Phnom Penh and Delhi to several cities in Africa. His TED Prize wish opened an even wider lens on the world. With the prize, he launched INSIDE OUT -- a global participatory art project. INSIDE OUT invites everyone to share their portrait and transform messages of personal identity into public art.

David Kelley’s company IDEO helped create many icons of the digital generation -- but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely.

As founder of legendary design firm IDEO, David Kelley built the company that created many icons of the digital generation -- the first mouse, the first Treo, the thumbs up/thumbs down button on your Tivo's remote control, to name a few. But what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations so they can innovate routinely.

David Kelley's most enduring contributions to the field of design are a methodology and culture of innovation. More recently, he led the creation of the groundbreaking d.school at Stanford, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, where students from the business, engineering, medicine, law, and other diverse disciplines develop the capacity to solve complex problems collaboratively and creatively.

Kelley was working (unhappily) as an electrical engineer when he heard about Stanford's cross-disciplinary Joint Program in Design, which merged engineering and art. What he learned there -- a human-centered, team-based approach to tackling sticky problems through design -- propelled his professional life as a "design thinker."

In 1978, he co-founded the design firm that ultimately became IDEO, now emulated worldwide for its innovative, user-centered approach to design. IDEO works with a range of clients -- from food and beverage conglomerates to high tech startups, hospitals to universities, and today even governments -- conceiving breakthrough innovations ranging from a life-saving portable defibrillator to a new kind of residence for wounded warriors, and helping organizations build their own innovation culture.

Today, David serves as chair of IDEO and is the Donald W. Whittier Professor at Stanford, where he has taught for more than 25 years. Preparing the design thinkers of tomorrow earned David the Sir Misha Black Medal for his “distinguished contribution to design education.” He has also won the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation, as well as the Chrysler Design Award and National Design Award in Product Design from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineers.

Chip Kidd's book jacket designs spawned a revolution in the art of American book packaging.

You know a Chip Kidd book when you see it -- precisely because it's unexpected, non-formulaic, and perfectly right for the text within. As a graphic designer for Alfred A. Knopf since 1986, Kidd has designed shelves full of books, including classics you can picture in a snap: Jurassic Park, Naked by David Sedaris, All the Pretty Horses … His monograph, Chip Kidd: Book One, contains work spanning two decades. As editor and art director for Pantheon Graphic novels, Kidd has commissioned work from cartoonists including Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman. He's a novelist as well, author of The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners.

Chip received the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication in 2007, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Design in 1997 and the AIGA Medal in 2014.

Kidd is the author of the TED Book, Judge This.

As the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations.

At the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, flying quadrotor robots move together in eerie formation, tightening themselves into perfect battalions, even filling in the gap when one of their own drops out. You might have seen viral videos of the quads zipping around the netting-draped GRASP Lab (they juggle! they fly through a hula hoop!). Vijay Kumar headed this lab from 1998-2004. He's now the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he continues his work in robotics, blending computer science and mechanical engineering to create the next generation of robotic wonders.

Cesar Kuriyama shoots one second of video every day of his life, and edits them together into a montage that prompts him to think how he approaches each day.

As a video maker, director, producer and animator Cesar Kuriyama has worked for giant clients like Hershey's, BMW, Verizon, Gillette and the NFL. But what we love about him are his personal projects -- based on his travel, his love of the arts community, and his family and friends. Imagine a movie that contains one day of your entire life ...

Play with the 1SecondEveryDay app ... and check out other people's own videos on r/OneSecondaDay.

Don Levy has served on the frontlines of the digital transformation of entertainment. For 17 years, he led the communications efforts for top visual effects and digital animation studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks. He is fascinated by the magic of movies.

Don Levy joined Sony Pictures Imageworks when it was “just 40 people and a dream” in 1995. Starting as an awards campaign consultant, he helped the studio grow in both size and reputation, beginning with its first Academy Award for the animated short “The ChubbChubbs” in 2003 and continuing with the 2005 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for “Spider-Man 2.” As the senior vice president of marketing and communications for Sony Pictures, he directed corporate communications, marketing and public relations for Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, as well as for Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Online Entertainment.

Levy left Sony Pictures in June of 2012 to develop a new family entertainment venture and found Smith Brook Farm, a media, entertainement and tech consultancy. At the same time, he is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts' Entertainment Technology Center and is teaching entertainment marketing at Boston University's Los Angeles Internship Program.

Levy is also member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on its feature animation nominating committee. The Academy helped tremendously in crafting the video montage in his talk, an exclusive for TED.

Suja has focused on addressing issues such as parking, public safety, air & water quality and commercial development through sustainable, long-term policies.

As the CEO and Founder of Crisis Text Line, Nancy Lublin is using technology and data to help save lives.

Nancy Lublin is Founder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, the nations first free, 24/7 text line for people in crisis. To date, almost 10 million text messages have come through the text line.

Nancy recently left her post as CEO of DoSomething.org, one of the largest global organizations for young people and social change. Previously, she founded Dress for Success, the organization that helps women transition from welfare to work. 

Awele (ah WAY lay) Makeba is a storyteller and teaching artist who sparks "aha!" moments about life and U.S. history.

Awele Makeba is a truth teller, an artist for social change: She researches, writes and performs hidden African American history, folklore, and personal tales. Her audience grapple with the meaning of their own lives as they make meaning of past lives. She has made it her life's work to tell history through the words of its silenced and oft-forgotten witnesses, using art to catalyze deep conversations about race, our common humanity, and our vision of a just, humane, multiracial society.

She has written two one-woman shows, Rage Is Not a 1-Day Thing!: The Untaught History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and I'm Not Getting On Until Jim Crow Gets Off, which tells the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of two girls and two women: Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Rosa Parks and JoAnn Robinson. She is working on a new picture book and a creative work Mississippi Roots:Tracing My Family Tree.

Reuben Margolin's moving sculptures combine the logic of math with the sensuousness of nature.

Trained as a classical ballerina and architect, Lucy McRae is fascinated by the human body, and how it can be shaped by technology.

Kate Messner believes in nature, art, magic, lake monsters, science, and the power of literacy to change the world. She writes books for people who believe in those things, too.

Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.

Jean-Baptiste Michel holds joint academic appointments at Harvard (FQEB Fellow) and Google (Visiting Faculty). His research focusses on using large volumes of data as tools that help better understand the world around us -- from the way diseases progress in patients over years, to the way cultures change in human societies over centuries. With his colleague Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jean-Baptiste is a Founding Director of Harvard's Cultural Observatory, where their research team pioneers the use of quantitative methods for the study of human culture, language and history. His research was featured on the covers of Science and Nature, on the front pages of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, in The Economist, Wired and many other venues. The online tool he helped create -- ngrams.googlelabs.com -- was used millions of times to browse cultural trends. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and holds an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

Angie Miller is the 2011 New Hampshire Teacher of the Year. She has spent the past year traveling the nation, speaking and collaborating with K-12 teachers and other educational stakeholders.

Angie Miller has been immersed in middle school education for 11 years, which has deeply affected her spelling and humor. In a typical classroom that Miller runs, students develop their voices to make change. Her students have helped an elderly homeless woman completely furnish her new apartment; they have raised enough money to buy a generator so that a village in Southern Sudan could have refrigeration in its health clinic, allowing them to store vaccinations; they have supported education in Pakistan; they have sent funds to the Joplin, Missouri, hospital. She feels it is critical to help her students become educated activists who know when to take action and when to accept reality. She also has the amazing ability to gently inform pre-adolescents when deodorant is necessary.

Peter Norvig is a leading American computer scientist, expert on artificial intelligence and the Director of Research at Google Inc.

Peter Norvig is a computer scientist and expert in both artificial intelligence and online search. Currently the Director of Research at Google Inc., Norvig was responsible for maintaining and improving the engine's core web search algorithms from 2002 to 2005. Prior to his work at Google, Norvig was NASA's chief computer scientist.

A fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the author of the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Norvig (along with Sebastian Thrun) taught the Stanford University class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence," which was made available to anyone in the world. More than 160,000 students from 209 countries enrolled.

Norvig is also known for penning the world's longest palindromic sentence.

Bill Nye is a man with a mission: to help people understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work.

Scientist, engineer, comedian, author, inventor, and now CEO of the Planetary Society -- Bill Nye makes science entertaining and accessible. A mechanical engineer by training, Nye uses his comedy skills (his TV career started after he won a Steve Martin lookalike contest) to painlessly and memorably share big ideas from physics, chemistry, algebra and green living. His Emmy-winning show Bill Nye the Science Guy has spun into three other science shows, several books, and a math series called Solving for X. These days he's the CEO of the Planetary Society, the world's largest non-governmental space interest organization. He wants everyone to know and appreciate our place in space. It's all about the P, B, & J -- the Passion, Beauty, and Joy -- of science and math.

Mayor Eduardo Paes is on a mission to ensure that Rio's renaissance creates a positive legacy for all its citizens.

Eduardo Paes started his political career as the head of the Barra da Tijuca and Jacarepaguá in Rio de Janeiro. He then became a city councilman, a congressman, the Municipal Secretary for Environment and State Government’s Secretary for Sports and Tourism in 2007. Paes was empowered by the Governor of Rio, Sérgio Cabral, to bring the preparations for the Pan American Games that would begin just seven months later back on track. In 2008, Eduardo Paes was elected Mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

Paes says that his mission as mayor is to ensure that Rio’s renaissance thanks to the Brazilian economic boom, the effective pacification policy developed by the State Government and the successful bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games creates a positive legacy for all Rio’s citizens.

He has created programmes such as Porto Maravilha (revitalisation of the port area), Morar Carioca (urbanisation of all the favelas), UPP Social (development of social programmes in pacified favelas), the Rio Operations Centre (a nerve centre that monitors all municipal logistics), and the establishment of the BRT system (four express corridors for articulated buses that will connect the whole city).

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, which matches software geniuses with US cities to reboot local services.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which works with talented web professionals and cities around the country to promote public service and reboot government. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the Game Group, responsible for GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, CA with her daughter and six chickens.

Damian Palin is developing a way to use bacteria to biologically "mine" minerals from water -- specifically, out of the brine left over from the desalinization process.

Research engineer Damian Palin has long been fascinated by the process of biomineralization–with particular attention on the mechanisms involved for mineral precipitation. At the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (in collaboration with Nanyang Technical University, Singapore), he conducts experiments to assess the ability of microorganisms to mine selected minerals out of seawater desalination brine. This study was based on compelling and burgeoning evidence from the field of geomicrobiology, which shows the ubiquitous role that microorganisms play in the cycling of minerals on the planet. 

He says: "It is my aim to continue to research in the field of biomineralization, while exploring the mechanisms responsible for mild energetic mineral (including metal) precipitation for the production of mineral composites."

Read our in-depth Q&A with Damian Palin >>

Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah Parcak uses satellite images to locate lost ancient sites. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, her wish is to protect the world’s shared cultural heritage.

There may be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undiscovered ancient sites across the globe. Sarah Parcak wants to locate them. As a space archaeologist, she analyzes high-resolution imagery collected by satellites in order to identify subtle changes to the Earth’s surface that might signal man-made features hidden from view. A TED Senior Fellow and a National Geographic Explorer, Parcak wrote the textbook on satellite archaeology and founded the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her goal: to make the world's invisible history visible once again.

In Egypt, Parcak's techniques have helped locate 17 potential pyramids, and more than 3,100 potential forgotten settlements. She's also made discoveries in the Viking world (as seen in the PBS Nova special, Vikings Unearthed) and across the Roman Empire (as shown in the BBC documentary, Rome’s Lost Empire). Her methods also offer a new way to understand how ancient sites are being affected by looting and urban development. By satellite-mapping Egypt and comparing sites over time, Parcak has noted a 1,000 percent increase in looting since 2009. It’s likely that millions of dollars worth of artifacts are stolen each year. Parcak hopes that, through her work, unknown sites can be protected to preserve our rich, vibrant history.

As the winner of the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak asked the world to help in this important work. By building a citizen science platform for archaeology, GlobalXplorer.org, Parcak invites anyone with an internet connection to help find the next potential looting pit or unknown tomb. GlobalXplorer launched on January 30, 2017, with volunteers working together to map Peru. Other countries will follow, as the platform democratizes discovery and makes satellite-mapping rapid and cost-effective. 

High-wire artist Philippe Petit surprised the world when he walked illegally between the Twin Towers in 1974.

Besides having stretched a steel cable without permission between the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, high-wire artist Philippe Petit is a street juggler, writes, draws, performs close-up magic, practices lock-picking and 18th-century timber framing, plays chess, studies French wine, gives lectures and workshops on creativity and motivation, and was recently sighted bullfighting in Peru. Also, he has been arrested over 500 times … for street juggling.

Petit’s book To Reach the Clouds is the basis of the Academy Award-wining documentary film Man on Wire. His new high-wire project on Easter Island -- Rapa Nui Walk -- is an homage to the Rapa Nui and their giant carved stone statues, the Moai.

Petit is working on his seventh book, Why Knot? He just completed his first series of Master Classes: Tightrope! An Exploration into the Theatre of Balance. He is also hard at work on a new one-man stage show titled Wireless! Philippe Petit Down to Earth.

A legendary oil and gas entrepreneur, T. Boone Pickens is now on a mission to enhance U.S. energy policies to lessen the nation’s dependence on OPEC oil.

T. Boone Pickens views America's dependence on OPEC oil as the greatest threat to the country's national security and economic well-being. In developing The Pickens Plan for America’s energy future, he's advocating for domestic alternatives and even greater new technologies. Pickens grew from humble beginnings in Depression-era Holdenville, Oklahoma, to be one of the nation’s most successful oil and gas entrepreneurs, and has been uncannily accurate in predicting oil and gas prices (CNBC coined him the “Oracle of Oil”) -- and he's established a very successful energy-oriented investment fund. Pickens is also an innovative, committed philanthropist who has donated nearly $1 billion to charity.

Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature.

Steven Pinker grew up in the English-speaking community of Montreal but has spent his adult life bouncing back and forth between Harvard and MIT. He is interested in all aspects of human nature: how we see, hear, think, speak, remember, feel and interact.

To be specific: he developed the first comprehensive theory of language acquisition in children, used verb meaning as a window into cognition, probed the limits of neural networks and showed how the interaction between memory and computation shapes language. He has used evolution to illuminate innuendo, emotional expression and social coordination. He has documented historical declines in violence and explained them in terms of the ways that the violent and peaceable components of human nature interact in different eras. He has written books on the language instinct, how the mind works, the stuff of thought and the doctrine of the blank slate, together with a guide to stylish writing that is rooted in psychology.

In his latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, he writes about progress -- why people are healthier, richer, safer, happier and better educated than ever. His other books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, The Stuff of Thought, and The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Anthony Magliano and Mica Thomas are the founder and artistic directors of Quixotic, a mixed-media theater/performance/aerialist company.

Quixotic, conceived by founder Anthony Magliano is an ensemble of artists from various disciplines including aerial acrobatics, dance, fashion, film, music and visual f-x. This inventive group of artists goes beyond the limits of any specific art form, challenging traditional perceptions and creating a total sensory experience unlike any other for its audience while exploring infinite possibilities of movement, sound and multimedia.

Ainissa Ramirez is a science evangelist and science lecturer, passionate about getting kids of all ages excited about science.

Ainissa Ramirez is a science evangelist, dedicated to sharing the joy of materials, process and creativity with students of all ages. You can find her work at Material Marvels. Prior to taking on the call to improve science understanding, she was a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Yale, leading a research program in smart materials and nanomaterials. She has published several book chapters and scores of scientific articles and holds 10 patents. Prior to working at Yale, Ainissa was a member of technical staff (MTS) at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, where she developed a universal solder (a reactive solder that bonds to glass) for which she was awarded MIT’s Technology Review TR100 award (in 2003). She later founded a company, called Adhera Technologies, which commercializes this invention.

Aaron Reedy teaches at Thomas Kelly High School in Chicago, where he uses innovative projects to connect his classroom to the wider world of science.

Aaron Reedy is one of those science teachers you dreamed of having. In pursuit of great education, he sea-kayaked down the Mississippi River, immersed kids in field studies of reptile reproductive biology and climate change, and carried out professional-level science in the classroom. Right now, he's a team member on a National Geographic/Waitts grant to investigate the role that the sex ratio plays in evolution and population growth in island populations of lizards. 

At his blog, wideworldscience.blogspot.com, he helps bring field biology into classrooms and shared the work of his students with the world.

Colin Robertson is apparently "attempting to make the world's first crowdsourced solar energy solution" Or is he?

Colin Robertson is a young entrepreneur with a single, world-changing idea: crowdsource solar energy solutions to the global climate crisis. He is a passionate believer in the idea that we can solve all of our problems by coming together in groups.

He is also a fictional character created by ImprovEverywhere for a special prank at TED2012. He is played by Eugene Cordero, an actor and comedian based in Los Angeles, and a regular performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. 

Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary filmmaker who dips into every flavor of madness, extremism and obsession.

For his latest book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson spent three years traveling the world and talking to people who'd been subjected to high-profile public shamings. Whatever their transgression, the response was to be faced by an angry mob, as Ronson calls them "collective outrage circles" devoted to tearing down said person from any position of power. It does not, Ronson suggests gently, reflect so well on society as a whole.

In a previous book, The Psychopath Test, Ronson explored the unnerving world of psychopaths -- a group that includes both incarcerated killers and, one of his subjects insists, plenty of CEOs. In his books, films and articles, Ronson explores madness and obsession of all kinds, from the US military's experiments in psychic warfare to the obscene and hate-filled yet Christian rap of the Insane Clown Posse. He wrote a column for the Guardian, hosted an essay program on Radio 4 in the United Kingdom, and contributes to This American Life.

Donald Sadoway is working on a battery miracle -- an inexpensive, incredibly efficient, three-layered battery using “liquid metal."

The problem at the heart of many sustainable-energy systems: How to store power so it can be delivered to the grid all the time, day and night, even when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining? At MIT, Donald Sadoway has been working on a grid-size battery system that stores energy using a three-layer liquid-metal core. With help from fans like Bill Gates, Sadoway and two of his students have spun off the Liquid Metals Battery Corporation (LMBC) to bring the battery to market.

Carl Schoonover is a neuroscientist and one of the founders of NeuWrite, a collaboration between writers and neuroscientist.

Carl is a neuroscience PhD candidate at Columbia University, where he works on microanatomy and electrophysiology of rodent somatosensory cortex. He the author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, and has written for the New York Times, Le Figaro, the Huffington Post, Science, Scientific American, Design Observer, and Boing Boing. In 2008 he cofounded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between. He hosts a radio show on WkCR 89.9FM, which focuses on opera and classical music, and their relationship to the brain.

How will we talk, work, live with robots? Henrik Scharfe and his robot double, Geminoid-DK, want to know.

TEDxBrussels says it best: "Henrik Scharfe lives with two bodies. One was born in Denmark in the late sixties, and one was born in Japan in 2011." Body #2 is Geminoid-DK, an ultra-realistic android that looks exactly like its ... master? owner? executive? human? The tension in this word choice hints at what Scharfe and Geminoid-DK want to explore: How we as humans will relate to robots that will soon form an intimate part of our lives. Geminoid-DK takes meetings in Scharfe's office and sparks uncanny reactions everywhere it goes. Curious? Take a look at www.geminoid.dk and see if you spot the human. Scharfe is director of the Center for Computer-Mediated Epistemology at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he researches what technology can help us know -- and how technology can help us understand what it is to be human.

Tali Sharot studies why our brains are biased toward optimism.

Optimism bias is the belief that the future will be better, much better, than the past or present. And most of us display this bias. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot wants to know why: What is it about our brains that makes us overestimate the positive? She explores the question in her book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. 

In the book (and a 2011 TIME magazine cover story), she reviewed findings from both social science and neuroscience that point to an interesting conclusion: "our brains aren't just stamped by the past. They are constantly being shaped by the future." In her own work, she's interested in how our natural optimism actually shapes what we remember, and her interesting range of papers encompasses behavioral research (how likely we are to misremember major events) as well as medical findings -- like searching for the places in the brain where optimism lives. Sharot is a faculty member of the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences at University College London.

Andrew Stanton has made you laugh and cry. The writer behind the three "Toy Story" movies and the writer/director of "WALL-E," he releases his new film, "John Carter," in March.

Andrew Stanton wrote the first film produced entirely on a computer, Toy Story. But what made that film a classic wasn't the history-making graphic technology -- it's the story, the heart, the characters that children around the world instantly accepted into their own lives. Stanton wrote all three Toy Story movies at Pixar Animation Studios, where he was hired in 1990 as the second animator on staff. He has two Oscars, as the writer-director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E. And as Edgar Rice Burroughs nerds, we're breathlessly awaiting the March opening of his fantasy-adventure movie John Carter.

Jim Stengel is a brand ­marketer looking to change the narrative of business.

When he left Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel was Global Marketing Officer, working with P&G's intimately loved brands (Crest, Pampers, Gillette ...). He left to pursue a larger vision: How can we change the narrative of business to focus on core values? He's looking for a new story of business -- a new kind of leadership that amplifies the ideal at the core of every business, and creates the kind of growth that makes our world a better place. With his consultancy, The Jim Stengel Company, he's been looking at 50 of the world's top companies, analyzing some 50,000 brands. And he found that there's a cause-and-effect relationship between the companies' financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. His new book is Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Bryan Stevenson is a public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based group that has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.

EJI recently won an historic ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. Mr. Stevenson’s work fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system has won him numerous awards. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, and has been awarded 14 honorary doctorate degrees. Bryan is the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. 

Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.

Marco Tempest began his performing career as a stage magician and manipulator, winning awards and establishing an international reputation as a master illusionist. His interest in computer-generated imagery led him to incorporate video and digital technology in his work -- and eventually to develop a new form of contemporary illusion. 

Tempest is the executive director of the NYC Magic Lab, a science consortium exploring illusion and digital technology. He is deeply embedded in the tech industry and has regular interactions with product teams in an advisory capacity and as a consultant or developer for prototype consumer technologies. He is a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and a creative consultant at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.

Marco Tempest began his performing career as a stage magician and manipulator, winning awards and establishing an international reputation as a master illusionist. His interest in computer-generated imagery led him to incorporate video and digital technology in his work -- and eventually to develop a new form of contemporary illusion. 

Tempest is the executive director of the NYC Magic Lab, a science consortium exploring illusion and digital technology. He is deeply embedded in the tech industry and has regular interactions with product teams in an advisory capacity and as a consultant or developer for prototype consumer technologies. He is a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and a creative consultant at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (call him MTT) is an all-around music educator -- connecting with global audiences, young musicians and concertgoers in San Francisco and London.

Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships: with others, with ourselves, with it.

Since her path breaking The Second Self: Computers and The Human Spirit in 1984 psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle has been studying how technology changes not only what we do but also whom we are. In 1995's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle explored how the Internet provided new possibilities for exploring identity. In her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis confront us with moments of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. In her most recent bestselling book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle argues that now, with a deeper understanding of our vulnerability to technology, we must reclaim conversation, the most human—and humanizing—thing that we do. The virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless; to the disconnections of our modern age, it is the talking cure.

Described as "the Margaret Mead of digital cuture," Turkle's work focuses on the world of social media, the digital workplace, and the rise of chatbots and sociable robots. As she puts it, these are technologies that propose themselves "as the architect of our intimacies." We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection. Turkle suggests that just because we grew up with the Internet, we tend to see it as all grown up, but it is not: Digital technology is still in its infancy, and there is ample time for us to reshape how we build it and use it.

Turkle is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

In his 12th-grade Sexuality and Society class, Al Vernacchio speaks honestly and positively about human sexuality.

Al Vernacchio teaches at Friends’ Central, a private Quaker school just outside Philadelphia. His positive, enthusiastic and often humorous approach to comprehensive sexuality education (rather than abstinence-only education) has made “Mr. V.” a popular speaker -- and has recently brought him to the attention of the New York Times Magazine, which profiled his class in the November 20, 2011, cover story "Teaching Good Sex". When not talking about sexuality, Vernacchio teaches English and is the faculty moderator of the school's Gay-Straight Alliance. He's also a seasoned wedding officiant.

Christina Warinner is a researcher at the University of Zurich, where she studies how humans have co-evolved with environments, diets and disease.

Tna analyzes DNA from the bones and teeth of ancient people to study human evolution in response to changes in infectious disease, diet and the environment over the last 10,000 years. Using samples from ancient skeletons and mummies, she investigates how and why lactase persistence, alcohol intolerance and HIv-resistance have evolved in different populations around the world. As an archaeogeneticist, she’s particularly interested in bridging the gap between archaeology, anthropology and the biomedical sciences.

Frank Warren is the creator of the PostSecret Project, a blog full of secrets anonymously shared via postcard.

Frank Warren is the creator of The PostSecret Project, a collection of highly personal and artfully decorated postcards mailed anonymously from around the world, displaying the soulful secrets we never voice. Since November 2004, Warren has received more than 500,000 postcards, with secrets that run from sexual taboos and criminal activity to confessions of secret beliefs, hidden acts of kindness, shocking habits and fears. PostSecret is a safe and anonymous "place" where people can hear unheard voices and share untold stories.

Abigail Washburn pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, creating results that feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody's ever heard before.

Reggie Watts creates unpredictably brilliant performances on the spot using his voice, looping pedals and his giant brain.

The winner of TED's Full Spectrum auditions, Reggie Watts works on the edge of improv performance -- at a place where you can almost visibly see his brain moving, as he pulls spoken and musical snippets from the sonosphere and blends them into a stream-of-consciousness flow. On screen, Reggie has appeared on The Conan O’Brien Show, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, HBO’s The Yes Men Save the World, Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues and PBS’ Electric Company. Last summer, he opened nightly on Conan O'Brien’s sold-out North American “Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour.

After making a splash in the field of bioinformatics, Sebastian Wernicke moved on to the corporate sphere, where he motivates and manages multidimensional projects.

Dr. Sebastian Wernicke is the Chief Data Scientist of ONE LOGIC, a data science boutique that supports organizations across industries to make sense of their vast data collections to improve operations and gain strategic advantages. Wernicke originally studied bioinformatics and previously led the strategy and growth of Seven Bridges Genomics, a Cambridge-based startup that builds platforms for genetic analysis.

Before his career in statistics began, Wernicke worked stints as both a paramedic and successful short animated filmmaker. He's also the author of the TEDPad app, an irreverent tool for creating an infinite number of "amazing and really bad" and mostly completely meaningless talks. He's the author of the statistically authoritative and yet completely ridiculous "How to Give the Perfect TEDTalk."

At 14, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to achieve fusion -- with a reactor born in his garage. Now he wants to save our seaports from nuclear terror.

Physics wunderkind Taylor Wilson astounded the science world when, at age 14, he became the youngest person in history to produce fusion. The University of Nevada-Reno offered a home for his early experiments when Wilson’s worried parents realized he had every intention of building his reactor in the garage.

Wilson now intends to fight nuclear terror in the nation's ports, with a homemade radiation detector priced an order of magnitude lower than most current devices. In 2012, Wilson's dreams received a boost when he became a recipient of the $100,000 Thiel Prize. Wilson now intends revolutionize the way we produce energy, fight cancer, and combat terrorism using nuclear technology.

Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus.

Using genetic sequencing, needle-haystack research, and dogged persistence (crucial to getting spoilage-susceptible samples through the jungle and to the lab), Nathan Wolfe has proven what was science-fiction conjecture only a few decades ago -- not only do viruses jump from animals to humans, but they do so all the time. Along the way Wolfe has discovered several new viruses, and is poised to discover many more.

Wolfe's research has turned the field of epidemiology on its head, and attracted interest from philanthropists at Google.org and the Skoll foundation. Better still, the research opens the door to preventing epidemics before they happen, sidelining them via early-warning systems and alleviating the poverty from which easy transmission emerges.

Lior Zoref is a blogger, speaker and marketing guy -- and he'll be delivering Long Beach's first crowd-sourced TEDTalk. You can help ...

Lior's talk was created using crowd wisdom from thousands of people globally. This is a completely new way to create a TED talk. At TED we get inspired by the best speakers in the world. But it's just one speaker at a time who reaches out to many. Lior's talk was prepared by many, presented by one, to inspire many. He'll offer a fresh idea about using social networks to gather crowd wisdom as a new way to think.

About a year ago, Lior attended TEDx in Tel-Aviv. It was then that he decided to share his dream about speaking at TED with his friends on social networks. Then, something amazing happened: his Facebook friends decided to help him make his dream come true.