Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), overseeing the Web's standards and development.

In the 1980s, scientists at CERN were asking themselves how massive, complex, collaborative projects -- like the fledgling LHC -- could be orchestrated and tracked. Tim Berners-Lee, then a contractor, answered by inventing the World Wide Web. This global system of hypertext documents, linked through the Internet, brought about a massive cultural shift ushered in by the new tech and content it made possible: AOL, eBay, Wikipedia, TED.com...

Berners-Lee is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains standards for the Web and continues to refine its design. Recently he has envisioned a "Semantic Web" -- an evolved version of the same system that recognizes the meaning of the information it carries. He's the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the MIT, where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.

As Blood Orange, musical polymath Devonté “Dev” Hynes blends guitar, voice, and electronica into a seductive cocktail of 21st-century R&B.

As a producer and songwriter, Devonté “Dev” Hynes has helped launch several superstar careers. Now, under the guise of his solo project Blood Orange, he is launching his own. 

Channeling classical tropes, nineties hits and hip New York musical culture with equal proficiency, Hynes, who has synesthesia, literally applies sounds as colors. His 2013 album Cupid Deluxe showcases dazzling, complex compositions that retain pop’s infectious stickiness. 

In addition to his own work, Hynes has produced sessions for Sky Ferreira, Solange, and MKS.

As a member of the California Highway Patrol with assignments including patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge, Sergeant Kevin Briggs and his staff are the last barriers between would-be suicides and the plunge to near-certain death.

The Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic landmark of unparalleled beauty and attracts swarms of visitors every year. Tragically, also among them are hundreds of suicidal men and women.

As a member of the CHP for over twenty-three years, with the majority of those years patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge, Sgt. Briggs discovered early that his job required him to take on an unusual role for a police officer: suicide prevention counselor. As a cancer survivor and survivor of multiple heart operations, Briggs’ familiarity with personal struggle bonds him with suicidal men and women. With simple empathy, an instinct for improvisation and a refusal to walk away, Briggs has negotiated several hundred people from suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. As he told the SF Chronicle, "I've talked to people from ten minutes to seven hours. I very much despise losing. I do whatever I can to get that person back over the rail. I play to win." Sgt. Briggs retired from the CHP in November 2013. 

Kevin also has a book, Guardian of the Golden Gate , about his experiences. 

Writer and thinker David Brooks has covered business, crime and politics over a long career in journalism.

David Brooks became an op-ed columnist for the New York Times in September 2003. He is currently a commentator on The PBS Newshour, NPR's "All Things Considered" and NBC's Meet the Press.

He is the author of Bobos in Paradise and The Social Animal. In April 2015, he released with his fourth book, The Road to Character, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Brooks also teaches at Yale University, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He graduated with a bachelor's in history from the University of Chicago before becoming a police reporter for the City News Bureau, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times.

He worked at The Washington Times and then The Wall Street Journal for nine years. His last post at the Journal was as Op-ed Editor. Prior to that, he was posted in Brussels, covering Russia, the Middle East, South Africa and European affairs. His first post at the Journal was as editor of the book review section, and he filled in as the Journal's movie critic.

He also served as a senior editor at The Weekly Standard for nice years, as well as contributing editor for The Atlantic and Newsweek. His latest book is The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.

As New York’s chief city planner under the Bloomberg administration, Amanda Burden led revitalization of some of the city's most familiar features -- from the High Line to the Brooklyn waterfront.

With a keen eye for detail that extends to the most humble park bench -- and a gift for convincing developers and bureaucrats of her vision -- former New York City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden rebuilt New York City.

Taking inspiration from her mentor, the influential urban theorist William H. “Holly” Whyte, Burden stepped out of the society pages (she's Babe Paley's daughter) and into a high-profile development career, which started with the planning and design of Battery Park and brought her to the Bloomberg administration. Her high design standards and flair for human-scale public spaces (as she told the Wall Street Journal, "You can actually change a city by a small stroke") ensures that her legacy will be an enduring element of New York’s urban landscape. Post-mayoralty, she is joining Mike Bloomberg's newly established global consultancy, Bloomberg Associates, as one of the founding Principals (along with Janette Sadik-Khan, former traffic commisioner).

Even if you don’t recognize his name, chances are you’ve seen Matthew Carter’s work -- his type designs include some of the world’s most familiar digital typefaces.

MacArthur Fellow Matthew Carter started his career as a punchcutter, a print artisan who physically carves each letter into metal. He had already designed several legendary typefaces (in 1975, he created Bell Centennial for use in phone books) when he stepped into the digital design ring. As part of a project undertaken for Microsoft, Carter created early and successful examples of screen type emphasizing clarity and ease of long-term viewing, including the familiar Verdana, Galliard and Georgia. A recent work is MS Sitka, a family of digital fonts that are built to be readable at many sizes in print and onscreen.

Print and online publications such as Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Wired and the Washington Post have all commissioned Carter fonts, leading Microsoft's typography blog to call him "the person who shapes the way we read about the world."

Carter is a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company specializing in designing and producing original typefaces. As he says: "A typeface is a beautiful collection of letters, not a collection of beautiful letters."

In his work, David Chalmers explores the “hard problem of consciousness" -- the quest to explain our subjective experience.

David Chalmers is a philosopher at the Australian National University and New York University. He works in philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. While he's especially known for his theories on consciousness, he's also interested (and has extensively published) in all sorts of other issues in the foundations of cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology.

Chalmers placed the "hard problem" of consciousness firmly on the philosophical map. He famously challenges materialist conceptions of mind, arguing for an "explanatory gap" between our brains’ physical properties and our minds’ qualia. Elsewhere he has championed the notion of the "extended mind," which argues that the mind is not confined to skin or skull, but plausibly may extend beyond them.

At the Simons Foundation, Wendy Chung is working to characterize behavior, brain structure and function in people with genetic variations that may relate to autism.

Wendy Chung is the director of clinical research at the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, which does both basic and applied science to serve people affected by autism spectrum disorders. She's the principal investigator of the foundation's Simons Variation in Individuals Project, which characterizes behavior and brain structure and function in participants with genetic copy number variants such as those at 16p11.2, which are believed to play a role in spectrum disorders.
 
Chung also directs the clinical genetics program at Columbia University. In assessing and treating kids with autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disabilities, she uses advanced genomic diagnostics to explore the genetic basis of neurological conditions. She thinks deeply about the ethical and emotional questions around genetic medicine and genetic testing.

The co-creator of TEDTalks and a bold thinker about new media, June Cohen is the Senior Executive Producer of TED Media.

As Executive Producer of TED Media, June Cohen has been responsible for bringing the TED Conference online and helping to grow its audience to more than 150 million viewers worldwide. In 2006, she launched TEDTalks, the online video series of TED Conference talks, followed by TED.com, the TED Open Translation Project and the TED Open TV Project. Cohen also co-produces and co-hosts the TED Conference in California. A journalist by training, she was previously VP of Content at HotWired.com, the pioneering website from Wired magazine. In 1991, she launched the world's first networked multimedia magazine, at Stanford University

She says: "Modern technologies are returning us to very ancient forms of media, communication and community. And we're all the better for it."

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
 

Andrew Connolly is helping to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope -- as well as tools to handle the massive datasets it will send our way.

Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and perhaps 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 affect 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.

Masarat Daud founded the 8-Day Academy, creating short, accessible courses to educate those in remote villages and communities. She's also, as she puts it, "the accidental ambassador of the Burqa."

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.

Groomed for terror, Zak Ebrahim chose a different life. The author of The Terrorist's Son, he hopes his story will inspire others to reject a path of violence.

When Zak Ebrahim was seven, his family went on the run. His father, El Sayyid Nosair, had hoped Zak would follow in his footsteps -- and become a jihadist. Instead, Zak was at the beginning of a long journey to comprehend his past.

Zak Ebrahim kept his family history a secret as they moved through a long succession of towns. In 2010, he realized his experience as a terrorist’s son not only gave him a unique perspective, but also a unique chance to show that if he could escape a violent heritage, anyone could. As he told Truthdig.com, “We must embrace tolerance and nonviolence. Who knows this better than the son of a terrorist?”

In 2014 Ebrahim published the TED Book The Terrorist's Son, a memoir written with Jeff Giles about the path he took to turn away from hate. In early 2015 the book won an American Library Association Alex award.

Keren Elazari charts the transformation of hackers from cyberpunk protagonists to powerful hacktivists, lone rangers and digital robin hoods who are the unsung heroes of the digital frontier.

A GigaOM analyst and Israeli hacking scene insider, Keren Elazari moves through business, academic and security circles, researching new technologies and emerging security threats. Inspired by science fiction in her teenage years and fuelled by insatiable curiosity, Elazari spent years investigating the darker corners of cyberspace.

Today, she emerges with a new understanding of the hacker underworld. Information is the new currency of our digital society, and those who can control it have become powerful actors -- whether they choose to be heroes or villains. As she says, "Hacking has become a superpower that can positively impact millions worldwide – if we learn how to harness it.”

Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.

A broad thinker, Juan Enriquez bridges disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. He is the managing director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm. He published (with Steve Gullans) Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Shaping Life on Earth. The book describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves and other species.

Enriquez cofounded the company that made the world's first synthetic life form, and seed funded a company that may allow portable brain reading.

David Epstein is an investigative reporter who covers the wide-open space where sports, science and medicine overlap.

Once known for entertaining millions by creating special effects for Hollywood, theme parks and Broadway, Applied Minds cofounder Bran Ferren now solves impossible tech challenges with previously unimaginable inventions.

After dropping out of MIT in 1970, Bran Ferren became a designer and engineer for theater, touring rock bands, and dozens of movies, including Altered States and Little Shop of Horrors, before joining Disney as a lead Imagineer, then becoming president of R&D for the Walt Disney Company.

In 2000, Ferren and partner Danny Hillis left Disney to found Applied Minds, a playful design and invention firm dedicated to distilling game-changing inventions from an eclectic stew of the brightest creative minds culled from every imaginable discipline.

Ze Frank rose to fame on a viral video -- in 2001! He has been making online comedy, web toys and massively shared experiences (like the addictive Young Me Now Me) ever since.

Ever since his "How to Dance Properly" viral video -- born as a party invite for 17 friends -- hit the Web in 2001, Ze Frank has been making people giggle, guffaw and gasp out loud whilst procrastinating at work. He defines, in many ways, the genre of online comedy, and continues to innovate madly on the form. 

In 2006 he launched a year-long daily video blog called The Show with Ze Frank, which Slate.com called "the best sustained comedy run in the history of the Web." His rapid-fire delivery and absurd explorations in audience participation (like Earth Sandwich) has influenced a generation of digital native YouTubers. Perhap his most brilliant move: calling on fans to write the show for him. Using collaborative tools, online viewers collectively put words in his mouth (and props in his lap); he faithfully performed this wiki-comedy each week for his "Fabuloso Friday" show.

In 2008, along with Erik Kastner, Frank launched Colowars, the first massively multiplayer game on Twitter, which featured two months of sponsored online events and competitions. Recently he has worked with his audience to create a series of projects based on shared emotions such as pain, fear and the pang of nostalgia. Frank works as a consultant to range of industries on audience engagement and is a public speaker on the subject of the virtual life.

In 2012 he returned to the internet airwaves with "A Show." About which a MetaFilter commenter wrote:

If this were a cult, I would join.

If this were a religion, I would attend services.

If this were a band, I would not torrent the albums, but buy them, full price, from a local independent record store.

If this were a telethon, I would buy multiple tote bags.

Welcome back, Ze.

Inspired by open-source software models, Sage Bionetworks co-founder Stephen Friend builds tools that facilitate research sharing on a massive and revolutionary scale.

While working for Merck, Stephen Friend became frustrated by the slow pace at which big pharma created new treatments for desperate patients. Studying shared models like Wikipedia, Friend realized that the complexities of disease could only be understood -- and combated -- with collaboration and transparency, not by isolated scientists working in secret with proprietary data

In his quest for a solution, Friend co-founded Sage Bionetworks, an organization dedicated to creating strategies and platforms that empower researchers to share and interpret data on a colossal scale -- as well as crowdsource tests for new hypotheses.

As he wrote on CreativeCommons.org, "Our goal is ambitious. We want to take biology from a place where enclosure and privacy are the norm, where biologists see themselves as lone hunter-gatherers working to get papers written, to one where the knowledge is created specifically to fit into an open model where it can be openly queried and transformed."

Melinda French Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she puts into practice the idea that every life has equal value.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. As co-chair, Melinda French Gates helps shape and approve strategies, review results, advocate for foundation issues and set the overall direction. In developing countries, the foundation focuses on improving people's health with vaccines and other life-saving tools and giving them a chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to dramatically improve education so that all young people have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

In recent years, Melinda French Gates has become a vocal advocate for access to contraception, advancing the idea that empowering women to decide whether and when to have children can have transformational effects on societies. In 2012, Gates spearheaded the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of delivering contraceptives to 120 million women in developing countries by 2020. When asked why she got involved in this issue, Gates said, "We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to the contraceptives we have here in the United States and we weren't providing them because of political controversy in our country. To me, that was just a crime. I kept looking around trying to find the person to get this back on the global stage. I realized I just had to do it."

A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation.

Bill Gates is the founder and former CEO of Microsoft. A geek icon, tech visionary and business trailblazer, Gates' leadership -- fueled by his long-held dream that millions might realize their potential through great software -- made Microsoft a personal computing powerhouse and a trendsetter in the Internet dawn. Whether you're a suit, chef, quant, artist, media maven, nurse or gamer, you've probably used a Microsoft product today.

In summer of 2008, Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. Holding that all lives have equal value (no matter where they're being lived), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has now donated staggering sums to HIV/AIDS programs, libraries, agriculture research and disaster relief -- and offered vital guidance and creative funding to programs in global health and education. Gates believes his tech-centric strategy for giving will prove the killer app of planet Earth's next big upgrade.

Read a collection of Bill and Melinda Gates' annual letters, where they take stock of the Gates Foundation and the world. And follow his ongoing thinking on his personal website, The Gates Notes. His new paper, "The Next Epidemic," is published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

After Rep. Gabby Giffords was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet in January 2011, she and her husband, Mark Kelly, a NASA astronaut, retired US Navy captain and combat veteran, have become known around the world for their story of hope and resilience.

For nearly 15 years, Gabby Giffords has dedicated herself to public service. As the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona State Senate, she represented her community in the Arizona Legislature from 2000-2005, and then in US Congress from 2006-2012. In Congress, Gabby represented a diverse area that covers 9,000 square miles including a 114-mile border with Mexico. She quickly became a leading champion of border security, energy independence, and the needs of military families and veterans. She was consistently ranked as one of the most centrist legislators in Congress. 

In 2007, Giffords married Mark Kelly, a Naval aviator who flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm and NASA astronaut. Mark flew his first of four missions in 2001 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour, the same space shuttle that he commanded on its final flight in May 2011. He has also commanded Space Shuttle Discovery and is one of only two individuals who have visited the International Space Station on four different occasions.

On January 8, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona, an assassination attempt at an event with constituents left Giffords severely wounded, and six others dead. Since that day, Gabby and Mark have become known for their story of hope and resilience in the wake of tragedy.

The author of "Eat, Pray, Love," Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some big topics. Her fascinations: genius, creativity and how we get in our own way when it comes to both.

Elizabeth Gilbert faced down a premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of -- running off for a year. Her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia resulted in the megabestselling and deeply beloved memoir Eat, Pray, Love, about her process of finding herself by leaving home.

She's a longtime magazine writer -- covering music and politics for Spin and GQ -- as well as a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the story collection Pilgrims, the novel Stern Men (about lobster fishermen in Maine) and a biography of the woodsman Eustace Conway, called The Last American Man. Her work has been the basis for two movies so far (Coyote Ugly, based on her own tale of working at the famously raunchy bar in New York City), and Eat, Pray, Love, with the part of Gilbert played by Julia Roberts. Not bad for a year off.

In 2010, Elizabeth published Committed, a memoir exploring her ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage. And her 2013 novel, The Signature of All Things, is "a sprawling tale of 19th century botanical exploration."

Gilbert also owns and runs the import shop Two Buttons in Frenchtown, New Jersey.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead.

"Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age," Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago. "Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas -- usually, but not always, his own." In fact, he's as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.

After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton). In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them.

Charmian Gooch is the 2014 TED Prize winner. At Global Witness, she exposes how a global architecture of corruption is woven into the extraction and exploitation of natural resources.

Charmian Gooch co-founded the watchdog NGO Global Witness with colleagues Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, in response to growing concerns over covert warfare funded by illicit trade in 1993. Since then, Global Witness has captured headlines for their exposé of "blood diamonds" in Uganda, of mineral exploitation in the Congo, of illegal timber trade between Cambodia and Thailand, and more. With unique expertise on the shadowy threads connecting corrupt businesses and governments, Global Witness continues its quest to uncover and root out the sources of exploitation.

In 2014, Gooch and Global Witness were awarded the $1 million TED Prize, along with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, for their campaign to end anonymous companies. Gooch's TED Prize wish: for us to know who ultimately owns and controls companies and launch a new era of openness in business. Global Witness highlighted the importance of this issue in an investigation, aired on 60 Minutes, where they sent an undercover investigator into 13 New York law firms. The investigator posed as an adviser to a government minister in Africa and asked for thoughts on how to move money into the United States for a plane, a yacht and a brownstone. All but one firm offered advice. 

The Panama Papers, released in April of 2016, further demonstrate the need for transparency. The papers paint a picture of how the rich and powerful around the world use offshore accounts and anonymous companies to move money. "This secretive world is being opened up to global public scrutiny," said Gooch, on the day the papers were released.

By studying how ant colonies work without any one leader, Deborah Gordon has identified striking similarities in how ant colonies, brains, cells and computer networks regulate themselves.

Ecologist Deborah M. Gordon has learned that ant colonies can work without central control by using simple interactions like how often the insects touch antennae. Contrary to the notion that colonies are organized by efficient ants, she has instead discovered that evolution has produced “noisy” systems that tolerate accident and respond flexibly to the environment. When conditions are tough, natural selection favors colonies that conserve resources.

Her studies of ant colonies have led her and her Stanford colleagues to the discovery of the “Anternet,” which regulates foraging in ants in the same way the internet regulates data traffic. But as she said to Wired in 2013, "Insect behavior mimicking human networks ... is actually not what’s most interesting about ant networks. What’s far more interesting are the parallels in the other direction: What have the ants worked out that we humans haven’t thought of yet?" Her latest exploration: How do ants behave in space?

Using a deck of cards and other simple props, Helder Guimarães gets up close to play with your perceptions and preconceptions.

Helder Guimarães slips and slides cards on a table, wowing you with invisible technique, unorthodox psychology and fresh humor. As a close-up magician, he's won international awards for his elegantly thought-through performances, which merge a nuanced stagecraft with good old how-does-he-do-it sleight of hand. He is the world's youngest-ever World Champion of Card Magic. He reflects on his craft in the enigmatic out-of-print book, Reflections.

His appearances at LA's Magic Castle led him to be awarded the title of Parlour Magician of The Year, in 2011 and 2012, recognition that drew hours-long queues as audiences (and fellow magicians) flocked to the simple and astonishing act. Also, in 2012, he co-created a show called Nothing to Hide, with Derek DelGaudio, which opened at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by magic superfan Neil Patrick Harris. In 2013, the show was taken to Off-Broadway where it stayed for a very successful held-over run of 110 performances.

Tweeting (and covering Bowie) from the International Space Station last year, Colonel Chris Hadfield reminded the world how much we love space.

“Good morning, Earth.” That is how Colonel Chris Hadfield, writing on Twitter, woke up the world every day while living aboard the International Space Station. In his five months on the ISS (including three as commander) Hadfield became a worldwide sensation, using social media to make outer space accessible and infusing a sense of wonder into the collective consciousness. Check out his cover version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," sung while floating in his tin can, far above the world ...
 
Now back on our home planet, he continues to share the excitement of science and space travel. He's the author of the 2014 book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. As he says, "There are no wishy-washy astronauts. You don't get up there by being uncaring and blasé. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself." A photography geek, in 2014 he also published an album of his photos from the shuttle: You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes.

Hadfield is also a font of Canadian firsts: He was Canada’s first shuttle mission specialist, and the first Canadian to board a Russian spacecraft (he helped build the Mir), do a spacewalk (he's done two), and of course, to command the International Space Station.

Del Harvey works to define policy and to ensure user safety and security in the challenging realm of modern social media.

As Senior Director of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Del Harvey works to define policy and to ensure user safety and security in the challenging realm of modern social media. Prior to joining Twitter, she spent five years as the co-administrator and law enforcement liaison for a 501(c)3 non-profit charity, working with agencies ranging from local police departments to the FBI, U.S. Marshals and the Secret Service.

When Adrianne Haslet-Davis lost her left foot in the Boston Marathon bombing, her left leg was amputated to the knee. Less than a year later, she's back on her feet and dancing again.

To ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, dancing was everything. So when she lost her left foot in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, she vowed — from her hospital bed — that she would dance again. Two hundred days later, standing on the TED2014 stage, she did just that. With the help of MIT prostheticist Hugh Herr, Haslet-Davis performed in Vancouver for the first time since the bombing. 

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 2012's TEDGlobal she recorded a song in various locations around 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."

Heap's last album Ellipse earned her a Grammy and Ivor Novello award. This summer marks the release of Sparks, her fifth and most ambitious album to date. Sparks' songs have taken Imogen all over the world from her North East London home studio to the Himalayas via China. This year Imogen is the guest artist-curator for the iconic London Roundhouse venue’s new music festival, Reverb. The eagerly awaited Sparks world tour will begin at Reverb in August 2014. Meanwhile, Imogen will be celebrating her tenth TED anniversary this year.

At MIT, Hugh Herr builds prosthetic knees, legs and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors to restore (and perhaps enhance) normal gait, balance and speed.

Hugh Herr co-directs the Center for Extreme Bionics at the MIT Media Lab, where he is pioneering a new class of biohybrid smart prostheses and orthoses to improve the quality of life for thousands of people with physical challenges. A powered ankle-foot prosthesis called the Empower by Ottobock, for instance, emulates the action of a biological leg to create a natural gait, allowing persons with amputation to walk with normal levels of speed and metabolism as if their legs were biological.  

Herr also advances powerful body exoskeletons that augment human physicality beyond innate physiological levels, enabling humans to walk and run faster with less metabolic energy. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Dephy Inc., which creates products that augment physiological function through electromechanical enhancement.

Mellody Hobson is president of Ariel Investments, a value-driven money management firm -- and an advocate for financial literacy and investor education.

Mellody Hobson handles strategic planning for the Chicago-based Ariel Investments, one of the largest African-American-owned money management firms in the United States. Beyond her work at Ariel, Hobson has become a nationally recognized voice on financial literacy and investor education. She is a regular contributor and analyst on finance, the markets and economic trends for CBS News, contributes weekly money tips on the Tom Joyner Morning Show and writes a column for Black Enterprise magazine. As a passionate advocate for investor education, she is a spokesperson for the Ariel/Hewitt study, 401(k) Plans in Living Color and the Ariel Black Investor Survey, both of which examine investing patterns among minorities.

Hobson is chair of the board for DreamWorks Animation. Her community outreach includes serving as chairman of After School Matters, providing Chicago teens with high quality out-of-school-time programs.

Why is there something rather than nothing? In his book "Why Does the World Exist?" Jim Holt dares to ask.

In his 2012 book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, Jim Holt creates a narrative out of one of the biggest questions we can ask -- and how modern scientists and philosophers are asking it. Can answers be found in many-worlds theory, in quantum mechanics, in a theology? Traveling around North America and Europe, he talks to physicists, including David Deutsch; philosophers, including Richard Swinburne; and the novelist John Updike. Why? Because as he tells Vanity Fair, "To me it’s the most sublime and awesome question in all of philosophy and all of human inquiry."

A longtime contributor to the New York Times, Slate and the New Yorker, Holt has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, humor, logic, truth and bullshit, among other topics. Holt studied mathematics at the University of Virginia, and was a faculty fellow in the philosophy department at Columbia. He is now at work on a book about free will, weakness of will, self-knowledge and happiness.

Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab.

Joichi "Joi" Ito is one of those names threaded through the history of the Internet. From his days kickstarting Internet culture in Japan at Digital Garage, his restless curiosity led him to be an early-stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kickstarter and other Internet companies, and to serve on countless boards and advisory committees around digital culture and Internet freedom.
 
He leads the legendary MIT Media Lab as it heads toward its third decade, and is working on a book with Jeff Howe about nine principles for navigating whatever the changing culture throws at us next. As he told Wired, "The amount of money and the amount of permission that you need to create an idea has decreased dramatically." So: aim for resilience, not strength; seek risk, not safety. The book is meant to be a compass for a world without maps.

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.

Tony Award-winning monologist, UNICEF ambassador, firebrand and FCC-fighting poet -- Sarah Jones assumes as many roles offstage as on.

"Chameleon-like" barely describes the astonishing ease with which Sarah Jones slips in and out of the characters in her solo performances -- as many as fourteen personae in her Broadway hit Bridge & Tunnel. Critics marvel not only at her ability to perfectly mimic accents and mannerisms, but also to seemingly reshape her body, down to pupils and dimples, in the blink of an eye.

Jones' performances showcase a biting political awareness, and she has received commissions from Equality Now, the Kellogg Foundation and the National Immigration Forum to address issues of injustice and inequality. She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and has given multiple performances at the White House at the invitation of President and First Lady Obama. Jones is now at work on a new solo show called Sell/Buy/Date, commissioned by the Novo Foundation. She debuted material from it at TED2015. She is also working on a commission for Lincoln Center Theater and a television project based on her characters.

Maira Kalman's wise, witty drawings have appeared on numberless New Yorker covers, in a dozen children's books, and throughout the pages of the Elements of Style. Her latest book, The Principles of Uncertainty, is the result of a year-long illustrated blog she kept for the New York Times.

Children know Maira Kalman for her series of Max storybooks, adults for her New Yorker covers and the gotta-have-it illustrated version of the Elements of Style -- simple proof that her sensibility blends a childlike delight with a grownup's wry take on the world.

With her husband, the legendary designer and art director Tibor Kalman, Maira spent several decades designing objets and assembling books like (un)FASHION. But after Tibor's untimely death in 1999, Maira herself became a cultural force. Her colorful, faux-naif illustrations -- and her very perspective -- tap a desire in all of us to look at the world the way she does.

Her latest book, The Principles of Uncertainty, is perhaps the most complete expression of Maira's worldview. Based on a monthly blog she kept for the New York Times website for one year, it is filled with carefully observed moments and briskly captured thoughts, an omnivore's view of life in the modern world.

Using fMRI imaging to watch the human brain at work, Nancy Kanwisher’s team has discovered cortical regions responsible for some surprisingly specific elements of cognition.

Does the brain use specialized processors to solve complex problems, or does it rely instead on more general-purpose systems?

This question has been at the crux of brain research for centuries. MIT researcher Nancy Kanwisher seeks to answer this question by discovering a “parts list” for the human mind and brain. "Understanding the nature of the human mind," she says, "is arguably the greatest intellectual quest of all time."

Kanwisher and her colleagues have used fMRI to identify distinct sites in the brain for face recognition, knowing where you are, and thinking about other people’s thoughts. Yet these discoveries are a prelude to bigger questions: How do these brain regions develop and function? What are the actual computations that go on in each region, and how are these computations implemented in circuits of neurons? And how do these work together to produce human intelligence?

To learn more, see Kanwisher's collection of short talks on how scientists actually study the human mind and brain and what they have learned so far.

Using innovative orbiting instruments, aerospace engineer Jeremy Kasdin hunts for the universe’s most elusive objects — potentially habitable worlds.

Sarah Kay is a poet, performer, educator and the founder of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate and empower students and teachers worldwide.

Sarah Kay has shared her poetry in 30 countries on six continents: in the middle of cornfields in Iowa, an orthodontist office in Nepal, a viking ship on a fjord in Norway, an LGBTQ community center in India, a church in New Zealand, a nightclub in Singapore, the Royal Danish Theater in Denmark, a public square in Estonia, Carnegie Hall in New York City, the back rooms of bars, juvenile detention centers, middle school gymnasiums and everywhere in between. Her poetry can be found on Netflix TV shows, Uniqlo T-shirts and bookstore shelves. She is the author of four best-selling books of poetry including B, The Type, No Matter the Wreckage and All Our Wild Wonder.

Kay holds a Masters Degree in The Art of Teaching from Brown University and an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Grinnell College. She is the founder and codirector of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate and empower students and teachers worldwide.

In 2004, Sal Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began making math tutorials for his cousins. Twelve years later, Khan Academy has more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries, with tutorials on subjects from basic math through economics, art history, computer science, health, medicine and more.

Salman "Sal" Khan is the founder and chief executive officer of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Khan Academy started as a passion project in 2004. Khan's cousin was struggling with math, so he tutored her remotely and posted educational videos on YouTube. So many people watched the videos that eventually Khan quit his job at a hedge fund and pursued Khan Academy full time. Today Khan Academy has more than 100 employees in Mountain View, California. Khan Academy believes learners of all ages should have unlimited access to free educational content they can master at their own pace. Its resources cover preschool through early college education, including math, grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, finance and history. Additionally, Khan Academy offers free personalized SAT test prep in partnership with the test developer, the College Board. More than 42 million registered users access Khan Academy in dozens of languages across 190 countries.

Khan has been profiled by "60 Minutes," featured on the cover of Forbes, and recognized as one of TIME’s "100 Most Influential People in the World." In his book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, Sal outlines his vision for the future of education.

Khan holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

As a punter, most recently for the Minnesota Vikings, Chris Kluwe consistently set team records. As an advocate for equality, he proudly and profanely broke the NFL's code of omertà around locker-room politics. He tweets a lot about World of Warcraft.

Rob Knight explores the unseen microbial world that exists literally right under our noses -- and everywhere else on (and in) our bodies.

Using scatological research methods that might repel the squeamish, microbial researcher Rob Knight uncovers the secret ecosystem (or "microbiome") of microbes that inhabit our bodies -- and the bodies of every creature on earth. In the process, he’s discovered a complex internal ecology that affects everything from weight loss to our susceptibility to disease. As he said to Nature in 2012, "What motivates me, from a pragmatic standpoint, is how understanding the microbial world might help us improve human and environmental health.”
 
Knight’s recent projects include the American Gut, an attempt to map the unique microbiome of the United States using open-access data mining tools and citizen-scientists to discover how lifestyle and diet affect our internal flora and fauna, and our overall health.

Knight is the author of the TED Book, Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes. 

Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text and audio technology. He's revered for his dizzying -- yet convincing -- writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology and the future of the human species.

Inventor, entrepreneur, visionary, Ray Kurzweil's accomplishments read as a startling series of firsts -- a litany of technological breakthroughs we've come to take for granted. Kurzweil invented the first optical character recognition (OCR) software for transforming the written word into data, the first print-to-speech software for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Yet his impact as a futurist and philosopher is no less significant. In his best-selling books, which include How to Create a Mind, The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil depicts in detail a portrait of the human condition over the next few decades, as accelerating technologies forever blur the line between human and machine.

In 2009, he unveiled Singularity University, an institution that aims to "assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies." He is a Director of Engineering at Google, where he heads up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language comprehension.

With Architizer, an online hub for architecture, Marc Kushner is breaking architecture out of its insular echo chamber and reconnecting the public with buildings.

David Kwong creates illusions for films and TV, and makes verbal magic as a crossword puzzle maker for the New York Times.

As a magician and crossword puzzle constructor, David Kwong mixes puzzles and prestidigitation. With a background in film (and a Harvard degree in the history of magic), he's the founder of the Misdirectors Guild, an elite group of magicians that specialize in illusion for film, television and theater (they're working right now on Marvel's upcoming Ant-Man). Kwong created the illusions for the 2013 hit film Now You See Me, about a gang of street magicians caught up in a crime caper.
 
He is a frequent crossword writer for the New York Times, often collaborating with his friend Kevan Choset. His puzzles are marked by clever, outside-the-grid thinking -- and sometimes a dash of magic. He also produces Deception on ABC, a crime drama about a magician who joins the FBI. Check out his talk on the science of illusion.

In a lab near Vancouver, Michel Laberge and his team at General Fusion are building a prototype fusion reactor that mimics the processes of the sun to produce cheap, clean and abundant energy.

Frans Lanting is one of the greatest nature photographers of our time. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Audubon andTime, as well as numerous award-winning books. Lanting's recent exhibition, The LIFE Project, offers a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth.

In the pursuit of his work, Frans Lanting has lived in the trees with wild macaws, camped with giant tortoises inside a volcanic crater, and documented never-before-photographed wildlife and tribal traditions in Madagascar. The Dutch-born, California-based photographer has traveled to Botswana's Okavango Delta, the rain forests of Borneo and the home of emperor penguins in Antarctica.

The resulting photographs -- staggering in their beauty, startling in their originality -- have brought much-needed attention to endangered species and ecological crises throughout the world. In 2001, HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands inducted Lanting as a Knight in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, the country's highest conservation honor -- just one of many honors he has received throughout his illustrious career.

Richard Ledgett is deputy director and senior civilian leader of the National Security Agency. He acts as the agency’s chief operating officer, responsible for guiding and directing studies, operations and policy.

Richard Ledgett began his NSA career in 1988 and has served in operational, management, and technical leadership positions at the branch, division, office, and group levels. Now, think of him as the COO of the NSA, guiding and directing studies, operations and policy. From 2012 to 2013 he was the Director of the NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center, responsible for round-the-clock cryptologic activities to discover and counter adversary cyber efforts. Prior to NTOC he served in several positions from 2010 to 2012 in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in both the collection and cyber mission areas. He was the first National Intelligence Manager for Cyber, serving as principal advisor to the Director of National Intelligence on all cyber matters, leading development of the Unified Intelligence Strategy for Cyber, and coordinating cyber activities across the Intelligence Community (IC). Previous positions at NSA include Deputy Director for Analysis and Production (2009-2010), Deputy Director for Data Acquisition (2006-2009), Assistant Deputy Director for Data Acquisition (2005-2006), and Chief, NSA/CSS Pacific (2002-2005). He also served in a joint IC operational activity, and as an instructor and course developer at the National Cryptologic School.

He led the NSA Media Leaks Task Force from June 2013 to January 2014, and was responsible for integrating and overseeing the totality of NSA’s efforts surrounding the unauthorized disclosures of classified information by a former NSA affiliate.

Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system.

Lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig spent a decade arguing for sensible intellectual property law, updated for the digital age. He was a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization that builds better copyright practices through principles established first by the open-source software community.

In 2007, just after his last TED Talk, Lessig announced he was leaving the field of IP and Internet policy, and moving on to a more fundamental problem that blocks all types of sensible policy -- the corrupting influence of money in American politics.

In 2011, Lessig founded Rootstrikers, an organization dedicated to changing the influence of money in Congress. In his latest book, Republic, Lost, he shows just how far the U.S. has spun off course -- and how citizens can regain control. As The New York Times wrote about him, “Mr. Lessig’s vision is at once profoundly pessimistic -- the integrity of the nation is collapsing under the best of intentions --and deeply optimistic. Simple legislative surgery, he says, can put the nation back on the path to greatness.”

Read an excerpt of Lessig's new book, Lesterland >>

Evolutionary ecologist Sara Lewis digs deep into firefly mating rituals to uncover a world of secret languages and strange gifts in these silent sparks.

Art historian and critic Sarah Lewis celebrates creativity and shows how it can lead us through fear and failure to ultimate success.

Curator and critic Sarah Lewis has emerged as a cultural powerhouse for her fresh perspectives on the dialogue between culture, history, and identity. In 2010, she co-curated the groundbreaking SITE Santa Fe biennial, a platform celebrating artists melding the “homespun and the high-tech.” She has served on Obama’s National Arts Policy Committee, and as a curatorial advisor for Brooklyn’s high-profile Barclays Center. 

Her debut book The Rise analyzes the idea of failure, focusing on case studies that reveal how setbacks can become a tool enabling us to master our destinies. As she says: "The creative process is actually how we fashion our lives and follow other pursuits. Failure is not something that might be helpful; it actually is the process." — Art21.org.

TED Fellow Jimmy Lin is developing technologies to catch cancer early.

C. Jimmy Lin, MD, PhD, MHS is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO), Oncology at Natera and a TED Fellow. He comes from a long history as a pioneer in cancer genomics. Most recently, he led the clinical genomics program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Previously, at Johns Hopkins and Washington University in St. Louis, Lin was part of one of the first clinical genomics labs in academia and led the computational analyses of the first ever exome sequencing studies in cancer, including breast, colorectal, pancreatic, glioblastoma, medulloblastoma and melanoma.

Lin has published in top academic journals, such as Science, Nature and Cell, and he has been an expert in national and international media outlets, such as New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times.

As one of the leading green voices in China, Peggy Liu is a key player in the race for green growth and for fostering international collaboration with China.

In 2007, Liu founded the non-profit Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE) as a collaborative platform for Chinese leaders, environmental solutions providers, and key societal influencers. JUCCCE is building a sustainable future for China and the world by creating systemic changes in clean energy delivery, the urbanization of China, and the changing lifestyles of the emerging middle class.

JUCCCE is noted for holding the first public dialogues between US & China on clean energy, introducing Smart Grid to China, educating hundreds of Chinese government leaders on how to build sustainable cities, creating the China Dream initiative to reimagine prosperity and transform consumer desire for everyday Chinese.

With a background in computer engineering, management consulting, entrepreneurship, Liu is bringing together unique and effective cross-border and cross-sector partnerships to transform the sustainability landscape.

Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg heads the Copenhagen Consensus, which has prioritized the world's greatest problems -- global warming, world poverty, disease -- based on how effective our solutions might be. It's a thought-provoking, even provocative list.

Bjorn Lomborg isn't afraid to voice an unpopular opinion. In 2007, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine after the publication of his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which challenged widely held beliefs that the environment is getting worse. This year, he was named on of the "50 people who cold save the planet" by the Guardian newspaper. In 2007 he published Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, further analyzes what today's science tells us about global warming and its risks. That same year, his next book Solutions for the World's Biggest Problems was released, which provided a summary of the greatest challenges facing humanity. 

In 2004, he convened the Copenhagen Consensus, which tries to prioritize the world's greatest challenges based on the impact we can make, a sort of bang-for-the-buck breakdown for attacking problems such as global warming, world poverty and disease.

It begins from the premise that we can't solve every problem in the world, and asks: Which ones should we fix first? The Copenhagen Consensus 2004 tapped the expertise of world-leading economists, as well as a diverse forum of young participants; collectively, they determined that control of HIV/AIDS was the best investment -- and mitigating global warming was the worst. Lomborg summarized these findings in How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. In spring of 2008, Copenhagen Consensus convened again, assembling over 55 international economists, including 4 Nobel laureates, to assess, prioritize and brainstorm solutions for the major global challenges of today, including conflicts, malnutrition, health, education and terrorism. In 2013, he published How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the Wolrd a Better Place.

John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, 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.

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. After leaving his post as RISD's president, Maeda is turning his attention to Silicon Valley, where is is working as a Design Partner for Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers. He is also consulting for eBay, where he is the chair of the Design Advisory Board.

As head of the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another.

Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called "collaborative filtering" and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations -- or "things like this" -- fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup sold to Microsoft) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they'd never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.

Now Maes is working on a similarly boundary-breaking initiative. She founded Fluid Interfaces Group, also part of the MIT Media Lab, to rethink the ways in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes' world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that's embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. The uses of this tech -- from healthcare to home furnishings, warfare to supermarkets -- are powerful and increasingly real.

At Planet, Will Marshall leads overall strategy for commercializing new geospatial data and analytics that are disrupting agriculture, mapping, energy, the environment and other vertical markets.

Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet. Prior to Planet, he was a Scientist at NASA/USRA where he worked on missions "LADEE" and "LCROSS," served as co-principal investigator on PhoneSat, and was the technical lead on research projects in space debris remediation.

Marshall received his PhD in Physics from the University of Oxford and his Masters in Physics with Space Science and Technology from the University of Leicester. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at George Washington University and Harvard.

Jon Mooallem is the author of "Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America."

What do we see when we look at wild animals -- do we respond to human-like traits, or thrill to the idea of their utter unfamiliarity? Jon Mooallem's book, Wild Ones , examines our relationship with wild animals both familiar and feral, telling stories of the North American environmental movement from its unlikely birth, and following three species who've come to symbolize our complicated relationship with whatever "nature" even means anymore.

Mooallem has written about everything from the murder of Hawaiian monk seals, to Idahoan utopians, to the world’s most famous ventriloquist, to the sad, secret history of the invention of the high five. A recent piece, "American Hippopotamus," was an Atavist story on, really, a plan in 1910 to jumpstart the hippopotamus ranching industry in America.

A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and advocate for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

Aimee Mullins was born without fibular bones, and had both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was an infant. She learned to walk on prosthetics, then to run -- competing at the national and international level as a champion sprinter, and setting world records at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. At Georgetown, where she double-majored in history and diplomacy, she became the first double amputee to compete in NCAA Division 1 track and field.

After school, Mullins did some modeling -- including a legendary runway show for Alexander McQueen -- and then turned to acting, appearing as the Leopard Queen in Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. In 2008 she was the official Ambassador for the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival.

She's a passionate advocate for a new kind of thinking about prosthetics, and recently mentioned to an interviewer that she's been looking closely at MIT's in-development powered robotic ankle, "which I fully plan on having."

Randall Munroe sketches elegant and illuminating explanations of the weird science and math questions that keep geeks awake at night.

One of a small group of professional web cartoonists, math obsessive and chronic explainer Randall Munroe dazzles the online world (and racks up millions of monthly page views) with the meaninglessly-named (and occasionally heartbreaking) webcomic xkcd.
 
Munroe’s blog What If? specializes in cunning answers to, as the Atlantic put it, "the kinds of of wonderful and fanciful hypotheticals that might arise when the nerdily inclined get together in bars," like “How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?” or “What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power was turned on and put in an airtight 1x1x1 meter box?” As he told Math Horizons, I really enjoy solving these kinds of things, and it’s a bonus if I realize that I can put boxes around it and make it a comic."

He is also the author of the book Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words. 

The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.

A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte founded (and was the first director of) MIT's Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff across a broad range of disciplines. An original investor in Wired (and the magazine's "patron saint"), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology -- ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he's funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.

But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is designing, manufacturing and distributing low-cost, wireless Internet-enabled computers costing roughly $100 and aimed at children. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of children in the developing world.

TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim is a gutsy filmmaker whose astonishing documentaries reveal the triumphs and hardships of courageous individuals.

Two weeks before the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Jehane Noujaim gained access to both Al Jazeera and the US military's Central Command offices in Qatar. By being in the right place at that very wrong time, she caught the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war on film. The resulting documentary, Control Room (2004), exposed the very divergent ways the Middle East and the West covered the war. Since then, Noujaim has continued to document the Middle East, lending a personal eye to the world's most startling current events. Her film The Square (2013), which premiered at Sundance and was shown on Netflix, give viewers an intimate look at the personal stories and cultural complexities of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Raised between Egypt and the US, the exploration of culture is one of Jehane's driving forces. So is creating empathy and compassion through film. With the 2006 TED Prize, Noujaim wished for Pangea Day, a moment for people around the world come together to watch films and understand one another through their magic. Pangea Day took place in May 2008 and united people across 100 cities and online through a worldwide festival of film, music, art, performance and speakers.

Kevin Olusola combines his beatboxing talents with his cello training to create a fresh, unique sound.

Kevin Olusola lays down the beat for the instrument-free band Pentatonix. Through a unique combination of cello and beatboxing, he creates layered rhythms that take on a life of their own. Don't miss his 2011 performance of "Julie-O," which was featured by CBS, AOL, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. Olusola has performed at Carnegie Hall and has apeared on NPR's "From the Top." 

Larry Page is the CEO and cofounder of Google, making him one of the ruling minds of the web.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in grad school at Stanford in the mid-'90s, and in 1996 started working on a search technology based on a new idea: that relevant results come from context. Their technology analyzed the number of times a given website was linked to by other sites — assuming that the more links, the more relevant the site — and ranked sites accordingly. In 1998, they opened Google in a garage-office in Menlo Park. In 1999 their software left beta and started its steady rise to web domination.

Beyond the company's ubiquitous search, including AdSense/AdWords, Google Maps, Google Earth and the mighty Gmail. In 2011, Page stepped back into his original role of chief executive officer. He now leads Google with high aims and big thinking, and finds time to devote to his projects like Google X, the idea lab for the out-there experiments that keep Google pushing the limits.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn't fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable -- and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans.

Amanda Palmer commands attention. The singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur, known for pushing boundaries in both her art and her lifestyle, made international headlines this year when she raised nearly $1.2 million via Kickstarter (she’d asked for $100k) from nearly 25,000 fans who pre-ordered her new album, Theatre Is Evil.
 
But the former street performer, then Dresden Dolls frontwoman, now solo artist hit a bump the week her world tour kicked off. She revealed plans to crowdsource additional local backup musicians in each tour stop, offering to pay them in hugs, merchandise and beer per her custom. Bitter and angry criticism ensued (she eventually promised to pay her local collaborators in cash). And it's interesting to consider why. As Laurie Coots suggests: "The idea was heckled because we didn't understand the value exchange -- the whole idea of asking the crowd for what you need when you need it and not asking for more or less."

Summing up her business model, in which she views her recorded music as the digital equivalent of street performing, she says: “I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.”

Amanda's non-fiction book, The Art of Asking, digs deeply into the topics she addressed in her TED Talk. 

Unapologetic vaudevillians Barry Friedman and Dan Holzman -- the Raspyni Brothers -- have been international juggling champions, Guinness record holders, recurring guests on "The Tonight Show" and, recently, preeminent entertainers on the corporate seminar circuit.

The Raspyni Brothers' inventory of international championships, TV appearances and national tours may seem a lot to juggle, but then, Dan Holzman and Barry Friedman are jugglers by trade. Their waggish humor, irresistible stage presence and "panther-like reflexes" have turned these jesters from openers into the headline act.

While the Raspynis sling their share of unique props, their trademark maneuver is (perhaps) the strategic interlude: stalling difficult, dangerous stunts with quips, asides and even deliberate mistakes. The duo's arch brand of onstage chemistry often steals the spotlight from conventional juggling showstoppers. (Though, we should mention, they won't hesitate to use torches, sickles and machetes.)

In recent years Friedman and Holzman have carved a niche on the business seminar circuit, electrifying corporate audiences with lessons on teamwork, balance, trust and -- if you happen to be the CEO -- mortal peril. Sergey Brin has remarked, "They're the Google of comedy." So, welcome to Vaudeville 2.0.

At XponentialWorks, Avi Reichental is helping to imagine a future where 3D scanning-and-printing is an everyday act -- where food, clothing and objects are routinely output at home.

Avi Reichental is the founder and CEO of XponentialWorks, a venture, advisory and product development company specializing in 3D printing and other exponential technologies. From 2003-2015, he was the CEO of 3D Systems, transforming the company into a global leader in the field of rapid prototyping. He envisions a 3D printer in every house.

Reichental holds numerous leadership positions at a range of 3D printing companies, including founder and CEO of Nexa 3D; chairman of Nano Dimension; and co-founder and executive chairman of NXT Factory. 

Read his thought leadership articles at Forbes, Fortune, TechCrunch and Money Inc. and check out his video library.

Shai Reshef wants to democratize higher education.

Reshef is the president of University of the People, an online school that offers tuition-free academic degrees in computer science, business administration and health studies (and MBA) to students across the globe. The university is partnered with Yale Law School for research and NYU and University of California Berkeley to accept top students. It's accredited in the U.S. and has admitted thousands of students from more than 180 countries. Wired magazine has included Reshef in its list of "50 People Changing the World" while Foreign Policy named him a "Top Global Thinker." Now Reshef wants to contribute to addressing the refugee crisis. "Education is a major factor in solving this global challenge," he says. UoPeople is taking at least 500 Syrian refugees as students with full scholarship. Before founding UoPeople, Reshef chaired KIT eLearning, the first online university in Europe.

In her documentary films, Yoruba Richen unites African-American, feminist and LGBTQ voices in a renewed cry for civil rights for all.

Geena Rocero is a professional model for fashion and beauty companies around the world. And she uses her platform to share a powerful story.

As Cameron Russell puts it, professional models are people who have won the genetic lottery, born with the DNA for long legs, great skin and dazzling smiles. The advertising industry presents these gorgeous folks as idealized versions of ourselves to sell us clothes, makeup, cars. But behind the fabulousness, there's always an interesting story.

Born in Manila, Geena Rocero moved to New York in 2005 to pursue a modeling career. Signed to Next Models, she has worked with Rimmel Cosmetics, Hanes, and many other fashion and beauty companies. Through her own experience into womanhood, she realized her bigger purpose in life was to share her journey and work towards justice and beauty.

His production credits range from Amy Winehouse to Paul McCartney -- ace DJ, musician and producer Mark Ronson has lived recent music history from the inside out.

Mark Ronson’s unusual path into the music world has led to an eclectic and multifaceted resume. Ronson began his career DJing hip New York City nightclubs in the heady 1990s. Since then, he’s scored his own hits with the help of Ghostface Killah and Amy Winehouse via his own first two albums Here Comes The Fuzz and Version, winning the Brit Award for best British male sole artist in 2008.

As a producer, Mark has helped create chart-topping albums for Adele, Lily Allen and Bruno Mars (nominated for 2014 Record of the Year for Locked out of Heaven), and won three Grammys for his work on Amy Winehouse's album Back to Black. 2010’s Record Collection featured collaborations with Duran Duran, Boy George, D'Angelo, Q-Tip and MNDR. Mark is the Global Ambassador for Arms Around The Child. 

Moshe Safdie's buildings -- from grand libraries to intimate apartment complexes -- explore the qualities of light and the nature of private and public space.

Moshe Safdie's master's thesis quickly became a cult building: his modular "Habitat '67" apartments for Montreal Expo '67. Within a dizzying pile of concrete, each apartment was carefully sited to have natural light and a tiny, private outdoor space for gardening. These themes have carried forward throughout Safdie's career -- his buildings tend to soak in the light, and to hold cozy, user-friendly spaces inside larger gestures.

He's a triple citizen of Canada, Israel and the United States, three places where the bulk of his buildings can be found: in Canada, the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Vancouver public library. For Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, he designed the Children's Memorial and the Memorial to the Deportees; he's also built airport terminals in Tel Aviv. In the US, he designed the elegant and understated Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Masachusetts, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.

Renowned for album covers, posters and his recent book of life lessons, designer Stefan Sagmeister invariably has a slightly different way of looking at things.

Stefan Sagmeister is no mere commercial gun for hire. Sure, he's created eye-catching graphics for clients including the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, but he pours his heart and soul into every piece of work. His design work is at once timeless and of the moment, and his painstaking attention to the smallest details creates work that offers something new every time you look at it.

While a sense of humor invariably surfaces in his designs, Sagmeister is nonetheless very serious about his work; his intimate approach and sincere thoughtfulness elevate his design. A genuine maverick, Sagmeister achieved notoriety in the 1990s as the designer who self-harmed in the name of craft: He created a poster advertising a speaking engagement by carving the salient details onto his torso.

In 2004, Ben Saunders became the youngest person ever to ski solo to the North Pole. In 2013, he set out on another record-breaking expedition, this time to retrace Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole on foot.

Although most of the planet's surface was mapped long ago, there's still a place for explorers in the modern world. And Ben Saunders' stories of arctic exploration -- as impressive for their technical ingenuity as their derring-do -- are decidedly modern. In 2004, at age 26, he skied solo to the North Pole, updating his blog each day of the trip. Humble and self-effacing, Saunders is an explorer of limits, whether it's how far a human can be pushed physically and psychologically, or how technology works hundreds of miles from civilization. His message is one of inspiration, empowerment and boundless potential.

He urges audiences to consider carefully how to spend the “tiny amount of time we each have on this planet.” Saunders is also a powerful advocate for the natural world. He's seen first-hand the effects of climate change, and his expeditions are raising awareness for sustainable solutions. 

Being the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole did not satiate Saunders' urge to explore and push the boundaries. In 2008, he attempted to break the speed record for a solo walk to the North Pole; however, his journey was ended abruptly both then and again in 2010 due to equipment failure. From October 2013 to February 2014, he led a two-man team to retrace Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1,800-mile expedition to the South Pole on foot. He calls this journey the hardest 105 days of his life.

Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.

Desertification of the world's grasslands, Allan Savory suggests, is the immediate cause of poverty, social breakdown, violence, cultural genocide -- and a significent contribution to climate change. In the 1960s, while working in Africa on the interrelated problems of increasing poverty and disappearing wildlife, Savory made a significant breakthrough in understanding the degradation and desertification of grassland ecosystems. After decades of study and collaboration, thousands of managers of land, livestock and wildlife on five continents today follow the methodology he calls "Holistic Management."

In 1992, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, formed the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, a learning site for people all over Africa. In 2010, the Centre won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for its work in reversing desertification. In that same year he and his wife, with others, founded the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to promote large-scale restoration of the world's grasslands.

Intrigued by this talk? Read Savory's papers and other publications »

What goes into a climate model? Gavin Schmidt looks at how we use past and present data to model potential futures.

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom.

In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today's western world is actually making us miserable.

Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.

Schwartz's previous research has addressed morality, decision-making and the varied inter-relationships between science and society. Before Paradox he published The Costs of Living, which traces the impact of free-market thinking on the explosion of consumerism -- and the effect of the new capitalism on social and cultural institutions that once operated above the market, such as medicine, sports, and the law.

Both books level serious criticism of modern western society, illuminating the under-reported psychological plagues of our time. But they also offer concrete ideas on addressing the problems, from a personal and societal level.

Schwartz is the author of the TED Book, Why We Work. 

Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.

Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer whose career spans more than four decades of providing breathtaking imagery using his time-lapse, high-speed and macro cinematography techniques. Schwartzberg tells stories that celebrate life and reveal the mysteries and wisdom of nature, people and places.

Schwartzberg's recent theatrical releases include the 3D IMAX film, Mysteries of the Unseen World with National Geographic, narrated by Forest Whitaker, and the documentary Wings of Life for Disneynature, narrated by Meryl Streep. Mysteries of the Unseen World is a journey into invisible worlds that are too slow, too fast, too small and too vast for the human eye to see, while Wings of Life focuses on pollination and the web of life. Schwartzberg also directed Soarin' Around the World, an international update to the original Soarin' ride now showing at Disney Parks in Anaheim, Orlando and Shanghai.

Designed to inspire, educate and evolve our perspective on the world, Schwartzberg creates and curates Moving Art videos, which can be found on your smart phone and Netflix. The Moving Art series will be expanded from six to thirteen videos in early 2017.

Schwartzberg's Gratitude Revealed series of shorts were launched on Oprah.com. Supported by the Templeton Foundation, with science and analytics by the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley, the series explores the multifaceted virtues of gratitude. Schwartzberg is the first filmmaker to be inducted into the Association for the Advancement of Science and the Lemelson Foundation’s Invention Ambassadors Program.

For Schwartzberg, the greatest satisfaction is creating works that can have a positive effect on the future of the planet. "I hope my films inspire and open people's hearts," he says. "Beauty is nature's tool for survival -- we protect what we love. Nature's beauty can open hearts, and the shift in consciousness we need to sustain and celebrate life."

Using literature as a lifeline, Shaka Senghor escaped a cycle of prison and desperation. Now his story kindles hope in those who have little.

At the age of 19, Shaka Senghor went to prison fuming with anger and despair. Senghor was a drug dealer in Detroit, and one night, he shot and killed a man who showed up on his doorstep. While serving his sentence for second-degree murder, Senghor discovered redemption and responsibility through literature -- starting with The Autobiography of Malcolm X -- and through his own writing.

Upon his release at the age of 38, Senghor reached out to young men following his same troubled path, and published Live in Peace as part of an outreach program bringing hope to kids in Detroit and across the Midwest. His activism attracted the attention of the MIT Media Lab, and as a Director’s Fellow, Senghor has collaborated on imagining creative solutions for the problems plaguing distressed communities. His memoir, Writing My Wrongs, was published in 2013.

In her new book "All Joy and No Fun," Jennifer Senior explores how children reshape their parents' lives -- for better and worse.

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.

Clay Shirky's work focuses on the rising usefulness of networks -- using decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer sharing, wireless, software for social creation, and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that "a group is its own worst enemy."

Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityʼs graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” Heʼs the author of several books. This spring at the TED headquarters in New York, he gave an impassioned talk against SOPA/PIPA that saw 1 million views in 48 hours.

Simon Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He's the author of the classic "Start With Why"; his latest book is "Leaders Eat Last."

Fascinated by the leaders who make impact in the world, companies and politicians with the capacity to inspire, Simon Sinek has discovered some remarkable patterns in how they think, act and communicate. He wrote Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action to explore his idea of the Golden Circle, what he calls "a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and organizations over others." His newest work explores "circles of safety," exploring how to enhance feelings of trust and confidence in making bold decisions. It's the subject of his latest book, Leaders Eat Last.

An ethnographer by training, Sinek is an adjunct of the RAND Corporation. He writes and comments regularly for major publications and teaches graduate-level strategic communications at Columbia University.

In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified American National Security Agency documents, sparking a global conversation about citizens' rights to privacy on the Internet.

Edward Snowden was just about to turn 28 when his face was suddenly splashed across every major newspaper in the US. In the summer of 2013 The Guardian published a series of leaked documents about the American National Security Agency (NSA), starting with an article about a secret court order demanding American phone records from Verizon, followed by an article on the NSA's top-secret Prism program, said to be accessing user data from Google, Apple and Facebook.

It wasn't long before Snowden came forward as the source, revealing that he had carefully planned the leak, copying documents when he was working as a contractor for the NSA. "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," he said at the time, but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant." Snowden's actions have led to a global debate on the relationship between national security and online privacy. His leaks continue to have a lasting impact on the American public's view of the government, and has encouraged media scrutiny on the NSA.

Snowden had coordinated the leak with journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras from Hong Kong; after he revealed his identity, he fled and ended up in Moscow. Under charges of espionage by the American government, Snowden remains in Russia in temporary asylum.

Jill Sobule isn't just another singer-songwriter with catchy tunes and smart lyrics, she's one of the more insightful satirists of our age. Each of her fanciful songs captures an issue or irony, an emotion or epiphany that helps us understand what it's like to live now.

Jill Sobule first found her place in music history with the controversial 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl." The song's silly sweetness masked its significance: It broke new ground as the first Top 40 hit to deal with overtly gay themes.

This approach -- packaging hard-hitting social commentary in a wrapper of whimsy -- has defined Sobule's career. Her endearing story-songs veer from fanciful storytelling to forceful satire and back again, covering a wide range of political and social issues from climate change to prostitution; anorexia to anti-semitism. Her winning combination of memorable characters, clever lyrics and catchy tunes has inspired comparisons that range from Burt Bacharach to Gertrude Stein. It also makes her performances and recordings a delight.

Sobule's candy-coated commentary can be found on her Huffington Post blog, as well as in her steady stream of stand-out albums, including Jill Sobule (1995), Happy Town (1997), Pink Pearl (2000) and Underdog Victorious (2004). Lately, Sobule has performed regularly with comedian Julia Sweeney (the two met at TED2006). They put on the "Jill and Julia Show," an utterly endearing evening of stories and songs. She's also recording an album with the string quartet Ethel (another TED2006 match).

Andrew Solomon writes about politics, culture and psychology.

Andrew Solomon is a writer, lecturer and Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University. He is president of PEN American Center. He writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Times.

Solomon's newest book, Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years was published in April, 2016. His previous book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction, the Wellcome Prize and 22 other national awards. It tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. It was a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback editions. Solomon's previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and was included in The Times of London's list of one hundred best books of the decade. It has been published in twenty-four languages. Solomon is also the author of the novel A Stone Boat and of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost.

Solomon is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. He is a member of the boards of directors of the National LGBTQ Force and Trans Youth Family Allies. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Columbia University Medical Center, serves on the National Advisory Board of the Depression Center at the University of Michigan, is a director of Columbia Psychiatry and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. Solomon also serves on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yaddo and The Alex Fund, which supports the education of Romani children. He is also a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Solomon lives with his husband and son in New York and London and is a dual national. He also has a daughter with a college friend; mother and daughter live in Texas but visit often.

With her lustrous voice and wide-ranging musical curiosity, Somi spins elegant vocal jazz from African legacies.

In late 2011, East African vocalist and songwriter Somi moved from New York City to Lagos, Nigeria, for 18 months in search of new inspiration. The result: her chart-topping 2014 major label debut, The Lagos Music Salon (Sony Music). The album, with guests Angelique Kidjo, Common and Ambrose Akinmusire, draws its material from the tropical city's boastful cosmopolitanism, urgent inspiration and giant spirit, straddling the worlds of African jazz, soul and pop with a newfound ease and voice that Vogue Magazine calls "powerful."

Born in Illinois to immigrants from Rwanda and Uganga, African and Jazz legacies are crucial to Somi's sound. Referred to as a modern-day Miriam Makeba, JazzTimes magazine describes her performance as "the earthy gutsiness of Nina Simone blended with the fluid vocal beauty of Dianne Reeves," while Billboard remarks that she's "all elegance and awe... utterly captivating." 

In 2013, Somi was invited by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to perform at the United Nations' General Assembly in commemoration of the International Day of Rememberance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  

A TED Senior Fellow, inaugural Association of Performing Arts Presenters Fellow, founder of the non-profit New Africa Live, and a two-time recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation's French-American Jazz Exchange Composers’ Grant, Somi began an exploration of African and Arab jazz traditions alongside French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, while investigating the role of the female voice during the Arab Spring protests. That body of work was premiered at the Kennedy Center’s 2014 Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. Somi is a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

She is currently working on a jazz opera about the life and legacy of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.

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. 

At Facebook (and previously at YouTube), Margaret Gould Stewart designs experiences that touch the lives of a large percentage of the world's population.

Margaret Gould Stewart has spent her career asking, “How do we design user experiences that change the world in fundamental ways?” It's a powerful question that has led her to manage user experiences for six of the ten most visited websites in the world, including Facebook, where she serves as Director of Product Design.

Before joining Facebook, Margaret managed the User Experience Team for YouTube, where she oversaw the largest redesign in the company's history, including the YouTube player page. She came to YouTube after two years leading Search and Consumer Products UX at Google. She approaches her work with a combined appreciation for timeless great design and transient digital technologies, and always with the end goal of improving people's lives. As she says: "Design is creativity in service of others."

He’s sold more than 100 million albums and earned 16 Grammy Awards, yet Sting continues to surprise. His fourteenth solo album, The Last Ship, features songs from his Broadway-bound musical of the same name.

Premiering in 2014, The Last Ship—with direction by Joe Mantello, music and lyrics by Sting and book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey—is inspired by Sting's memories of the English seafaring community of Wallsend where he was born and raised. The story is set against the demise of the local shipbuilding industry and is anchored by a group of unemployed workers who take back the shipyard to build one last ship.

The constant throughout Sting's enduring career has been his propensity to evolve. From his tenure as lead singer and bassist with The Police, producing classic hits like "Every Breath You Take" and "Message In A Bottle," to his acclaimed ventures as a solo artist, Sting is one of the world's most renowned and distinctive musicians.

An actor, composer, author and committed activist, Sting, along with wife Trudie Styler, founded the Rainforest Fund in 1989 to protect the world's rainforests and the indigenous people living there. This year, the organization celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Julia Sweeney creates comedic works that tackle deep issues: cancer, family, faith.

Julia Sweeney is a writer, director, actress, comedian and monologist. She is known for being a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1995, where she created and popularized the androgynous character, Pat. She is also well known for her comedic and dramatic monologues. God Said Ha! is a monologue about serious illness, her brother's lymphoma and her own cancer, and her family's crazy reactions to this crisis as they soldiered their way through struggle, confusion and death. This play was performed all over the U.S. and on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater. It was made into a film produced by Quentin Tarantino, and the comedy album from the show was nominated for a Grammy.

Sweeney's second monologue, In the Family Way, played in theatrical runs in New York and Los Angeles. It was ultimately fashioned into a book, a memoir titled If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother. Sweeney's third monologue, Letting Go of God, chronicled her journey from Catholicism to atheism. It was made into a film that played on Showtime.

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.

Jakob Trollback is a pioneering designer, whose work in video and motion graphics has helped define the industry -- always pushing the edges of technology and entertainment through design.

Jakob Trollback is a designer and creative thinker -- and he's also a DJ, which becomes clear when you see the work of his firm, Trollback + Company, distinguished by an almost musical attention to rhythm, form and detail.

As creative director for R/GA in the 1990s, Jakob Trollback was among the earliest group of designers to understand and embrace the importance of digital media, and the effect it would have on culture at large. Working on film titles, TV commercials, interactive displays ... Trollback translated the sea changes in media for advertisers and marketers, as well as Hollywood.

His firm Trollback + Company speciaizes in motion graphics -- those often-overlooked elements that set the tone for film and TV titles, short-form video and TV ad campaigns. Recently, Trollback designed the low-key but perfect titles for Deborah Scranton's Frontline documentary Bad Voodoo's War. They've also designed the video wall at the Frank Gehry-designed IAC building in New York City.

Jason Webley is a Seattle-based troubadour who has built a small following around the globe with his passionate uninhibited performances.

Ed Yong blogs with a mission: to ignite excitement for science in everyone, regardless of their education or background.

Whether he's exploring a possible resurrection for extinct mouth-birthing amphibians or skewering media misunderstandings of hyped hormones like oxytocin, Ed Yong has a gift for illuminating the beauty (or controversy) in difficult and complex topics.

The award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science (hosted by National Geographic) is the epicenter of Yong’s formidable web and social media presence. In its posts, he tackles the hottest and most bizarre topics in science journalism. As he says, “The only one that matters to me, as far as my blog is concerned, is that something interests me. That is, excites or inspires or amuses me.” When not blogging, he also finds time to contribute to Nature, Wired, Scientific American and many other web and print outlets.

He is also the author of the book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. 

Despite an attack on his daughter Malala in 2012, Ziauddin Yousafzai continues his fight to educate children in the developing world.

Ziauddin Yousafzai is an educator, human rights campaigner and social activist. He hails from Pakistan's Swat Valley where, at great personal risk among grave political violence, he peacefully resisted the Taliban's efforts to shut down schools and kept open his own school. He also inspired his daughter, Malala Yousafzai, to raise her voice to promote the rights of children to an education. Ziauddin is the co-founder and serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Malala Fund. 

He also serves as the United Nations Special Advisor on Global Education and also the educational attaché to the Pakistani Consulate in Birmingham, UK.