Program Speakers A-Z

Benjamin Barber suggested that the future of the world may lie with the politicians who implement practical change every day: mayors.

A passionate advocate of democracy’s power, Benjamin Barber explored bold solutions for dysfunctional systems and political paralysis. In his 2013 book If Mayors Ruled the World, he showed how decentralized local governments can be more flexible -- and more in tune with their constituents -- than their federal counterparts. The book led to the foundation of the Global Parliament of Mayors, a governance body of, by and for mayors from all continents. It builds on the experience, expertise and leadership of mayors in tackling local challenges resulting from global problems.

Barber burst into the media spotlight on September 11, 2001, when his book Jihad Vs. McWorld, published several years earlier, assumed new relevance. With his prophetic analysis of the emerging collision of tribalism and globalism, Barber established the parameters for 21st-century political debate.

His newest book is Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming.

Natasha Bedingfield writes and sings heartfelt, dynamic pop anthems, like 2008's smash "Pocketful of Sunshine.”

With a powerfully soulful voice, Natasha Bedingfield sings her own deeply felt and passionate lyrics about the basic emotions we share -- with the kind of emotional knockout-punch lines that Taylor Swift writes on her arm; that coming-of-age movies like Easy A use to underscore that perfect moment.

Bedingfield's 2004 debut won awards in the US and UK; she followed up with her 2008 smash Pocketful of Sunshine, then with late 2010's Strip Me, and now she's in the studio working on her next. In the meantime she's all over Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, building a beautiful rapport with fans one on one. As she sings: "I'm only one voice in a million, but you ain't taking that from me."

Using daring displays of algorithmic trickery, lightning calculator and number wizard Arthur Benjamin mesmerizes audiences with mathematical mystery and beauty.

Arthur Benjamin makes numbers dance. In his day job, he's a professor of math at Harvey Mudd College; in his other day job, he's a "Mathemagician," taking the stage in his tuxedo to perform high-speed mental calculations, memorizations and other astounding math stunts. It's part of his drive to teach math and mental agility in interesting ways, following in the footsteps of such heroes as Martin Gardner.

Benjamin is the co-author, with Michael Shermer, of Secrets of Mental Math (which shares his secrets for rapid mental calculation), as well as the co-author of the MAA award-winning Proofs That Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof. For a glimpse of his broad approach to math, see the list of research talks on his website, which seesaws between high-level math (such as his "Vandermonde's Determinant and Fibonacci SAWs," presented at MIT in 2004) and engaging math talks for the rest of us ("An Amazing Mathematical Card Trick").

Carin Bondar is an expert on the sexual life of animals -- and loves to tell their wild sex stories.

Group sex, prostitution, masturbation -— every sexy thing we humans do, says Carin Bondar, animals do too, and a whole lot more we, thank goodness, can't (see topic: chastity belts). Bondar, a biologist, hosts the truly astonishing Wild Sex video series on earthtouch.tv , where over two seasons she's been using science and uberwatchable storytelling to tell surprising tales of animal mating. As she says: "We hit topics hard, and not just for the quirk factor, but because there is a lot of cool science behind so many strange mating rituals."

For contrast, her first book, The Nature of Human Nature, examines the unique behaviors of the human species in the context of Darwin's Survival of the Fittest. Bondar is also the host and producer of SciAm Cinema, a monthly series of the best stories from the Scientific American blog network, and the co-host (with Phil Plait) of TwiST, a weekly series about science and tech on the Science Alert YouTube channel, as well as a TV host for Discovery International and National Geographic Wild.

With provocative actions that erase the lines between performance and politics, Tania Bruguera transforms passive audiences into engaged citizens.

TED Senior Fellow Yana Buhrer Tavanier explores human rights innovation at the intersection of activism, art, tech and science -- and their potential to instigate change.

Yana Buhrer Tavanier is the cofounder and executive director of Fine Acts, a global platform for socially engaged creative solutions. As a creative activist and a social entrepreneur with a background in investigative journalism, she explores human rights innovation at the intersection of activism, art, tech and science.

Buhrer Tavanier is also cofounder of TimeHeroes.org, a do-more-good platform building volunteering culture in developing societie. She is a board member of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, the country's leading human rights group, and an expert member of Amnesty International's Europe and Central Asia Regional Oversight Group. She has a BA in communication and MA in political science from Sofia University, along with executive education at Harvard University, Yale University and Oxford University. She is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a fellow of the Royal Society of Art and was named one of 50 people who will change the world in WIRED's Smart List 2012.

In his influential poetry criticism, Stephen Burt links the contemporary with the classical, pinpoints new poetry movements, and promotes outstanding little-known poets.

Siddharthan Chandran explores how to heal damage from degenerative disorders such as MS and motor neuron disease (ALS).

Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects the nervous system by chewing up the axons that connect neurons to one another, which slows, stops or simply randomizes the transmission of nerve impulses. At the Centre for clinical brain sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Siddharthan Chandran works in the emerging discipline of regenerative neurology -- exploring how injured or damaged neurons in the brain might actually be repaired.
 
His research strategy uses MS and motor neuron disease (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's diesease) as primary disease models, combining laboratory and clinical activity to study  brain injury, neurodegeneration and repair, using stem cells to model and test. His work, he says, "reflects the complexity of the brain. You can replace a kidney, but not a brain. One must remain careful and humble in the face of current knowledge." He is also director of the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic.

Grégoire Courtine and his interdisciplinary lab imagine new ways to recover after devastating, mobility-impairing injury to the spinal cord.

In a lab in Switzerland, a little white rat is re-learning how to walk. In research dubbed Project Rewalk, Grégoire Courtine and his collaborators are figuring out how a spinal cord with a severe lesion might repair itself, to the point that voluntary locomotion could happen again -- not just reactive movement but brain-directed walking and running. The treatment involves a re-awakening cocktail of chemicals released onto the spinal cord, combined with electrical stimulation -- plus repeated exercise that rehearses the walking movement. As part of the experiment, Courtine's team developed a robot that gently supports the rat vertically but does not push it forward; the rat has to decide to move on its own. And eventually, it does. As Courtine explains, "the training forces the brain to recruit what is left of the neural system to get the job done."
 
Courtine holds the International Paraplegic Foundation chair in spinal cord repair at the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Teddy Cruz looks for clues to the "city of the future" in the emerging urban areas of today.

Teddy Cruz works at the crossroads of architecture, urbanism, policy and art. He has looked deeply, over many years, at the Tijuana-San Diego area spanning the US-Mexico border -- a thriving, high-density, high-activity zone of trade and urban relationships -- and at other southern cities. And he suggests that the modern, highly planned cities of the developed world have much to learn from these developments. The informal shops, garages and neighborhoods of a boomtown are built to maximize "social flow" -- because buildings are easy to put up and modify, they can respond exactly to the inhabitant's needs, connecting them to the community and the city.  

In collaboration with community-based nonprofits such as Casa Familiar, Cruz and his team also explore new visions for affordable housing, in relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 1991, Cruz received the Rome Prize in Architecture; in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize. Born in Guatemala, he is a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego.

Wrestling with inspiration, Jamie Cullum has been ripping up the jazz rulebook.

Jamie Cullum's self-penned new record, Momentum, is a dizzying mix of beats, big band and funky swings dragging jazz into the 21st century. Primarily a vocalist/pianist, thorugh his career the British multi-instrumentalist has accompanied himself on guitars, drums, ukeleles and smartphone apps.

He has collaborated with stars across the musical spectrum, from Pharrell Williams to Roots Manuva to Clint Eastwood -- with whom he co-wrote the title track to the Grammy-nominated movie Gran Torino. Since 2010 Cullum has also presented numerous radio documentaries. He hosts a weekly jazz show on BBC Radio 2

Raffaello D'Andrea explores the possibilities of autonomous technology by collaborating with artists, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Raffaello D'Andrea combines academics, business, and the arts to explore the capabilities of autonomous systems. As part of his research as professor of dynamic systems and control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), he and his collaborators enchant viewers with works like the self-destructing, self-assembling Robotic Chair, or the Balancing Cube that can perch itself on its corners.

D’Andrea and his team created the Flying Machine Arena to test the gravity-defying abilities of their athletic flying robots. Building on research in the Flying Machine Arena, ETH Zürich partnered with its spin-off company Verity Studios and with Cirque du Soleil to create “Sparked,” a short film showcasing the unexpected airborne dexterity of quadcopters. D’Andrea is the co-founder of Kiva Systems, a robotics company that develops intelligent automated warehouse systems and that was acquired by Amazon in 2012.

Abha Dawesar writes to make sense of the world -- herself included.

Abha Dawesar began her writing career as an attempt to understand herself -- at age 7. It’s a goal that remains at the center of her work: Sensorium, her most recent novel, explores the nature of time, self, and uncertainty, using Hindu mythology and modern science as prisms. “At a very basic level, writing was always my way of apprehending the world,” she has said.

Dawesar moved from India to the United States to study at Harvard, and Delhi appears at the center of her novels Family Values and Babyji. But the oversimplified genres of immigrant fiction or ethnic fiction do not appeal to her. “Those looking for a constant South Asian theme or Diaspora theme or immigrant theme will just be disappointed in the long run from my work,” she has said. “The only label I can put up with is that of a writer. And my ideas come from everywhere.”

Peter Doolittle is striving to understand the processes of human learning.

Peter Doolittle is a professor of educational psychology in the School of Education at Virginia Tech, where he is also the executive director of the Center for Instructional Development and Educational Research. He teaches classes such as Cognition and Instruction, Constructivism and Education, Multimedia Cognition and College Teaching, but his research mainly focuses on learning in multimedia environments and the role of "working memory."

Doolittle has taught educational psychology around the world. He is the executive editor of the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and the co-executive editor of the International Journal of ePortfolio.

Toby Eccles has created a radical financial instrument that helps private investors contribute to solving thorny public problems.

All too often, an ex-inmate walks out of prison with the exact same problems he or she walked in with: lack of skills, lack of support, no job. And they end up re-offending and back in jail. It's an expensive problem to fix, but it's a much more expensive one to ignore. A director at Social Finance in London, Toby Eccles explores the arbitrage between those two options.

In 2010, his pioneering Social Impact Bond allowed private investors to support a UK program targeting ex-prisoners who served short sentences (the limited government funding only goes to ex-inmates who served long terms). The £5m scheme, funded by 17 investors, supports training and support for 1,000 ex-inmates; if they re-offend less than a control group, the government will pay investors back, plus interest, through the savings accrued by achieving the program's targets.

More such bonds are now being tried across the world, including in New York City and Massachusetts (both addressing recidivism), and extended to new fields such as development. Eccles founded Social Finance in 2007, and he oversees all of the firm's social impact bond work, where, he says: "We are incentivised to work with the complicated and with those willing to change." "We are incentivised to work with the complicated and with those willing to change."

Shereen El Feki works and writes on sexuality and social change in the Arab world.

Dividing her time between London and Cairo, TED Fellow Shereen El Feki works on issues related to health and social welfare in the Arab region -- including intimate attitudes toward sexual (and political) freedoms, as explored in her new book, Sex and the Citadel.

Half-Egyptian and half-Welsh, El Feki was brought up in Canada. She started her professional life in medical science, with a PhD in molecular immunology from the University of Cambridge, and later worked as healthcare correspondent at The Economist. She also is a former vice chair of the United Nations' Global Commission on HIV and Law. While she has worked in regional media as a presenter with the Al Jazeera Network, and continues to write on social issues in the Arab world, her passion lies in projects that aim to better understand, and surmount, the social challenges facing Arabs, particularly young people.

Read a Q&A with Sheeren El Feki on the TED Fellows site.

Singled out for the originality of her voice and style, Egyptian singer Dina El Wedidi has made her mark on her country’s music scene in just a few years.

The Beirut Marathon is the largest running event in the Middle East. May El-Khalil founded it as an instrument of peace.

The beautiful city of Beirut, Lebanon, has seen its share of tragedy, as a seat of Lebanon's long-running civil war (1975-1990) and the Israeli-Lebanese conflict that came to a head in 2006. But in 2003, May El-Khalil, a local sports official, decided: It's time to start a marathon, open to all, as an antidote to sectarianism. And despite ongoing political and security pressure, the Beirut Marathon, now entering its 11th year, has become not only the largest running event in the Middle East but a powerful force for peace.

El-Khalil was inspired to start the marathon after a personal tragedy: a near-fatal running accident. Doctors told her she would never run again. She was hospitalized for two years and had to undergo a long series of surgeries. But the resolve from this personal struggle created an event that, each year, draws runners and fans from opposing political and religious communities in a symbolic act of peace. Case in point: In 2012, on a rainy and windy November day, more than 33,000 runners turned out. Other countries around the region are now thinking of replicating this model.

Mixing pure pop with opera, jazz and classic songcraft, Elizaveta transmutes musical forms into emotional auditory experiences.

Musician and software designer Tim Exile mixes interactivity into performance with his crowdsourced sonic creations.

Tim Exile is a classically trained performer and composer who chops and loops sound into unexpected electro-pop creations. In addition to his CD releases, Exile programs his own performance and improvisation tools, based on the Reaktor software, to expand on the live DJ format.

At Barcelona’s 2012 Sónar by Day festival, Exile showcased these tools as a member of Mostly Robot, an electronic supergroup blending instant computer composition with fluid improvisation. Two years earlier he toured North America with another TEDster adept at exploring the future of music: Imogen Heap.

Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli created the social enterprise FightTheStroke.org to open up a dialogue about the devastating effects of strokes at a young age. This issue is important to them for a simple reason: because they've been through it themselves with their son Mario.

When Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli’s son, Mario, was just 10 days old, he was diagnosed as having had a perinatal stroke in the right side of his brain, which left him unable to move the left side of his body. Through mirror neuron rehabilitation, Mario is now 5 years old and has greatly improved motion.

The tech-savvy couple founded FightTheStroke.org to gather and share the experiences of families who have been affected by all types of infant and childhood strokes. The social movement wants to open up a dialogue about the devastating effects of this traumatic event, advocating for young stroke survivors and using technology and open medicine as enablers for their better future. Together, as a family, they’re promoting the awareness of this story as motivational speakers at events like TED, they're proud ambassaros of TEDMED in Italy and promoters of the first Medicine Hackathon in Italy, aimed to regroup the leading experts on Medicine and Innovation. Roberto is Director for Online Learning at Microsoft Italy, while Francesca currently focuses her management expertise in the FightTheStroke.org project, and they are developing an innovative rehabilitation platform based on Mirror Neurons. Francesca also acts as a member of various Board of Patients Associations, became an Eisenhower Fellow in 2014 and the first Ashoka Fellow in Italy in 2015.

Andras Forgacs produces animal products -- meat and leather -- without the animal.

An entrepreneur in tissue engineering, Andras Forgacs is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Meadow, a company developing novel biomaterials. These include cultured meat and leather which, as they put it, "will require no animal slaughter and much lower inputs of land, water, energy and chemicals".  This approach involves sourcing cells from living animals, multiplying these cells into billions, and then assembling them into the tissue precursors of meat or leather. The products, for now, are at a prototype stage.

Previously, Andras co-founded Organovo, which uses 3D bioprinting to create human tissues for pharmaceutical research and medical applications, such as drug development and replacement tissues. Organovo’s bioprinting technology was recognized by MIT Technology Review on its TR50 list of most innovative companies for 2012.

Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.

Much as your ear does double duty (balance plus hearing), Russell Foster posits that the eye has two jobs: creating vision, but also -- as a completely separate function -- managing our perception of light and dark, providing the clues that our circadian rhythms need to regulate sleep-wake cycles. He and his team at the University of Oxford are exploring a third kind of photoreceptor in the eye: not a rod or a cone but a photosensitive retinal ganglion cell (pRGC) that detects light/dark and feeds that information to the circadian system. As Foster explains: "Embedded within our genes, and almost all life on Earth, are the instructions for a biological clock that marks the passage of approximately 24 hours." Light and dark help us synchronize this inner clock with the outside world.
 
The research on light perception hits home as we age -- faced with fading vision, we also risk disrupted sleep cycles, which have very serious consequences, including lack of concentration, depression and cognitive decline. The more we learn about how our eyes and bodies create our sleep cycles, the more seriously we can begin to take sleep as a therapy.

In "Plutocrats," Chrystia Freeland explores the growing gap between the working poor and the increasingly disconnected mega-rich.

Author Chrystia Freeland looks under the hood of global capitalism to expose the technological, economic and structural inequalities pushing society in unforeseen directions. Along the way, she takes the temperature of a rising caste -- the super rich -- and shows how the creation of vast fortunes at the top hollow out the middle class in western industrialised countries. This rising income inequality, she argues, has a structural character, and is becoming a cultural and social issue, with consequences for social cohesion and social mobility.

Freeland began her career as an “accidental journalist” with frontline bulletins from the Ukraine in the heat of the Soviet collapse. She is now an editor at Thomson Reuters, and is frequently featured on media outlets ranging from the International Herald Tribune to The Colbert Report.

TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.

As half of Backyard Brains, neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage builds the SpikerBox -- a small rig that helps kids understand the electrical impulses that control the nervous system. He's passionate about helping students understand (viscerally) how our brains and our neurons work, because, as he said onstage at TED2012, we still know very little about how the brain works -- and we need to start inspiring kids early to want to know more.

Before becoming a neuroscientist, Gage worked as an electrical engineer making touchscreens. As he told the Huffington Post: "Scientific equipment in general is pretty expensive, but it's silly because before [getting my PhD in neuroscience] I was an electrical engineer, and you could see that you could make it yourself. So we started as a way to have fun, to show off to our colleagues, but we were also going into classrooms around that time and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could bring these gadgets with us so the stuff we were doing in advanced Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, you could also do in fifth grade?" His latest pieces of gear: the Roboroach, a cockroach fitted with an electric backpack that makes it turn on command, and BYB SmartScope, a smartphone-powered microscope.

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.

The former Chief Creative Officer of Mexico City, Gabriella Gómez-Mont now works with organizations and cities across the world to better understand the potential of political imagination, social creativity, experimentation and transdisciplinary practices.

Gabriella Gómez-Mont believes that cities should not just be built for the human body but also for the human imagination. She was the founder of Laboratorio para la Ciudad, the award-winning experimental arm of the Mexico City government. In this role she held a unique title, Chief Creative Officer for Mexico City, and led a team working to unlock the social potential of one of the world's most fascinating and complex cities.

Gómez-Mont currently directs The Urban Task Force, a new kind of nomadic and creative office specialized for cities that constantly shifts shape to accommodate high-level, transdisciplinary collaborations across the world.

In record time, Tariq Harb’s masterful command of melody and emotion shot him into the upper ranks of classical guitarists.

Writer, psychologist and former Middle East reporter Lesley Hazleton explores the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect.

Lesley Hazleton has traced the roots of conflict in several books, including compelling 'flesh-and-blood' biographies of Muhammad and Mary, and casts "an agnostic eye on politics, religion, and existence" on her blog, AccidentalTheologist.com.

Her newest book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, celebrates the agnostic stance as "rising above the flat two-dimensional line of belief/unbelief, creating new possibilities for how we think about being in the world." In it, she explores what we mean by the search for meaning, invokes the humbling perspective of infinity and reconsiders what we talk about when we talk about soul.

Hazleton's approach has been praised as "vital and mischievous" by the New York Times, and as "a positive orientation to life, one that embraces both science and mystery ... while remaining intimately grounded and engaged."

The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.

Margaret Heffernan was born in Texas, grew up in the Netherlands and was educated at Cambridge University. She produced drama and documentary programs for the BBC for 13 years, then moved back to the US where she became a serial entrepreneur and CEO in the wild early days of web business.

Heffernan's third book, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. In 2015, she was awarded the Transmission Prize for A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition. In 2015, TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. As lead faculty for the Forward Institute's Responsible Leadership Programme, Heffernan mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organizations.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel shrunk the human brain by 14 billion neurons -- by developing a new way to count them.

How many neurons make a human brain? For years, the answer has been (give or take) 100 billion. But neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel decided to count them herself. Her research approach involved dissolving four human brains (donated to science) into a homogeneous mixture -- in her lab at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences in Rio de Janeiro, they call it "brain soup." She then took a sample of the mix, counted the number of cell nuclei belonging to neurons, and scaled that up. Result: the human brain has about 86 billion neurons, 14 billion fewer than assumed -- but intriguingly, far more than other animals, relative to brain size.

She suggests that it was the invention of cooking by our ancestors -- which makes food yield much more metabolic energy -- that allowed humans to develop the largest primate brain. She's now working on elephant and whale brains to test her hypothesis.

Reflective and precise, Yaron Herman plays piano jazz.

 Born in Tel Aviv, Yaron Herman seemed destined for a brilliant career as a junior basketball player on Israel's national team, but his dreams were interrupted when he badly injured his knee. He was just 16. So he turned to the piano, studying the instrument using a method based on philosophy, mathematics and psychology. Today, Herman is considered one of the best pianists of his generation, hailed by the public and media alike in Europe, Asia and the United States.

With his new record Alter Ego, a surprising, intimate album, Herman reveals an inner journey, and also a process which stems from long musical reflection. As he says: "The compositions on this record represent key moments in my life, emotions of joy or sadness that I want to share."

Erik Hersman harnesses Africa’s boundless spirit of innovation by creating platforms to improve daily lives both inside and outside the continent.

Hersman is the CEO of BRCK, a rugged, self-powered, mobile Wi-Fi device that connects people and things to the Internet in areas of the world with poor infrastructure. He leads a number of web and mobile projects through organizations including iHub, a Nairobi community center that’s an epicenter for Kenya’s booming tech industry. The mobile app Ushahidi, which he co-developed, allows users to share breaking news through text messaging and continues to revolutionize and empower journalists, watchdog groups and everyday people around the world.

Annette Heuser proposes critical reforms to loosen the iron grip of rating agencies on national credit scores.

Credit rating agencies, with their power to downgrade credit ratings for entire nations, have come under intense scrutiny and recent events have put their acceptance and transparency into question. What if there was an alternative, free from the limitations and weakened legitimacy that encumbers the big three agencies?

Annette Heuser, executive director of the Washington branch of the German Bertelsmann Foundation, has created a blueprint for a new, non-profit solution to loosen the agencies’ iron grip. The International Nonprofit Credit Rating Agency (INCRA) would conduct unsolicited foreign-risk assessments, redefining sovereign ratings as a public good, and could dramatically shift the financial futures of the world.

Adrian Hong works to promote innovation and empower citizens with technology, smart government and an entrepreneurial approach to problems.

At TEDGlobal 2013 he has guest-curated, together with TED Senior Fellow Erik Hersman, the session “Forces of Change." 

Steve Howard leads the sustainability effort at Ikea, helping the low-price-furniture giant to bring sustainable products to millions of people.

More than 690 million people visited an Ikea store in 2012; the company sold €27 billion worth of low-priced sofas, lamps, bookshelves and other goods (including €1.3 billion just in food) from more than 1,000 suppliers. Steve Howard, the chief sustainability officer, is charged with making that supply chain, and the company's 298 stores and almost 3,000 products, live more lightly upon the earth.
 
Coming to Ikea from the nonprofit consultancy Climate Group, Howard has embraced the challenge of working with a single big company, and the improvements he's made so far include helping farmers grow more-sustainable cotton around the world, remaking classic products to use fewer parts, and investing €1.5 billion through 2015 in renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar. (Like the rollout in the UK of Ikea solar panel systems for the home.) And if you've been to an Ikea lately, you probably already know this, through signs and explainers posted all over the store. Telling the story of sustainability is key, Howard believes, as companies like his become agents of transformative change. As he says: "I don't think we've fully realized the extent to which sustainability is going to shape society and the business landscape over the next couple of decades."

An artist, hacker and interaction designer, Salvatore Iaconesi embarked on a bold open-source project in 2012. Subject: his own brain cancer

Novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to forgotten nations and the 21st-century global order.

Pico Iyer's books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Both his 2008 meditation on the XIVth Dalai Lama, The Open Road, and his TED Book, The Art of Stillness, were best sellers across the US. Outside magazine called him "arguably the greatest living travel-writer," and the New Yorker said, "As a guide to far-flung places, he can hardly be surpassed." Between 2012 and 2016, Iyer delivered three talks for TED, and they have received more than eight million views so far.

An essayist for TIME since 1986, Iyer is a constant contributor the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, Granta and more than 200 other newspapers and magazines worldwide, and he has published introductions to 70 other works.

Paul Kemp-Robertson is the Cofounder and Editorial Director of Contagious Communications, a multi-platform marketing resource.

How do consumers get attached to, come to rely on and trust, the brands they use? How do brands find new ways to develop these relationships? These are the questions Paul Kemp-Robertson spends his time wondering about. Kemp-Robertson is the Editorial Director of Contagious Communications, which he cofounded with Gee Thomson in 2004. Contagious Communications is a multi-arm advertising resource that runs the quarterly magazine Contagious, an app that showcases videos of innovative marketing case studies and various other online resources.

Kemp-Robertson has previously served as editor of shots and Worldwide Director of Creative Resources at Leo Burnett Chicago. He lives in St. Albans, Hertfordshire.

Mark Kendall aims to shake up how vaccines are delivered with the Nanopatch.

Looking a bit like a fuzzy computer chip, the Nanopatch uses tiny powder-coated spikes to deliver a small dose of vaccine just under the skin, immunizing a person in about a minute. Made for less than $1, it uses only a fraction of a vaccine dose delivered by traditional syringe method (which was invented in 1853), at the same time eliminating the risk of needle injuries. What’s more, a Nanopatch infused with vaccine is designed to be heat-stable, so it can be transported without refrigeration. And the process doesn't draw blood, reducing the risk of infections.

Mark Kendall, an Australian biomedical engineer, was part of a team at the University of Queensland that advanced the Nanopatch by vaccinating animals. Now his company, Vaxxas, is on a mission to commercialize the device for human use. He plans to run an international trial using the Nanopatch, starting with the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine to protect against cervical cancer.

Musician John Kenny is the first person in hundreds of years to play the carnyx, an ancient bronze Celtic horn.

Joseph Kim escaped alone from North Korea at the age of 16, first to China and then to the United States.

Joseph Kim is from the northern region of North Korea. Growing up during the great famine of the 1990s, at the age of 12 Joseph saw his father starve to death, his mother disappear and his sister flee to China to search for food. In 2006, when he was 16, he decided to make the dangerous escape alone out of North Korea to look for food -- and for his sister. While hiding in China, he met a Korean-Chinese grandmother who protected and fed him until he found help from Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a NGO that provided more stabilized shelter and later helped him to escape to the United States.
 
Joseph arrived in the U.S. in 2007 as a refugee. He is now in college studying international business. He is still searching for his sister.

Lian Pin Koh expands conservation efforts by championing the use of low-cost autonomous aerial vehicles.

Lian Pin Koh is a relentless tinkerer and science fiction movie geek, though most know him as an environmental scientist. His dreams of combining these interests led him to cofound, with colleague Serge Wich, the site ConservationDrones.org, a project dedicated to gathering intelligence on forests and wildlife through the use of low-cost unmanned flying machines.

Ground surveys are expensive, and are not conducted at a sufficient frequency. Furthermore, some remote tropical forests have never been really surveyed for biodiversity. Koh's machines have already collected valuable information in Sumatra, Congo, Gabon, and Madagascar.

He is an assistant professor of applied ecology and conservation at the ETH Zurich.

Bernie Krause's legendary soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry -- along with some unexpected results.

With a stellar electronic music resumé including work with The Byrds, Stevie Wonder and many others, Bernie Krause is assured a place in the pop culture canon. But Krause continues to make history by capturing the fading voices of nature: studying sonic interplay between species as they attract mates, hunt prey, and sound out their roles in the ecosystem.

Krause’s recordings are not merely travelogues or relaxation tools -- they are critical barometers of global environmental health. His documents of vanishing aural habitats are a chilling reminder of shrinking biodiversity. As he tells the Guardian: "The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it."

A venture capitalist and political scientist, Eric X Li argues that the universality claim of Western democratic systems is going to be "morally challenged" by China.

A well-connected venture capitalist in Shanghai, where he was born, Eric X. Li studied in America (and even worked for Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign) before returning home, where he started doubting the idea that China's progress could only follow the path of the West's free-market principles.
 
In a much-discussed op-ed he wrote for the New York Times in February 2012 and in other writings, he has put forth the idea that China needed a different development framework, around a different idea of modernity. The Chinese system, he says, is meritocratic, highly adaptable despite the one-party rule, long term-oriented, pragmatic and non-individualistic. As he writes: "The Chinese political system ... comes close to the best formula for governing a large country: meritocracy at the top, democracy at the bottom, with room for experimentation in between.
 
While some criticize him as a cheerleader of the Chinese government and a champion of Chinese exceptionalism, Li is comfortable in the role of provocateur. He is the founder of Chengwei Capital in Shanghai, serves on the board of directors of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Lissie writes finely etched songs and sings them with a big old rebellious voice.

Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions.

Elizabeth Loftus altered the course of legal history by revealing that memory is not only unreliable, but also mutable. Since the 1970s, Loftus has created an impressive body of scholarly work and has appeared as an expert witness in hundreds of courtrooms, bolstering the cases of defendants facing criminal charges based on eyewitness testimony, and debunking “recovered memory” theories popular at the time, as in her book The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (with Katherine Ketcham).

Since then, Loftus has dedicated herself to discovering how false memories can affect our daily lives, leading her to surprising therapeutic applications for memory modification -- including controlling obesity by implanting patients with preferences for healthy foods.

Mariana Mazzucato is dedicated to changing how policymakers understand the economy -- and how we think about value -- to make it harder for value extractors to pass for value creators.

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of economics at University College London, where she founded and directs the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Mazzucato is changing how policymakers understand the role of the state in the economy: while traditional economics views policy as simply fixing markets when they go wrong, Mazzucato tries to convince bureaucrats that if they organize their institutions properly, they can cocreate value and markets, rather than just patch them up.

Most recently, Mazzucato developed a concept of "mission-oriented" innovation -- approaching social issues like climate change and health systems as past leaders approached the moon shot -- which has been adopted by the European Commission as part of their new innovation funding program.

Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.

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

Several years ago she suffered a serious concussion, and she created a multiplayer game to get through it, opening it up to anyone to play. In “Superbetter,” players set a goal (health or wellness) and invite others to play with them--and to keep them on track. While most games, and most videogames, have traditionally been about winning, we are now seeing increasing collaboration and games played together to solve problems.

Kelly McGonigal translates academic research into practical strategies for health, happiness and personal success.

Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal is a leader in the growing field of “science-help.” Through books, articles, courses and workshops, McGonigal works to help us understand and implement the latest scientific findings in psychology, neuroscience and medicine.

Straddling the worlds of research and practice, McGonigal holds positions in both the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the School of Medicine. Her most recent book, The Willpower Instinct, explores the latest research on motivation, temptation and procrastination, as well as what it takes to transform habits, persevere at challenges and make a successful change.

She is now researching a new book about the "upside of stress," which will look at both why stress is good for us, and what makes us good at stress. In her words: "The old understanding of stress as a unhelpful relic of our animal instincts is being replaced by the understanding that stress actually makes us socially smart -- it's what allows us to be fully human."

Alexa Meade paints mesmerizing, illusionistic portraits directly on living subjects, subverting familiar visual cues with perspective and color.

Alexa Meade creates paintings in 3D space that make the real world appear to be a 2D painting. What may look like a traditional painted portrait is actually a photograph of a living, breathing person whose face, clothes and surroundings are all covered in acrylic paint. The 3D paintings can be photographed from any angle and maintain the illusion of flatness without the need for digital effects.

Alexa stumbled upon this technique by accident. While she was studying political science in college, she had an idea for an art project: what would it look like if she covered up shadows in the landscape with black paint? This question led her down a rabbit hole of experiments with painitng in 3D space that led to her discovery of this new style of optical illusion. She paints on people around the world who become part of the urban landscape as living street art. The photographs of the ephemeral painting performances hang on the walls of galleries and museums.

She recieved critical acclaim from CNN, Wired, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and more. She has lectured at the CalArts, UC-Berkeley, Apple, Adobe and National Geographic London. 

Alexa travels the world creating live painting performances, art installations and commisioned portraits. Currently, Alexa is collaborating with scientists and researching spacetime at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Alexa is making a series of magical paintings with David Blaine, transforming her home into a "Fun House" with Chris Hughes, developing a line of toys and volunteering in the art program at the Braille Institute. 

An Xiao Mina studies how Internet culture and humor address political issues around the world.

An Xiao Mina is an artist, writer and technologist who makes her home in social media. Her research focuses on the significance of Internet culture and humor in tackling real-world social and political issues. She has postulated that memes are a leading form of political expression on the Chinese Internet, but there are also many similar phenomena in other countries -- such as Uganda and the United States -- arising independently of each other in different cultural contexts.

In 2009, An was central to kicking off the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans program, the museum world's first socially networked membership. Featured as the inaugural artist on their new Twitter art feed, she used Morse code to explore the history of telecommunications technologies. She  helped edit a book about Ai Weiwei's work, Interlacing, and she assisted the artist and curator Brendan McGetrick in developing the award-winning 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, which he co-directed. In her art and essays, she explores the shifting and overlapping worlds of ethnographic research, coworking spaces and networked creativity.

As an investigative journalist and self-described "professional troublemaker," George Monbiot uncovers the complicated truths behind the world's most persistent problems.

As a young man, George Monbiot spent six years working as an investigative journalist in West Papua, Brazil and East Africa, during which time he was shot at, shipwrecked, beaten up, stung into a poisoned coma by hornets, became lost for days in a rainforest (where he ate rats and insects to avert starvation) and (incorrectly) pronounced clinically dead in a hospital in northern Kenya. Today, he leads a less adventurous life as an author, columnist for the Guardian and environmental campaigner. 

Among his books and projects are Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life; The Age of Consent; and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. His latest book is Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. He has made a number of viral videos. One of them, "How Wolves Change Rivers," based on an extract from his last TED Talk, has been watched 40 million times on YouTube.

Holly Morris tells the stories of women around the world through documentary, television, print and the web.

Holly Morris is a director, producer, writer and storyteller whose work spans media and continents. She is the author of Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine (Random House) and writer/director and executuve producer of its companion PBS documentary series, "Adventure Divas". A former National Geographic Adventure columnist and widely anthologized essayist, Morris is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, among other publications. She presents the PBS televisin series "Globe Trekker," and "Treks in a Wild World," and also hosted "Outdoor Investigations" -- a series in which she investigates the scientific side of today's environmental and natural world mysteries. 

Morris has reported on the illegal caviar trade from Iran's Caspian Sea, sex trafficking from the brothels of India, and the global diaspora of Black Panthers from Cuba. Whether she's exploring underground Soviet missile silos, or the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh, Morris goes to the grassroots to tell a global story.

Her new film, The Babushkas of Chernobyl is about a surprising group of survivors living in the shadow of Chernobyl. Based on her award-winning essay of the same name (also published as "Ukraine: A Country of Women"), it won the Meredith Editorial Excellence Award, was reprinted in London's Daily Telegraph, and The Week and was selected for the book The Best Travel Writing (2012). The film, which has won numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Film Festival Jury Award for Directing, is being widely released in Spring 2016 for the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who analyzes the macroeconomy and global affairs.

Dambisa Moyo's work examines the interplay between rapidly developing countries, international business, and the global economy -- while highlighting opportunities for investment. She has travelled to more than 60 countries over the past decade, studying the political, economic and financial workings of emerging economies, in particular the BRICs and the frontier economies in Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East. Her latest book, Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World, looks at how commodities markets influence much more than the global economy -- and examines the possible consequences of China's unprecedented rush for commodities such as oil, minerals, water, and food, including the looming specter of commodity-driven conflict.

She is the author of the brilliantly argued Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa and How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead. Previously, she was an economist at Goldman Sachs, where she worked for nearly a decade, and was a consultant to the World Bank in Washington.

Fabian Oefner creates stunning visual representations of natural forces.

Fabian Oefner is a photographer and artist who wants to blend the disciplines of art and science. His psychedelic images capture natural phenomena and present them in unique and eye-catching ways. To date, subjects have included sound waves, iridescence, even magnetic ferroliquids and fire. His aim: to create images that appeal to both a viewer's heart and brain.

Oefner's photographs have been exhibited in various countries and are part of private collections around the globe. Besides pursuing his own projects, he also works on ad campaigns. He works and lives in Switzerland.

George Papandreou draws on lessons learned from the Greek debt crisis as he helps guide the EU through difficult waters.

George Papandreou, a third-generation scion of Greece’s defining political dynasty, entered the global spotlight with his attempts to re-invent his country during the darkest hours of the European debt crisis. Upon becoming Prime Minister in 2009, his government inherited a deficit that was much larger than had been reported. As PM, he implemented major changes and reforms, but was overtaken by events beyond his government's control.

Papandreou resigned his Prime Minister post in November 2011 as part of a deal to pave the way for a coalition government to restore Grecian stability, but remains a powerful figure as an MP and as President of the Socialist International.

As he says: “We do have a choice. Either we empower Europe and its citizens and become a catalyst for humanizing our global economy, or globalization will dehumanize our societies and undermine the European project. As a citizen of Europe, I vote for the first choice."

Juan Pardinas works to increase prosperity in Mexico and Latin America by challenging conventional wisdom along with investors' preconceptions.

Trita Parsi delves into Middle Eastern history and politics, uncovering fresh perspectives on Iranian, Israeli, and U.S. relations -- and discovers potential solutions to brewing conflicts.

Writer and political scientist Trita Parsi is an expert observer of the labyrinthine relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East, cutting through conventional stereotypes to laying bare the often-contentious history of the region.
 
When Parsi was only 4, his family fled to Sweden from Iran to escape political repression. Parsi later relocated to the U.S., where he earned a PhD and founded the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a grassroots organization promoting the interests of the U.S./ Iranian community.

In his compelling stage works, Hetain Patel uses powerful imagery and storytelling to examine questions of identity.

"What determines our identities anyway?" asks Hetain Patel. As a child, Patel wanted to be like Spider-Man or Bruce Lee; later, he aimed to be more like his father, who displays a much different kind of bravery. From these ambitions, Patel's new show Be Like Water examines shifting identities of all kinds, using dance and bold imagery to power a story of self-examination and self-creation. 

As a conceptual artist, Patel has used photography, sculpture, installation and performance to challenge cultural identity. For his work, he has grown a mustache exactly like the one his father wore when he emigrated from India to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and remixed the practice henna tattooing to incorporate English words and comics books. Patel's conclusion about identity: that it is an ever-shifting game of imitation. 

Michael E. Porter wrote the books on modern competitive strategy for business. Now he is thinking deeply about the intersection between society and corporate interests.

Fortune magazine calls Michael Porter simply "the most famous and influential business professor who has ever lived." His books are part of foundational coursework for business students around the world; he's applied sharp insight to health care systems, American competitiveness, development in rural areas. Now he's taking on a massive question: the perceived disconnect between corporations and society. He argues that companies must begin to take the lead in reconceiving the intersection between society and corporate interests -- and he suggests a framework, that of "shared value," which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society.
 
Porter is a University Professor at Harvard Business School, where he leads the Institute on Strategy and Competitiveness, studying competitiveness for companies and nations -- and as a solution to social problems. He is the founder of numerous nonprofits, including The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a nonprofit, private-sector organization to catalyze inner-city business development.

Cloud Appreciation Society founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney shows how seemingly idle pursuits provide unexpected paths to appreciating overlooked wonders.

As co-founder of The Idler magazine, Gavin Pretor-Pinney is a longtime advocate of the joys of time ill-spent. In The Cloudspotter's Guide and The Cloud Collector's Handbook, he tackles the idlest pursuit of all: cloudwatching.

Pretor-Pinney’s blend of tranquil appreciation and hard science have floated his cloud books to the top of bestseller lists. For Pretor-Pinney, clouds illustrate how mundane phenomena reveal the complex vectors that connect the natural wonders around us.

Pretor-Pinney is also the author of The Wavewatcher's Companion.

Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas.

It's a modern-day truism that, in regions where the phone company never bothered to lay network cable, locals quickly adopted mobile phones -- and then innovated mobile services that go far beyond what so-called developed countries have. Could the same pattern hold true with roads?

Andreas Raptopoulos is hoping to find out with Matternet, a project that uses swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver urgent items -- think emergency and medical supplies -- to places where there are no driveable roads. Imagine a sort of flying bucket brigade or relay race, where autonomous quadricopters pass packages around a flexible network that behaves something like the internet -- but for real goods.

Raptopoulos is a designer, inventor and entrepreneur. Prior to Matternet, he founded FutureAcoustic, a music platform that adjusts to the listener's environment. 

Yuyu Rau's dance skills span a wide range, from ballet to contemporary to Chinese classical.

Yuyu Rau is a dancer trained in ballet, contemporary and Chinese classical dance. Born in Taiwan and now a resident of the United Kingdom, Rau has performed with a wide range of dance companies and worked with choreographers like Wayne McGregor, Javier De Frutos, Luca Silvestrini and Douglas Thorpe.

Yau has toured with conceptual artist Hetain Patel, performing in his stage work Be Like Water. In the piece, Rau acts as Patel's translator, and often stands in to help him tell his story. 

Apollo Robbins will take the phone from your pocket and the ring off your finger, then hand them back to you and (maybe) show you how he did it.

Pickpocketing is a triumph of craft: a distracting touch with one hand, while the other hand gets to work, and the next thing you know ... where's my wallet? Apollo Robbins is a modern master of picking pockets, possessor of a subtle understanding of human attention, a taste for classic crime, and something he calls "grift sense" -- which, as he told the New Yorker , is “stepping outside yourself and seeing through the other person’s eyes, thinking through the other person’s mind, but it’s happening on a subconscious level.”
 
Robbins makes a living as an entertainer, speaker and television personality, and he also is the founder of Whizmob Inc., a collective of misdirection experts -- including reformed criminals -- that schools military and law enforcement leaders in fraud and scam tactics. Robbins has also collaborated with academics in his quest to understand how awareness and attention can be manipulated. He's co-author of a 2011 paper that explores something he noticed in his countless hours of practice: people's eyes are more easily misdirected to follow a curve than a straight line.

In "The Fastest Billion," Charles Robertson re-examines the narrative of economic growth in African nations.

Checking one's assumptions about "Africa" has become a trope -- but it's still important to do, and still surprising. In The Fastest Billion, economist Charles Robertson and his co-authors suggest that behind the stereotyped narrative are some jawdropping indicators of extreme economic and social growth. He and colleagues make the case that Africa is moving away -- quickly -- from the "bottom billion" and  "will be the fastest continent to reach the fourth economic age ... of high-income, low-corruption and generally democratic norms." Rich in resources, and powered by young people who are holding leaders to account in new ways, Africa’s economies are now returning some of the highest growth rates on Earth. How will this trend play out?
 
Robertson, a leading emerging markets specialist, is the global chief economist and head of the macro-strategy unit at Renaissance Capital, where he covers the global economic themes having the greatest impact on emerging markets.

Johan Rockström works to redefine sustainable development.

Johan Rockström is an internationally recognized scientist for his work on global sustainability issues. He helped lead the internationally renowned team of scientists that presented the planetary boundaries framework, first published in 2009, with an update in 2015. The nine planetary boundaries presented in the framework are argued to be fundamental in maintaining a "safe operating space for humanity." This framework has been embraced as an approach to sustainable development and has been used to help guide governments, international organizations, NGOs, and companies considering sustainable development.

Before focusing on the planetary scale, Rockström’s research aimed to address building resilience in water-scarce regions, and he is an expert on water resources. After completing a PhD at Stockholm University’s Systems Ecology Department in 1997, he spent nearly two decades working on applied water research in tropical regions. He has also published research on with agriculture systems, land use, and ecosystem services.

Aside from his research helping to guide policy, Rockström acts as an advisor to several governments and business networks. He also acts as an advisor for sustainable development issues at noteworthy international meetings, such as the United Nations General Assemblies, World Economic Forums, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC, also known as COP).

He is chair of the steering committee for CGIAR’s Research Program on Water, Land, and Ecosystems; a member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN); as well as a member of several other committees and boards.

Rockström acts as chair of the advisory board for the EAT Foundation, a network that integrates knowledge on food, health and sustainability to work towards providing environmental limits for healthy diets of the growing global population. He is one of 20 international scientists working on the EAT-Lancet Commission, an assessment of the global food system, and whether a transformation towards healthy and sustainable diets is possible. This assessment is the first systematic analysis of the food system at the global scale, and is due for completion in 2017.

Rockström has published more than 100 research articles, including articles in Science and Nature, as well as 20 book chapters. He has also published four books: The Human Quest (2012) and Big World Small Planet (2015) with National Geographic photographer, Mattias Klum; co-authored Water Resilience for Human Prosperity (2014); and Bankrupting Nature (2012) co-authored with Swedish writer and politician, Anders Wijkman.

Juliana Rotich is the co-founder of Ushahidi, open-source software for collecting and mapping information -- and of iHub, a collective tech space in Nairobi, Kenya. She is a TED Senior Fellow.

Juliana Rotich is co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi, a nonprofit tech company, born in Africa, that develops free and open-source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Through Crowdmap.com, Swiftly.org and accompanying mobile applications, Ushahidi is making crowdsourcing tools available and useful. Their latest product is BRCK, a tool for resilient connectivity -- anywhere.

Rotich is also a founder of iHub, a Nairobi tech space described as "part open community workspace (co-working), part vector for investors and VCs and part incubator." She is a TED Senior Fellow and serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Information Communications Technology. She co-founded Mobisoko, a mobile marketplace for language and location relevant apps in Africa. She was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 by The World Economic Forum.

RuthAnne is a stunning vocalist, has written songs for many stars, and she's now preparing her debut album.

Sociologist and philosopher Renata Salecl scrutinizes our individual and societal neuroses, and suggests ways out of our current paralysis.

Why are we the way we are, as individuals and as larger societies? In her relentless effort to answer this question, theorist Renata Salecl mines law, sociology, criminology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to arrive at some unsettling conclusions.

Salecl—who researches and teaches at universities in her native Slovenia, in New York, and in London—argues that the modern, capitalism-driven imperative to become masters of our own lives leads to personal and social paralysis. We are obsessed with the impossible ideal of perfection and with others’ regard for us to a point that's politically de-mobilizing: obsessed with the idea of personal betterment, we ignore social change. Constant anxiety, kept alive in more-or-less conscious ways by the political system and by the media, further numbs our social criticism. Many people opt to tune out and live in denial. These themes form the core of Salecl's most recent books, The Tyranny of Choice and On Anxiety.

Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard, exploring some of the most hotly contested moral and political issues of our time.

Michael Sandel is one of the best known American public intellectuals. The London Observer calls him "one of the most popular teachers in the world" and indeed his lectures at Harvard draw thousands of students eager to discuss big questions of modern political life: bioethics, torture, rights versus responsibilities, the value we put on things. Sandel's class is a primer on thinking through the hard choices we face as citizens. The course has been turned into a public TV series with companion website and book: Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? In his newest book, What Money Can't Buy, he challenges the idea that markets are morally neutral.
 
"To understand the importance of his purpose," a Guardian reviewer wrote of the book, "you first have to grasp the full extent of the triumph achieved by market thinking in economics, and the extent to which that thinking has spread to other domains. This school sees economics as a discipline that has nothing to do with morality, and is instead the study of incentives, considered in an ethical vacuum. Sandel's book is, in its calm way, an all-out assault on that idea, and on the influential doctrine that the economic approach to "utility maximisation" explains all human behaviour."

Read more about his thinking on markets and morality: "Lunch with Michael Sandel" on FT.com >>  

Bastian Schaefer and a team of designers at Airbus have been imagining the high-concept future of the jet airlplane -- in a future with less fuel and more passengers.

Bastian Schaefer is the Cabin and Cargo Innovation Manager at Airbus Operations -- and leads a group of far-thinking engineers who are building out a concept plane. Previously at Airbus, he worked on the development of A380 stairs and components for in-flight entertainment. Between 2006 and 2011 Bastian worked at Bertrand Ingenieurbüro GmbH working on projects with C&D Zodiac Development A350XWB Lavatories, AT Kearney and EADS Technology Watch Consulting. He considers himself a mechanical engineer and has a special interest in cars.

Science historian Sonia Shah explores the surprisingly fascinating story behind an ancient scourge: malaria.

Aided by economics, culture, its own resilience and that of the insect that carries it (the mosquito), the malaria parasite has determined for thousands of years the health and course not only of human lives, but also of whole civilizations. In her book The Fever, author Sonia Shah outlines the epic and devastating history of malaria and shows how it still infects 500 million people every year, and kills half a million, in a context where economic inequality collides with science and biology.

Shah’s previous book The Body Hunters established her as a heavy hitter in the field of investigative human rights reporting. She is a frequent contributor to publications such as Scientific American, The Nation and Foreign Affairs.

The publisher and editor of Stuff magazine, Toby Shapshak is a South African writer focusing on innovation — and the role it plays in Africa.

Casual readers of Stuff magazine, with its smart and provocative gadget reviews, might not know the glossy comes from not London or New York but offices in South Africa. Toby Shapshak leads the magazine and news site; he's been called "the most high-profile technology journalist in the country" by GQ South Africa. Formerly a senior newspaper reporter covering everything from crime to politics, Shapshak shadowed Nelson Mandela when he was president, and covered the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the abolition of apartheid.  

He's been writing about innovation, telecommunications and the Internet — and the impact they have on people's lives — for more than 15 years. He's now working on a book about a passionately held belief: that in Africa, necessity is the mother of innovation. 

Anne-Marie Slaughter has exploded the conversation around women’s work-life balance.

Anne-Marie Slaughter has served as the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and was the first female Director of Policy Planning for the US Department of State. In late 2013 she left Princeton to assume the presidency of the New America Foundation. With her husband, Slaughter has also raised two sons. And she is on the record saying that integrating her remarkably high-powered career and motherhood was doable when she had the flexibility to control her own schedule, but impossible once she was no longer her own boss.

In a 2012 article for the Atlantic that became the magazine’s most-read ever, Slaughter dismantles the recently-popularized notion that women who fail to “have it all” lack the ambition to do so. Instead, she argues that the way most top jobs are structured, including the expectations of workers regardless of gender, uphold slavish devotion to work above family life or other passions. Creating a more flexible work environment would benefit not just individual women and men, but society as a whole. It is unacceptable, she argues, that a desire to spend time with one’s family should be cause for shame.

Didier Sornette studies whether it is possible to anticipate big changes or predict crises in complex systems.

While financial crashes, recessions, earthquakes and other extreme events appear chaotic, Didier Sornette's research is focused on finding out whether they are, in fact, predictable. They may happen often as a surprise, he suggests, but they don't come out of the blue: the most extreme risks (and gains) are what he calls "dragon kings" that almost always result from a visible drift toward a critical instability. In his hypothesis, this instability has measurable technical and/or socio-economical precursors. As he says: "Crises are not external shocks."

An expert on complex systems, Sornette is the chair of entrepreneurial risk at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and director of the Financial Crisis Observatory, a project to test the hypothesis that markets can be predictable, especially during bubbles. He's the author of Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems.

Marla Spivak researches bees’ behavior and biology in an effort to preserve this threatened, but ecologically essential, insect.

Bees pollinate a third of our food supply -- they don’t just make honey! -- but colonies have been disappearing at alarming rates in many parts of the world due to the accumulated effects of parasitic mites, viral and bacterial diseases, and exposure to pesticides and herbicides. Marla Spivak, University of Minnesota professor of entomology and 2010 MacArthur Fellow, tries as much as possible to think like bees in her work to protect them. They’re “highly social and complex” creatures, she says, which fuels her interest and her research.

Spivak has developed a strain of bees, the Minnesota Hygienic line, that can detect when pupae are infected and kick them out of the nest, saving the rest of the hive. Now, Spivak is studying how bees collect propolis, or tree resins, in their hives to keep out dirt and microbes. She is also analyzing how flowers’ decline due to herbicides, pesticides and crop monoculture affect bees’ numbers and diversity. Spivak has been stung by thousands of bees in the course of her work.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, meditates and writes on "the gentle power" of gratefulness.

Many first met Brother David Steindl-Rast through a viral video called "Nature. Beauty. Gratitude," where Louie Schwartzberg's footage of time-lapse flowers in bloom is narrated by Brother David's moving words asking us to simply be ... grateful. Since 1953, Brother David has been a monk of Mount Saviour Benedictine monastery in New York, dividing his time between hermitic contemplation, writing and lecturing. He's the cofounder of gratefulness.org, supporting ANG*L (A Network for Grateful Living).

He was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and is the author of The Ground We Share, a text on Buddhist and Christian practice, written with Robert Aitken Roshi. His other books include Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and Deeper Than Words. His most recent book is 99 Blessings, a series of prayers for the general reader -- whether people of faith, agnostics, or uncertain.

Molly Stevens studies and creates new biomaterials that could be used to detect disease and repair bones and human tissue.

At Imperial College London, Molly Stevens heads a highly multidisciplinary research group that designs bioactive materials for regenerative medicine and biosensing. It's fundamental science with an eye to practical applications as healthcare products.

Among the products from her lab: an engineered bone, cardiac tissue suitable for use in transplants, and disease-sensing nanoparticle aggregates that change color in the presence of even tiny quantities of cancer-related enzymes, making early sensing possible. As Stevens told The Lancet: "It's right down at the nanoscience level. It's really exciting stuff, but it actually results in something very tangibly useful."

Daniel Suarez concocts thrilling reads from terrifying (and not-so-farfetched) near-future scenarios.

While working as a software developer, Daniel Suarez self-published Daemon, a cyber-thriller depicting a future where society is radically reshaped by disruptive technologies. It struck a chord -- and so did the sequel, Freedom (TM) -- rocketing Suarez into the pantheon of sci-fi prophets.

In his 2012 novel Kill Decision, Suarez digs into the consequences of technology that’s here to stay: autonomous bots and drones programmed to be lethal. Suarez argues that as we cede more control to software, we gamble with the very essence of democracy itself. How can we establish sane guidelines for technology that could easily outstrip our control?

Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.

Julian Treasure is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, airports -- on how to design sound in their physical spaces and communication. He asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us. How do they make us feel: productive, stressed, energized, acquisitive?

Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business, a manual for effective sound use in every aspect of business. His most recent book, How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, based on his TED Talk, offers practical exercises to improve communication skills and an inspiring vision for a sonorous world of effective speaking, conscious listening and understanding. He speaks globally on this topic.

Drawing on threads stretching deeply into their musical ancestry, the brothers of Le Trio Joubran spin passionate oud music for the 21st century.

Eben Upton invented a cheap, tiny computer designed to encourage kids to code and tinker with hardware.

Barcelona-based architect Xavier Vilalta works in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He adopts and updates traditional design principles to construct modern buildings that truly suit their environment.

Named young architect of the year at the Leaf Awards in 2008, Xavier Vilalta is the founder of XVA, a Barcelona-based design team operating in the fields of architecture, urbanism and research.

The TED Fellow and his team have worked on more than 60 projects, including homes, schools, cultural institutions and commercial buildings everywhere from Africa to the Middle East. Declaring that "we love nature and we care about people," the team's design philosophy is to connect the old and the new, co-opting and updating the best thinking of past traditions to create modern buildings that are both deeply respectful of the past and searingly contemporary.

Recent projects include the Lideta Mercato shopping mall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and a concept for a series of urban gardens in Qatar.

Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk.

Tom Wujec is a Fellow at Autodesk, the makers of design software for engineers, filmmakers, designers. At Autodesk, he has worked on software including SketchBook Pro, PortfolioWall and Maya (which won an Academy Award for its contribution to the film industry). As a Fellow, he helps companies work in the emerging field of business visualization, the art of using images, sketches and infographics to help teams solve complex problems as a group.

He's the author of several books, including Five-Star Mind: Games and Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity and Imagination.

Manal al-Sharif advocates for women’s right to drive, male guardianship annulment, and family protection in Saudi Arabia.

In May 2011, Manal al-Sharif filmed herself driving a car in Saudi Arabia, where women are prohibited from driving. She posted the video on YouTube, called on women to participate in a Women2Drive campaign on June 17 of that year, and attracted 12,000 fans to a Facebook page she’d collaborated on called Teach Me How to Drive So I Can Protect Myself. During a second turn at the wheel, she was arrested. Nine days -- and a groundswell of protest -- later she was released from jail.
 
Al-Sharif, an information technology consultant, remains active in the women right's movement. She has broadened her campaign to focus on guardianship annulment and family protection as well as driving rights, and has founded several groups throughout Saudi Arabia with the title "My rights, my dignity."