Speakers

Adam Alter's academic research focuses on judgment, decision-making and social psychology, with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle cues in the environment on human cognition and behavior.

He is the bestselling author of two books: Irresistible, which considers why so many people today are addicted to so many behaviors, from incessant smart phone and internet use to video game playing and online shopping, and Drunk Tank Pink, which investigates how hidden forces in the world around us shape our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.   

Ashton Applewhite would like us to think differently about growing older. As she writes: "Aging is a natural, lifelong, powerful process that unites us all. So how come so many of us unthinkingly assume that depression, diapers, and dementia lie ahead? Because of ageism -- the last socially sanctioned prejudice."

She's the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and is the voice of the Yo, Is This Ageist? blog. She is also the author of Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well -- and was a clue on Jeopardy! as the author of the mega bestseller series, Truly Tasteless Jokes. (Who is Blanche Knott?)

Noriko Arai is the program director of an AI challenge, Todai Robot Project, which asks the question: Can AI get into the University of Tokyo? The project aims to visualize both the possibilities and the limitation of current AI by setting a concrete goal: a software system that can pass university entrance exams. In 2015 and 2016, Todai Robot achieved top 20 percent in the exams, and passed more than 70 percent of the universities in Japan.

The inventor of Reading Skill Test, in 2017 Arai conducted a large-scale survey on reading skills of high and junior high school students with Japan's Ministry of Education. The results revealed that more than half of junior high school students fail to comprehend sentences sampled from their textbooks. Arai founded the Research Institute of Science for Education to elucidate why so many students fail to read and how she can support them.

Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is the author of the bestsellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Dollars and Sense and Amazing Decisions -- as well as the TED Book Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes Our Motivations. He is also co-creator of the film documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies.

Isabel Behncke (MSc University College London, MPhil, Cambridge University; PhD, Oxford University) is a New York- and Oxford-based behavioural and evolutionary scientist working on the nature of social animals … including humans. She’s from the mountains of Chile and loves wild things.

After walking 3000+ km in the jungles of Congo observing the social behaviour of bonobo apes -- our closest living relatives -- in field research, Dr. Behncke now applies an evolutionary lens to questions that lie at the core of social life and creativity: Why do we go to festivals? Why does trust require risk taking? Why do adults need to play in order to not just feel alive, but also maintain health, creativity and social bonds? Why do cities need to be not just ‘smart’ but also enjoyable? And crucially why is it that the more digital we get, the more understanding of evolution we need?

She enjoys consulting and engagement in different forms, has spoken at WIRED, the G20, House of Lords, United Nations, twice at the main TED event, and around the fire in Patagonia. She also has been part of numerous radio programmes, including NPR and BBC Radio 4. She has been featured in a number of television documentaries (BBC and National Geographic) and independent cinema (e.g., ‘Bounce: How the Ball taught the World to Play’).

Born December 25, 1961, in Colombia, Ingrid Betancourt is a French-Colombian activist in the cause of freedom. She was a politician and presidential candidate in Colombia, celebrated for her determination to combat widespread corruption. In February 2002 she was taken hostage by the FARC, a communist guerrilla organization. For six and a half years, the FARC held her hostage in the Amazonian jungle. She was rescued on July 2, 2008.

Since her release, Betancourt has become a memoirist and fiction writer. Her first book, Even Silence Has Its End, which lyrically recounts her six years in the impenetrable jungle, was published in 2010. In 2016, she published a second work -- this time of fiction -- called The Blue Line, about the disappearances in Argentina during the Dirty War from 1976 to 1983. 

Betancourt has received multiple international awards, including the French National Order of the Légion d’Honneur, the Spanish Prince of Asturias Prize of Concord, the Italian Prize Grinzane Cavour, and was nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize for her commitment to democratic values, freedom and tolerance.

Levon Biss is a British photographer who works across many genres, including reportage, sport and portraiture. His passion for nature and photography have come together to create Microsculpture. For the project, a unique photographic process composites thousands of images using multiple lighting setups to create the final insect portraits. Each specimen was mounted on an adapted microscope stage, allowing close control over the position of the specimen in front of the camera lens. Most insects were photographed in about 30 sections, each section lit differently with strobe lights to accentuate the microsculpture of that particular area of the body. Each insect portrait is created from more than 8,000 separate images. In between his insect projects, Biss continues to photograph humans.

Dr. Blackburn is the president of the Salk Institute and a pioneering molecular biologist. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for discovering the molecular nature of telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that serve as protective caps essential for preserving genetic information, and for co-discovering telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomere ends. Both telomeres and telomerase are thought to play central roles in aging and diseases such as cancer, and her work helped launch entire new fields of research in these areas.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Blackburn has received nearly every major scientific award including the Lasker, Gruber, and Gairdner prizes. She has served as president of the American Association of Cancer Research and the American Society for Cell Biology, and on editorial boards of scientific journals including Cell and Science. She coauthored the best-selling book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer.

As a movement artist and creator, Jon Boogz seeks to share with audiences of all backgrounds an appreciation of the melding of art forms while inspiring and bringing awareness to social issues. Boogz recently wrote, choreographed, directed and danced in Color of Reality, a short film in collaboration with visual artist Alexa Meade and fellow dancer Lil Buck, and AM i A MAN in conjunction with Brian Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative, and DAIS.

First motivated to dance by the work of Michael Jackson, Boogz has choreographed for icons including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Naomi Campbell, Gloria Estefan and for Pharrell’s Adidas Originals campaign, and he to creative directed, choreographed and performed a tribute to Standing Rock at ComplexCon. He has also worked as a creative consultant for ads launching campaigns for Apple and Lexus. Boogz’s collaborators include TriBeCa Film Festival, DAIS, Lil Buck, and Flying Lotus; his choreography is used in FOX's "So You Think You Can Dance" and Cirque du Soleils "MJ ONE;" and he was featured at the Geffen Playhouse's "Backstage at the Geffen" with his dance company Control Freakz, Lil Buc, and spoken-word artist Robin Sanders to honor Morgan Freeman and Jeff Skoll. He co-founded Movement Art Is with Lil Buck in 2016. Boogz's forthcoming works seek to merge movement with fine art, film, technology and the stage.

Rutger Bregman is one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. The 28-year-old historian and author has published four books on history, philosophy and economics. His book Utopia for Realists -- on universal basic income and other radical ideas -- has been translated in more than 20 languages. His work has been featured in The Washington Post and The Guardian and on the BBC.

David Brenner directs the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City and has numerous distinctions within his field, such as the Oxford University Weldon Prize and the Radiation Research Society Failla Gold Medal Award. Founded by a student of Marie Curie more than a century ago, the Columbia Center for Radiological Research is committed to exploiting all forms of radiation to improve human health and medical care.

Over the past eight years, Brenner and his team have been developing the use of a unique type of ultraviolet light, called far-UVC light, designed to safely kill viruses such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, as well as drug-resistant bacteria. We have known for a long time that conventional germicidal UV light kills viruses and bacteria but the problem has always been that it can also potentially damage human skin and eyes. By contrast, far-UVC light has the potential to kill viruses safely, so that it can potentially be used to continuously kill viruses in occupied public places. 

As we begin to look forward towards a post-COVID era, Brenner envisages the use of overhead far-UVC light in hospitals, nursing homes, buses, planes, trains, train stations, schools, restaurants, offices, theaters, gyms, food preparation areas -- anywhere where people move closer together.   

The power of light, which Brenner sees as the power of physics, has the potential to be a genuinely new weapon in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well as next year's influenza virus and the next pandemic virus, as discussed in a recent paper he coauthored in Scientific Reports.

Richard Browning is an ultra-marathon runner, an ex-Royal Marine reservist, former City commodity trader and a pioneering inventor. He's the founder of Gravity, launched in March 2017 with a dream to reimagine an entirely new form of human flight, leaning on an elegant collaboration of mind and body augmented by leading-edge technology.

Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally with video views alone running at more than 60m within seven days of launch. Browning's vision is to build Gravity into a world-class aeronautical engineering business, challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if…’

International phenomenon Lil Buck began jookin' -- a street dance that originated in Memphis -- at age 13 alongside mentors Marico Flake and Daniel Price. After receiving early hip-hop training from Teran Garry and ballet training on scholarship at the New Ballet Ensemble, he performed and choreographed until relocating to Los Angeles in 2009.

Named one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch," his collaboration with Spike Jonze and Yo-Yo Ma performing The Swan went viral in 2011. Since then, he has collaborated with a broad spectrum of artists including JR, Damian Woetzel, the New York City Ballet, Madonna, Benjamin Millepied and Spike Lee. Buck is an avid arts education advocate, a recipient of the WSJ Innovator Award and recently launched a capsule collection with Versace.

In 2016 he co-founded with Jon Boogz Movement Art Is, an organization which seeks to inspire and change the world while elevating artistic, educational and social impact of dance.

Peter Calthorpe’s 30-year design practice is informed by the idea that successful places -- whether neighborhoods, towns, urban districts or metropolitan regions -- must be diverse in uses and users, must be scaled to the pedestrian and human interaction, and must be environmentally sustainable.

In the early 1990s, Calthorpe developed the concept of Transit Oriented Development (described in his book The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream) -- an idea that is now the foundation of many regional policies and city plans around the world. His 2010 book is Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change. Calthorpe Associates' work in Europe, Asia and the Middle East has demonstrated that community design with a focus on sustainability and scale can be adapted throughout the globe. His current work throughout China is focused on developing standards and examples of Low Carbon Cities in Beijing, Chongqing, Kunming, Zhuhai, Jinan and other major cities.

From his debut at the age of 13, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, Paul Cantelon commenced a successful career as a concert pianist, until some years later he was abruptly stopped by a life-altering bicycle accident whilst at the Paris Conservatory.

Out of this crisis, Cantelon reinvented his musical career, which would come to encompass such extremes from playing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to his eventual status as a Bafta-nominated film composer known for such scores as Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ and Oliver Stone’s W.

Jacob Collier is nothing short of prodigious. A two-time Grammy-winning singer, arranger, composer and multi-instrumentalist, he combines everything from jazz and a cappella to folk, electronic and classical music. In 2014, he was discovered by the legendary producer Quincy Jones. Shortly after, Collier began working on his audio-visual live performance vehicle designed and built by Ben Bloomberg at the MIT Media Lab.

Since his first video in 2011, Collier has amassed hundreds of thousands of international followers and more than 15 million YouTube views, which includes his astounding cover of Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing." In July 2016, Collier released his chart-topping debut album, In My Room, which he solely recorded, performed and produced by himself. Most recently, he has toured his unique one-man show to more than 150 locations around the world; helped to score the newest Dreamworks release with Hans Zimmer; is currently collaborating on Herbie Hancock's upcoming album; and shares his vast knowledge of music theory with everyone from Wired Magazine to universities across the globe.

As a solo artist and member of folk-rock duo Pomplamoose, Jack Conte garnered millions of views for his offbeat "video songs," including his breakout hit "Yeah Yeah Yeah" and "Pedals," a robotic tour-de-force with a set that duplicates the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.

Despite his success, Conte noted the disconnect between page views and revenue, and he realized that if you’re a widely viewed artist and you aren’t making money, "that's not your fault -- it’s technology's fault." His solution is Patreon: a membership platform built on recurring payments from patrons to support creatives with ongoing projects.

Dalio started Bridgewater out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City in 1975 and has grown it into the fifth most important private company in the U.S. (according to Fortune magazine). Because of the firm’s many industry-changing innovations over its 40-year history, he has been called the “Steve Jobs of investing” by aiCIO magazine and named one of TIME magazine’s "100 Most Influential People."

Dalio attributes Bridgewater’s success to its unique culture. He describes it as “a believability-weighted idea meritocracy” in which the people strive for “meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truth and radical transparency.” He has explained this approach in his book Principles, which has been downloaded more than three million times and has produced considerable curiosity and controversy.

Detroit is a legendary food town, and it's thanks to small, locally owned businesses that range from streetside barbecue tents to neighborhood bakeries, shops and delis -- even small farms. At FoodLab Detroit, Devita Davison helps locals with ideas for a food business to take their dreams into delicious reality, by connecting them with business advice, help with compliance and licensing, space in professional kitchens, marketing ideas and more. The nonprofit focuses on entrepreneurs and communities who have been traditionally under-resourced, aiming to build power and resilience for people around the city.

FoodLab's vision is to cultivate, connect and catalyze, to use food as an economic engine, to form a supportive community of entrepreneurs and to make good food a reality for all Detroiters.

Sara DeWitt's work in the children's digital space was first inspired by Mister Rogers's approach to television. Just as he strove to make every child feel special through that new medium, her vision is to make each interaction with a game, stream and view an opportunity for children, parents, and teachers to learn and delight in new discoveries.

Over the last 18 years, DeWitt has worked at the forefront of new platforms, in an effort to be everywhere kids are: from websites and mobiles apps to streaming video, augmented reality, 3D-rendered experiences, and wearable technologies. She oversees the Kidscreen- and Webby-award winning pbskids.org website, PBS KIDS streaming video services and the PBS KIDS portfolio of educational apps for children. In 2014, she was named one of the top 42 Women Leading in Education by the USC Rossier School of Education and one of the Top Women in Digital by Cynopsis Media in 2016. 

Before her career in public media, DeWitt worked as a preschool teacher, a management researcher and studied media habits of children in rural areas of the United States. She is a military spouse who has moved with her husband and two young sons four times in the last five years. They currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.

T. Morgan Dixon coleads GirlTrek, the largest public health nonprofit for African American women and girls in the United States. GirlTrek encourages women to use walking as a practical first step to inspire healthy living, families and communities. The organization knits local advocacy together to lead a civil rights-inspired health movement to eliminate barriers to physical activity, improve access to safe places, protect and reclaim green spaces, and improve the walkability and built environments of 50 high-need communities across the United States.

Prior to GirlTrek, Dixon was on the front lines of education reform. She served as director of leadership development for one of the largest charter school networks in the country, Achievement First, and directed the startup of six public schools in New York City for St. Hope and the Urban Assembly, two organizations funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has served as a trustee for boards of The National Outdoor Leadership School, Teach for Haiti and The Underground Railroad Historic Byway, a $50 million tourism and preservation project in Maryland.

As the leader of GirlTrek, Dixon has received fellowships from Teach for America (2012), Echoing Green (2013), Ashoka (2014) and The Aspen Institute (2015). She has been featured in the New York Times and CNN. She was named a "health hero" by Essence Magazine and appeared on the cover of Outside Magazine's "Icons" edition.

Jorge Drexler doesn't lay claim to one identity over another. Born to a German-Jewish exile father and a Uruguayan mother, Drexler grew up in Uruguay, traveled widely across Latin America and eventually settled in Spain. Within his music, you can hear touches of milonga and bossa nova and even Bach, as his lyrics wrangle with notions of nationality and belonging, language, identity and love.

Like both of his parents, Drexler started his career as a physician, but at the age of 30, he decided to pursue music full-time. The release of his fifth album, Frontera, caught the attention of Brazilian director Walter Salles, who tapped him to write the closing song for the 2004 film Motorcycle Diaries. Titled "Al Otro Lado del Río" (The Other Side of the River), the song won Drexler an Academy Award for Best Original Song and propelled him into the international spotlight.

Over the course of his 25-year career, Jorge Drexler has produced 12 albums, received 15 Latin Grammy nomination (with two wins in 2014 Record of the Year and Best Singer-Songwriter Album), four US Grammy nominations, 5 ASCAP Latin Awards, and one Academy Award. He has also collaborated with musicians from Shakira to Mercedes Sosa to Neneh Cherry and Jovanotti.

Cynthia Erivo is a Tony, Emmy and Grammy Award-winning actress as well as an Academy Award, Golden Globe and SAG nominee. Erivo burst onto West End and Broadway stages in The Color Purple and has since taken the big screen by storm. In 2018, she made her film debut in two major films from 20th Century Fox: Drew Goddard's Bad Times at the El Royale and Steve McQueen's Widows.

Erivo recently starred in Kasi Lemmons' Harriet where she brought the legacy of Harriet Tubman to the big screen. Her performance was met with critical acclaim, garnering two Academy Award nominations, Golden Globe, SAG and multiple NAACP Award nominations as well as AAFCA and Society of Composers and Lyricists Award wins.

Erivo currently stars on the HBO series The Outsider, a series is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. She can soon be seen as Aretha Franklin in National Geographic's Emmy-winning global anthology series "Genius: Aretha." This upcoming season will be the first-ever, definitive and only authorized scripted limited series on the life of the universally acclaimed Queen of Soul.

Additional upcoming projects include Doug Liman's sci-fi thriller Chaos Walking and John Ridley's Needle in a Timestack. Erivo is set to executive produce and star in Warner Brothers' musical take on the American folk tale "Rip Van Winkle," as well as produce and star in the film adaptation of the QCode scripted thriller podcast, Carrier. Erivo will add to her producing credits the title of executive producer of the upcoming Quibi docuseries, WHAT WE KEEP.

Continuing to push the boundaries of her versatile career, Erivo stars in John Cameron Mitchell's music-driven podcast anthology, Anthem: Homunculus. In addition to her illustrious stage career, she is an accomplished performer with symphonies and music spaces including the Kennedy Center Honors, the 2020 Academy Awards, the 2017 Governor's Ball and the 2017 Grammy Awards. A UK native, she graduated from the famed Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2010.

Emily Esfahani Smith is a writer in Washington, DC. In her writing, she draws on psychology, philosophy, and literature to write about the human experience -- why we are the way we are and how we can find grace and meaning in a world that is full of suffering. Her book The Power of Meaning, an international bestseller, was published by Crown and has been translated into 16 different languages. 

The former managing editor of The New Criterion, Smith's articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. 

Smith studied philosophy at Dartmouth College. She received her master's degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Catholic University. She was born in Zurich, Switzerland.

Noah Feldman is a professor and writer who tries to figure out how to make the government follow the rules; what the rules are that the government has to follow; and what to do if the rules are being broken. In his work, he asks questions like: How can a 225-year-old constitutional blueprint still work? Can you design a new and better constitution from scratch in places like Iraq and Tunisia? What rights do we have, really?

Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a contributing writer for Bloomberg View. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He is writing a biography on James Madison, principal author of the Constitution and fourth president of the US; it's forthcoming in 2017.

Feldman is the author of six other books: Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-building (Princeton University Press 2004) and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He most recently co-authored two textbooks: Constitutional Law, Eighteenth Edition (Foundation Press, 2013) and First Amendment Law, Fifth Edition (Foundation Press, 2013).

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People" and one of Fortune's "40 under 40." He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of four #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and his latest, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. The Observer and other media have called Tim "the Oprah of audio" due to the influence of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads.

Martin Ford was one of the first analysts to write compellingly about the future of work and economies in the face of the growing automation of everything. He sketches a future that's radically reshaped not just by robots but by the loss of the income-distributing power of human jobs. How will our economic systems need to adapt?

He's the author of two books: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (winner of the 2015 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award ) and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, and he's the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. He has written about future technology and its implications for the New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review and The Financial Times. 

FSN believes that collaborative music creation is a deeply effective way to become aware of the beauty, trauma and hidden potential in our communities. Their process gives voice to the underrepresented, unlocks the creative potential of youth and supports movements for social justice.

Founded by Christopher Marianetti and Jeremy Thal in 2010, FSN began its work as part of the groundbreaking new music organization, Bang on a Can. Over the years, FSN has led audio production workshops for Cine Institute in Haiti, worked extensively with Carnegie Hall in New York, Indonesia and Mexico, and developed music composition workshops with incarcerated youth in theBronx and Brooklyn.

In the field of cultural diplomacy, FSN developed the Dosti Music Project with US Embassies in Pakistan and India to bring together politically divided artists to create and tour original work. Since 2012 FSN has partnered with the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Bang on a Can to produce OneBeat, to convene young professional musicians from around the globe each fall to use music as a tool for the betterment of our communities, forming a growing web of interconnected musical change-makers from around the globe.

Pope Francis was elected in March 2013, becoming the first Pope from the Americas and from the Southern hemisphere. He was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in a family of Italian immigrants. A Jesuit, he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and then a Cardinal leading the Argentinian church. Upon election as the 266th Pope, he chose Francis as his papal name in reference to Saint Francis of Assisi.

A very popular figure who has taken it upon himself to reform the Catholic Church, Pope Francis's worldview is solidly anchored in humility, simplicity, mercy, social justice, attention to the poor and the dispossessed -- those he says "our culture disposes of like waste" -- and in a critical attitude towards unbridled capitalism and consumerism. He is a strong advocate of global action against climate change, to which he has devoted his powerful 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si' ("Praise be to you"). He invites us to practice "tenderness," putting ourselves "at the level of the other," to listen and care. He is committed to interfaith dialogue and is seen as a moral and spiritual authority across the world by many people who aren't Catholics.

Laura Galante analyzes how states use cyberspace, or more precisely, our information space. She describes a domain where militaries, intelligence services, criminal groups and individuals actively pursue their interests -- with far fewer restraints than in the physical world.

A leading voice on information operations and intelligence analysis, she founded Galante Strategies in spring 2017 to assist governments and corporations in recognizing and responding to cyber and information threats.

Galante previously served as Director of Global Intelligence at FireEye where her teams investigated network activity, profiled advanced cyber threats and portrayed the political, military and financial implications of cyber operations. A founding member of Mandiant Intelligence, her work has included leading strategic analysis, developing intelligence capabilities and offerings and directing intelligence publications including APT28: A Window into Russia's State Cyber Espionage; Red Line Drawn: China Recalculates its Use of Cyber Espionage and Hacking the Street? FIN4 Likely Playing the Market among others.

In November 2016, Galante spoke at the UN Security Council's meeting on cybersecurity and international peace and security. She frequently appears on and provides commentary to CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, BBC, Fox News, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press and other global and industry media.

Prior to her work at FireEye and Mandiant, Galante led a contractor team analyzing cyber capability development and military doctrine at the US Department of Defense. She supported the 2010 US-Russia bilateral information security talks.

Galante holds a J.D. from the Catholic University of America and a BA in Foreign Affairs and Italian from the University of Virginia.

Vanessa Garrison is the cofounder and COO of GirlTrek, the largest public health nonprofit for African-American women and girls in the United States. With more than 100,000 neighborhood walkers, GirlTrek encourages women to use walking as a practical first step to inspire healthy living, families and communities.

Prior to cofounding GirlTrek, Garrison worked within the criminal justice space, helping formerly incarcerated women access critical services. She began her career working in digital media with Turner Broadcasting System in Atlanta, where she managed digital media projects for some the world's most recognizable news and entertainment brands, including, CNN, TNT and Sports Illustrated.

With GirlTrek, Garrison has been a featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and she was named a "Health Hero" by Essence Magazine. She has received social innovations fellowships from Teach For America, Echoing Green and the Aspen Institute.

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

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

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

Photo: Aubrey Calo

Lisa Genova wields her ability to tell a story and her knowledge of the human brain to discuss medical conditions like Alzheimer's in warmly human terms. Her writing, often focusing on those who are misunderstood, explores the lives of people living with neurological diseases and disorders. A bestselling author, her work has been transformed into an Oscar-winning film, Still Alice, but the real triumph is Genova's ability to help us empathize with a person's journey we otherwise couldn't even begin to understand. Her newest book, Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, is nonfiction and explores how we remember, why we forget and what we can do to improve and protect our memories.

Gabriela González is a physicist working on the discovery of gravitational waves with the LIGO team. She was born in Córdoba, Argentina, studied physics at the University of Córdoba, and pursued her PhD at Syracuse University, which obtained in 1995. She worked as a staff scientist in the LIGO group at MIT until 1997, when she joined the faculty at Penn State. In 2001 she joined the faculty at LSU, where she is a professor of physics and astronomy. She has received awards from the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and she is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

González has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since it was funded in 1997, served as the elected LSC spokesperson in 2011-2017, and is known for participating in the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016. Her work has focused on LIGO instrument development (especially reducing noise sources and tuning alignment systems) and LIGO data calibration and diagnostics, critical to increasing the astrophysical reach of data analysis methods. 

By connecting humans and machines with AI, designer, inventor and polymath Tom Gruber is opening up new ways to improve our lives and augment human intelligence.

Gruber led the team that revolutionized human-machine interaction with Siri, the intelligent personal assistant that can understand your spoken language and help you get things done. Launched in 2010, Siri is now used billions of times a week in more than 30 countries around the world.

Ted Halstead was the founder and CEO of the Climate Leadership Council, whose mission is to convene global opinion leaders around the most cost-effective, popular and equitable climate solutions.

Halstead also founded and led two other successful think tanks. His first, which he launched at 25, introduced new measures of progress and coordinated the Economists’ Statement on Climate Change, signed by 18 Nobel laureate economists. His second, New America, has become one of the most influential think tanks in Washington.

Halstead published numerous articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, National Review, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times and Harvard Business Review. He also published two books, including The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (co-authored with Michael Lind).

From 2008 to 2012, he and his wife sailed around the world on a catamaran, with only their dog as crew. Halstead graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College, and received his Master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Montgomery Fellow. He was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

In his book, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, Robin Hanson re-imagines humanity's role as our tech becomes smarter. A pioneer in prediction markets, also known as information markets and idea futures, Hanson has been known since the 1980s for taking the very very long view on topics as varied as (a selected list) spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence and interstellar colonization.

Meanwhile, he has developed new technologies for conditional, combinatorial and intermediated trading, and he studied insider trading, manipulation and other foul play. Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. His next book is The Elephant in the Brain, co-authored with Kevin Simler, due in 2018.

Tristan Harris has been called "the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience" by The Atlantic magazine. Prior to founding the new Center for Humane Technology, he was Google's Design Ethicist, developing a framework for how technology should "ethically" steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens.  

Harris has spent a decade understanding the invisible influences that hijack human thinking and action. Drawing on literature from addiction, performative magic, social engineering, persuasive design and behavioral economics, he is currently developing a framework for ethical persuasion, especially as it relates to the moral responsibility of technology companies.

Rolling Stone magazine named Harris one of "25 People Shaping the World" in 2017. His work has been featured on TED, "60 Minutes," HBO's "RealTime with Bill Maher," "PBS NewsHour," Recode, The Atlantic, WIRED, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Economist and many more. Harris has briefed heads of state, technology company CEOs and members of the US Congress about the attention economy.

Before she became an architect, a visit to a small village in Bangladesh immediately hooked Anna Heringer on an ancient and yet neglected building material -- earth. With its easy availability, durability and endless recyclability, she realized, there was a reason its use has persisted for thousands of years.

Since then, Heringer’s love affair with sustainable materials has deepened, resulting in acclaimed projects like woven bamboo hostels in China and the METI Handmade School in Rudrapur, where, along with local workers and schoolchildren, she created a building that drew on locally abundant materials and fostered modern, sustainable building skills in local craftsmen. In the 2014 book, The Future of Architecture, she and her coauthors argue for a future that is low-impact and adaptable.

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for graphics processors and cloud computing. He holds more than 300 US patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, various electronic and mechanical devices, and the pinch-to-zoom display interface. He has recently been working on problems in medicine as well. He is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock, and he gave a TED Talk in 1994 that is practically prophetic. Throughout his career, Hillis has worked at places like Disney, and now MIT and Applied Invention, always looking for the next fascinating problem.

We live in extraordinary times, concurrently breathtaking and deeply precarious. Anab Jain co-founded the vanguard laboratory, design and film studio Superflux with Jon Ardern to parse uncertainties around our shared futures. She creates tangible, provocative experiences that transport people directly into possible future worlds. Through her work, Jain has discovered a powerful means of affecting change; by confronting and emotionally connecting people with future consequences in the present.

From climate change and growing inequality, to the emergence of artificial intelligence and the future of work, Jain and her team explore some of the biggest challenges of our times -- and investigate the potential and unintended consequences of these challenges.

Superflux is currently developing tools and strategies that can enable us to mitigate the shock of food insecurity and climate change. Recently, they produced a series of civilian drones -- creating a vision of a near-future city where these intelligent machines begin to display increasing autonomy within civic society.

Jain is also Professor of Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she is currently curating the "How Will We Work" show for the Vienna Biennale, and she is a TED Fellow. Her work has won awards at UNESCO, Apple Inc., Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, Innovate UK, and exhibited at MoMA New York, V&A London, National Museum of China, Vitra Design Museum and Tate Modern.  

Titus Kaphar is an artist whose paintings, sculptures and installations examine the history of representation by transforming styles and mediums with formal innovations to emphasize the physicality and dimensionality of the canvas and materials themselves. His practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the "past" in order to unearth its contemporary relevance. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant and a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Forthcoming exhibitions include: From a tropical space at Gagosian gallery, NY, Fall 2020 and Titus Kaphar: New works at an undisclosed location in Brussels, Belgium, October 2020.

Kaphar's commitment to social engagement has led him to move beyond traditional modes of artistic expression to establish NXTHVN, an arts incubator and residency program based in New Haven, Connecticut. Through intergenerational mentorship, professional development and cross-sector collaboration, NXTHVN connects early-career artists and creative professionals with the resources and networks vital to their success. NXTHVN provides an alternative model of professional development and mentorship in the arts and encourages artists, art professionals and local entrepreneurs to expand New Haven's growing creative community. For more information on how to support the next generation of Black and brown artists and curators, check out NXTHVN's website.

Garry Kasparov became the youngest world champion ever at the age of 22 in 1985 and spent 20 years as the world's top-rated player. His legendary matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 made him a central figure in artificial intelligence and the evolution of the human-machine relationship. He retired from professional chess in 2005 to form a Russian pro-democracy opposition against the rising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, which promotes individual liberty worldwide and organizes the annual Oslo Freedom Forum. Facing arrest during Putin's crackdown, Kasparov moved from Moscow to New York City in 2013. He later founded the Renew Democracy Initiative, dedicated to promoting the principles of the free world through education and advocacy. His book Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped details the rise of Putin's Russia as well as Kasparov's persecution and self-exile. His latest book on AI and the human-machine relationship is Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, which details his legendary matches against Deep Blue and shares his optimistic insights into our human-plus-machine future.

One of the world's biggest movie stars, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan is also an entrepreneur and inspired philanthropist. He heads the film production company Red Chillies Entertainments, whose Chennai Express was the highest-grossing film of 2013, and his recent film Raees also topped the box office in India. He's also the proud co-owner of two cricket franchises, the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Trinbago Knight Riders.

In the fall, he will host TED's brand-new TV series in Hindi for Star Plus, titled TED Talks India: Nayi Soch, which translates to "new thinking."

As a philanthropist and spokesperson, Khan stands up for causes ranging from the environment and water-supply issues to rural solar power. Khan's nonprofit Meer Foundation, named for his father, focuses on supporting victims of acid attacks through a 360-degree approach that helps with medical treatment, legal aid, rehabilitation and livelihood support.

Grace H. Kim is an architect and co-founding principal of Schemata Workshop, an award-winning, 16-person architectural practice with a keen focus on building community and social equity. She brings innovative ideas to her projects that merge client goals and sustainability measures -- such as urban agriculture, modular construction, and a focus on building community.

Kim is also the founder of Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing, a collaborative residential community that includes her street-level office and a rooftop urban farm. She walks the talk of sustainability -- leaving a small ecological footprint while incorporating holistic ideals of social and economic resilience into her daily life.

Jim Yong Kim served as the 12th president of the World Bank Group. Soon after he assumed his position in July 2012, the organization established two goals to guide its work: to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity, focusing on the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries. In September 2016, the World Bank Group Board unanimously reappointed Kim to a second five-year term as president. In early 2019, Kim resigned from the World Bank to join a firm focused on infrastructure investments.

During his first term, the World Bank Group supported the development priorities of countries at levels never seen outside a financial crisis and, with its partners, achieved two successive, record replenishments of the World Bank Group’s fund for the poorest. The institution also launched several innovative financial instruments, including facilities to address infrastructure needs, prevent pandemics and help the millions of people forcibly displaced from their homes by climate shocks, conflict, and violence.

Kim's career has revolved around health, education and delivering services to the poor. In 1987, he co-founded Partners In Health, a nonprofit medical organization that works in poor communities on four continents. He has received a MacArthur "genius" grant, was recognized as one of America's "25 Best Leaders" by U.S. News & World Report and was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World.

An award-winning journalist who has worked across television, radio and print, Gayle King is a co-host of CBS This Morning and Editor-at-Large of O, the Oprah Magazine.

King previously hosted The Gayle King Show, a live, weekday television interview program on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The program, which featured a discussion of a broad variety of topics that include politics, cultural developments, was also broadcast on XM Satellite Radio, where it premiered in 2006.

Before moving into print and radio, King worked for 18 years (1982–2000) as a television news anchor for CBS affiliate WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., during which period, she also hosted her own syndicated daytime program. Prior to joining WFSB, King worked at several other television stations, including WDAF-TV in Kansas City, Mo. (1978-1981), WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Md. (1976), and WTOP-TV in Washington, D.C. (1975).

King has received numerous awards for her extensive work as a journalist. In addition to three Emmys, she was honored in 2008 with the American Women in Radio & Television Gracie Award for Outstanding Radio Talk Show and in 2010 with both the Individual Achievement Award for Host-Entertainment/Information and the New York Women in Communications' Matrix Award.

Developed by gaming upstarts Colossal Order and guided by Korppoo as lead designer, Cities: Skylines has become the gold standard for city simulation games -- an honor previously held by the genre-defining Sim City.

At the core of Colossal Order’s rejuvenated game designs is their dedication to creating an accessible experience for all users, whether through ease of use or by allowing users to suggest their own modifications. As a result, Colossal Order doesn’t shy away from game projects that touch on the problems of urbanization, gentrification or the possibilities of servicing a city with nothing but gravel roads.

While it is essential that we reduce global carbon emissions, that isn't going to be enough to avoid dangerous climate change. Research into proposed geoengineering techniques could prove vital in the fight to protect our planet. At the Oxford Geoengineering Programme, Tim Kruger aims to assess the range of proposed geoengineering techniques to determine which, if any, could be both technically feasible and benign environmentally, socially and ethically.

Kruger, a James Martin Fellow at the University of Oxford, is a co-author of "The Oxford Principles," a draft code of conduct for geoengineering research. It calls for geoengineering to be regulated as a public good, for public participation in decision-making and for disclosure of research and open publication of results.

In addition to his work at Oxford, Kruger is also CEO of Origen Power, which is developing a process that uses natural gas to generate electricity in a way that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Anne Lamott hooks into our common experience and guides us to an understanding infused with openness. An activist, former alcoholic and Sunday School teacher, Lamott uses humor to weave through loss, parenthood, faith and the cancer diagnosis given to her best friend, in beloved books like Bird by Bird and Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. She says, "Hope begins in the dark ... if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

Her next book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, was released in April 2017.

What is truth and why does it matter? Does information technology help or hinder its pursuit? And how do we encourage more productive public discourse? These are some of the questions that animate Michael Lynch's work as a philosopher.  

Lynch is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. His work concerns truth, democracy, public discourse and the ethics of technology. Lynch is the author or editor of seven books, including The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy, Truth as One and Many and the New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s pick, True to Life.

The recipient of the Medal for Research Excellence from the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, he is The Principal Investigator for Humility & Conviction in Public Life, a $7 million project aimed at understanding and encouraging meaningful public discourse funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the University of Connecticut. He's a frequent contributor to the New York Times "The Stone" blog.

Dr. Anne A. Madden studies the ways that our dimly understood microbial neighbors can yield surprising discoveries, including technological solutions, to many of our human problems. She discovers what life exists around us and how it can be employed to make our lives better, from new medications to new food and beverage flavors. She's created novel brewing technology (see more in her 2016 TEDxCharlotte talk), discovered novel antibiotics, named a new fungus species living inside wasp nests and cataloged the astonishing diversity of some of the microscopic and macroscopic life in diverse places such as our house dust, sourdough starters, hands and even the bodies and nests of insects and birds. 

Madden is an award-winning scientist, academic researcher and entrepreneur. She is Founder and President of The Microbe Institute, a global organization that fosters microbial discovery for a better tomorrow through interdisciplinary education, art and research initiatives. She is Chief Scientific Officer at the brewing yeast company Lachancea, and she helps life sciences organizations, Fortune 500 companies and organizations such as MIT and Harvard University innovate for impact as Chief Consultant at Imnovate Consulting. (Learn more about one of her projects, HoneyDNA, in Noah Wilson-Rich's TED Talk). Her research and interdisciplinary projects have been featured on numerous media platforms, including National Geographic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, BBC, NPR, Newsweek, Scientific American and PBS NewsHour.

Kate Marvel is a scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space studies. She uses computer models and satellite observations to monitor and explain the changes happening around us. Her work has suggested that human activities are already affecting global rainfall and cloud patterns. Marvel is committed to sharing the joy and beauty of science with wider audiences.

She has advised journalists, artists and policymakers, written a popular science blog and given frequent public talks. Her writing has appeared in Nautilus Magazine.

As the son of refugees, David Miliband has first-hand experience with those fleeing conflict and disaster. In 2013, he abandoned a long political career to take the helm of the International Rescue Committee, an NGO committed to emergency and long-term assistance to refugees (and founded at the call of Albert Einstein in 1933).

As a former UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Miliband is no stranger to cross-border politics. He is a leading voice against recent anti-refugee and immigration measures in the US, where the IRC currently runs resettlement programs in 29 cities.

Luma Mufleh is the CEO and Founding Director of Fugees Family, Inc., a nonprofit organization that uses the power of soccer, education and community to empower refugee children to successfully integrate into the United States. Now, she's part principal, part tutor, the head of the first accredited private school dedicated to refugee education in the country, which encompases a summer camp and a college prep program -- and she’s building a community and support network that could be the national model the United States needs.

The Fugees' story began in 2004, when Luma took a wrong turn while driving through the town of Clarkston, Georgia and noticed a group of boys playing soccer in the street. She learned that these children were refugees from war-town countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Burma, Somalia and Sudan. That summer, Luma made fliers announcing tryouts for the Fugees soccer team. In the years that followed, the soccer team grew into something much larger -- a school, a tutoring program, a summer camp, a college prep program, and, most importantly, a community and support network.

A lifelong social entrepreneur, Luma has created several programs and initiatives that have gainfully employed, educated and empowered refugees and immigrants in her community and beyond, with the Fugees Academy serving as a national model for refugee education. While only 20 percent of refugee students graduate from high school in Georgia's DeKalb County, the Fugees Academy has a 90 percent graduation rate. These types of results helped earn Luma the 2016 Cournelle Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Manhattan Institute.

A Jordanian immigrant and Muslim of Syrian descent, Luma received her U.S. citizenship in 2011. Her story -- and the story of the Fugees -- illustrates both the American dream and the very real challenges of integration and discrimination that so many face today. Luma received her B.A. in Anthropology from Smith College and recently completed the Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

At Tesla, Elon Musk leads all product design, engineering and global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products and solar energy products. At SpaceX, he oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets. SpaceX is developing Starship — a fully reusable transportation system that will carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond — and Starlink, which will deliver high-speed broadband internet to places where access has been unreliable, expensive or completely unavailable. By pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX is pursuing the long-term goal of making humans a multi-planet species by creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Musk is also the founder of Neuralink, which is developing brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers, and The Boring Company, which combines fast, affordable tunneling technology with an all-electric public transportation system to try and alleviate soul-crushing urban congestion. Previously, Musk co-founded PayPal, the world's leading internet payment system, and Zip2, one of the first internet maps and directions services.

With a swarm of 1,024 robots inspired by the design of ant colonies, Radhika Nagpal and her colleagues at Harvard’s SSR research group have redefined expectations for self-organizing robotic systems. Guided by algorithms, Nagpal’s shockingly simple robots guide themselves into a variety of shapes -- an ability that, brought to scale, might lead to applications like disaster rescue, space exploration and beyond.

In addition to her work with biologically inspired robots, Nagpal helped create ROOT, a simple robot to teach coding to would-be programmers through a simple user interface suitable for students of all ages.

Chuck Nice is an 18-year veteran of stand-up comedy with a rich history in entertainment. For years, Nice has been busy making a name for himself across all mediums, including radio, television and the internet. Currently, he is the co-host of StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Nat Geo. Nice has also hosted How to Buy Like Mega Millionaire and Home Strange Home on HGTV. His other familiar works include Price This Place on HGTV, VH-1's Best Week Ever, TRU TV's World’s Dumbest, The Katie Couric Show, Bethany and The Meredith Viera Show. Despite his busy schedule, Nice still makes time to regularly perform at NYC comedy clubs, delighting audiences with his storytelling style of stand-up comedy. 

Most recently, Nice is preparing the groundwork for the world's largest youth climate summit titled "Shh...It Just Got Real!" -- aimed at activating the people most affected by climate change, those who will inhabit the problem we are now creating.

In 2008, as a hedge-fund quant, mathematician Cathy O’Neil saw firsthand how really really bad math could lead to financial disaster. Disillusioned, O’Neil became a data scientist and eventually joined Occupy Wall Street’s Alternative Banking Group.

With her popular blog mathbabe.org, O’Neil emerged as an investigative journalist. Her acclaimed book Weapons of Math Destruction details how opaque, black-box algorithms rely on biased historical data to do everything from sentence defendants to hire workers. In 2017, O’Neil founded consulting firm ORCAA to audit algorithms for racial, gender and economic inequality.

With a career that includes award-winning videos, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire (Paracadute), collaborations with pioneering dance companies, tech giants, animators and Muppets, OK Go is a band at the intersection of music, visual art, technology and science. Their videos have been encoded on strands of DNA, and they were President Obama's selection to perform at his 50th birthday party. They've penned New York Times op-eds and testified before the US Congress.

Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation and continue to add to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums. Most recently, they have partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to create OK Go Sandbox, an educational nonprofit that provides free resources to teachers that use OK Go's videos as starting points to teach STEAM concepts. They have been recognized for their achievements with 21 Cannes Lions, 12 CLIOs, three VMAs, two Webbys, The Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and one Grammy.

Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar leads multiple projects in the analytical domains for large-scale data. The spectrum of his expertise covers biosignals for controlling the external devices to automated data/image processing in real-time for automotive applications.

In his talk from TED2017, he introduces how connecting a human brain to machines could help individuals with attention deficit overcome their difficulty in focusing.

Raj Panjabi was nine when civil war broke out in his native country, Liberia. His family resettled in High Point, North Carolina, but he returned to Liberia as a medical student in 2005. He was shocked to find a health care system in total devastation. Only 50 doctors remained to treat a population of four million.

With a team of Liberian civil war survivors, American health workers and $6,000 he'd received as a wedding gift, Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health. The organization saves lives in the world's most remote communities by partnering with governments to deploy, sustain and manage national networks of community health professionals. They currently support the Government of Liberia's deployment of more than 4,000 health workers to provide life-saving healthcare to 1.2 million people and protect against the next epidemic. Last Mile Health's network of community health workers can be leveraged in a crisis -- in the fight against Ebola, the organization aided government response by training health workers in southeastern Liberia.

Panjabi is a physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and was named to TIME's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2016. As the winner of the 2017 TED Prize, Panjabi is creating the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train, connect and empower community health workers. The Academy aims to reinvent the education of community health workers -- and the leaders who support them -- for the digital age.

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

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

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

Anika Paulson's escape is always music. A self-proclaimed nervous Minnesotan, music is the measure of her life's tempo. There's no doubt that whatever Paulson decides to do, she will use the power and metaphor of music to guide her future. After all, according to Paulson, whether it's friendships or string theory, everything is music.

Paulson studies biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. In December 2016, she was one of 18 students from around the world selected to speak at the first-ever TED-Ed Weekend at TED's headquarters in New York City. She then had the honor of presenting her talk at TED 2017 in Vancouver.

In March 1946, scientists began tracking almost every British baby born in a single week. What they discovered would change how we are born, grow up, raise children, live and die. Helen Pearson's 2016 book, The Life Project, is the story of this incredible project and the remarkable discoveries that have come from it. It was named best science book of the year by The Observer and was a book of the year for The Economist.

As Chief Magazine Editor for the world’s leading science journal, Nature, Pearson oversees all its journalism and opinion content. Her own stories have won accolades including the 2010 Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award and two best feature awards from the Association of British Science Writers.

In her award-winning book The Sexual Paradox, psychologist Susan Pinker argued that biological differences could play an unexpectedly large role in creating classroom, lifespan and workplace gender gaps. With The Village Effect, she tracks another current: how social, face-to-face interactions are critical not only for our happiness but also for our survival, and how technology can isolate us from these life-saving bonds. As she writes: "Neglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-­a-­day cigarette habit, hypertension or obesity."

In addition to her books, Pinker writes a column for the Wall Street Journal, "Mind and Matter," which illuminates surprising advances in human behavior research. Pinker’s numerous writings (including her weekly columns "Problem Solving" and "The Business Brain") have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times and Financial Times, among many others.

Hidden under many meters of ice, a pool of meltwater lies under the Greenland Ice Sheet. Kristin Poinar studies how the meltwater forms and flows in this dynamic glacial system. She asks: How did this water get there, and where does it go? How much water is in there? And how is climate change affecting this system?

Using data from Operation IceBridge flights and from field instruments, she's building a numerical model of how crevasses form and channel water. In fact, a NASA report released in February 2017 revealed a new pathway her team discovered for meltwater to reach the ocean. Using physically based models to constrain the bounds of what is realistic has shaped Poinar's interest in glaciology.

Poinar is currently a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She will be moving to the University at Buffalo in winter 2017 to be a professor in the Geology Department and the RENEW Institute.

Working with his team at Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert builds some of the world's most advanced robots, such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle. These robots are inspired by the remarkable ability of animals to move with agility, dexterity, perception and intelligence. A key ingredient of these robots is their dynamic behavior, which contributes to their lifelike qualities and their effectiveness in the real world. 

Raibert founded Boston Dynamics as a spinoff from MIT, where he ran the Leg Laboratory, which helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. He was a professor of EE&CS at MIT and before that associate professor of CS & Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Raibert is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Jorge Ramos immigrated to the United States from Mexico City, on a student visa at the age of 24. What started as a street beat for a local Spanish-language broadcast in Los Angeles in the 1980s has evolved into a career of remarkable distinction and credibility. Today, Ramos co-anchors Univision's flagship Spanish-language broadcast, “Noticiero Univisión," writes a nationally syndicated column, hosts the Sunday Morning show "Al Punto" and now, the English language program, "America with Jorge Ramos." He is the winner of eight Emmys and the author of eleven books, including Take a Stand: Lessons from Rebels, 2016; A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto; and Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History.

In the absence of political representation in the United States, Jorge Ramos gives a face and voice to the millions of Latinos and immigrants living in the United States. He uses his platform to promote open borders and immigrants' rights and demands accountability from the world leaders he interviews. Nearly 1.9 million viewers tune into his program each night, and in 2015, Time named him one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People."

Computer scientist Joseph Redmon is working on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithm, which has a simple goal: to deliver image recognition and object detection at a speed that would seem science-fictional only a few years ago. The algorithm looks like the simple face detection of a camera app but with the level complexity of systems like Google's Deep Mind Cloud Vision, using Convolutional Deep Neural Networks to crunch object detection in realtime. It's the kind of technology that will be embedded on all smartphones in the next few years.

Redmon is also internet-famous for his resume.

Todd Reichert is co-lead engineer at Kitty Hawk, where he is helping to make the dream of personal flight a reality. In April 2017, Kitty Hawk introduced the prototype of the Kitty Hawk Flyer, a new, electric personal aircraft that is safe, fun, easy to fly and doesn't require a pilot's license.

Prior to joining Kitty Hawk, Reichert was co-founder of Aerovelo. In 2013 he and the team at Aerovelo won the Sikorsky Prize for building the human-powered helicopter Atlas. He earned the title of "World's Fastest Human" by reaching a speed of 89.59 MPH in the Eta speed bike, which he also helped design and build at Aerovolo. Earlier, he was the pilot and a co-engineer of Snowbird, the world's first human-powered ornithopter. Todd earned his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Dubbed a “Classical Rock Star” by the press, cellist Joshua Roman has earned a national reputation for performing a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicating the essence of the music at its most organic level. Before embarking on a solo career, he was for two seasons principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. For his ongoing creative initiatives on behalf of classical music, he has been selected as a 2011 TED Fellow, joining a select group of Next Generation innovators who have shown unusual accomplishments and the potential to positively affect the world.

Roman’s 2009–10 season engagements include debuts as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the Albany, Arkansas, and Santa Barbara Symphonies, the New Philharmonic Orchestra in Illinois, Oklahoma’s Signature Symphony, and Kentucky’s Lexington Philharmonic. In recent seasons he has performed with the Seattle Symphony, where he gave the world premiere of David Stock’s Cello Concerto, as well as with the Symphonies of Edmonton, Quad City, Spokane, and Stamford, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, among others. In 2008, Roman performed Britten’s third Cello Suite during New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival in a pre-concert recital at Avery Fisher Hall. In April 2009, he was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra’s debut concert at Carnegie Hall.

In addition to his solo work, Roman is an avid chamber music performer. He has enjoyed collaborations with veterans like Earl Carlyss and Christian Zacharias, as well as the Seattle Chamber Music Society and the International Festival of Chamber Music in Lima, Peru. He often joins forces with other dynamic young soloists and performers from New York’s contemporary music scene, including Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, and artists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two. In spring 2007, he was named Artistic Director of TownMusic, an experimental chamber music series at Town Hall in Seattle, where he creates programs that feature new works and reflect the eclectic range of his musical influences and inspirations.

Committed to making music accessible to a wider audience, Roman may be found anywhere from a club to a classroom, whether performing jazz, rock, chamber music, or a solo sonata by Bach or Kodály. His versatility as a performer and his ongoing exploration of new concertos, chamber music, and solo cello works have spawned projects with composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Mason Bates, and Dan Visconti. One of Roman’s current undertakings is an online video series calledThe Popper Project—wherever the cellist and his laptop find themselves, he performs an étude from David Popper’s “High School of Cello Playing” and uploads it, unedited, to his YouTube channel. Roman’s outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers, and displacement camps, communicating a message of hope through music.

The ACLU is dedicated to defending liberty and individual freedom in the US -- which is an interesting mandate to have right now. Anthony D. Romero has headed the organization since 2001 and focuses on building capacity to defend the laws that protect Americans' freedoms.

Under Romero's watch, the ACLU launched its national "Keep America Safe and Free" campaign to protect basic freedoms during a time of crisis; launched its unique legal challenge to the patents held by a private company on the human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer; launched litigation and lobbying efforts to win the freedom to marry for same-sex couples; and filed the first lawsuit against President Trump's Muslim Ban.

Daan Roosegaarde builds jaw-dropping artworks that redefine humanity's relationship to city spaces. Along with his team at Studio Roosegaarde, Roosegaarde is devoted to "landscapes of the future," city prototypes and urban adornments that fuse aesthetics with sustainability.

From Smog Free Project in Beijing -- a tower that purifies its surrounding atmosphere and harvests pollutants to preserve as jewelry -- to an interactive dance floor that generates electricity from dancers, Roosegaarde's designs revolutionize the role of technology in the built environment.

Always with the end consumer at heart, Anna Rosling Rönnlund spends her days making sure that Gapminder -- a foundation she co-founded with Hans and Ola Rosling to promote a fact-based Worldview that everyone can understand -- provides the world with useful and meaningful data about the world. Passionate about the visual side of data, she invented the project Dollar Street, where she uses photos as data to show how people really live on different income levels, beyond country stereotypes. Dollar Street explores a lot of items in homes like, for instance, how people brush their teeth.

Stuart Russell is a professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. His book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring and philosophical foundations.

He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.

After stepping down as Chief Rabbi of the UK and Commonwealth in 2013, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks became an increasingly well-known speaker, respected moral voice and writer. He authored more than 30 books, including Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence and Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.

Granted a seat in the British House of Lords in 2009 and the winner of the 2016 Templeton Prize, Rabbi Lord Sacks was a key Jewish voice for universalism and an embrace of tolerance between religions and cultures. He rejected the "politics of anger" brought about by the way "we have acted as if markets can function without morals, international corporations without social responsibility and economic systems without regard to their effect on the people left stranded by the shifting tide." He also saw, as a key idea for faith in our times, that unity in heaven creates diversity on Earth.

Robin Sanders is a captivating communicator and her energy and passion are infectious. Her credentials include more than 13 years of professional experience in teaching, performing and public speaking. She has traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Jamaica, and England as choreographer and performer for Nicole C. Mullen Tours (Nashville, TN) and CIY’s Believe Tour (Joplin, MO). Sanders's body of work includes speaking, teaching and choreographing at a host of dance schools and notable organizations such as Bates College in Lewiston, Bowdoin College, Colby College, University of Memphis, Vanderbilt University, Seattle's Velocity Dance Center, Collage Dance Collective, New Ballet Ensemble and School and many more. Her latest spoken word works include: An Ode to Hip Hop featured on So You Think You Can Dance, At the Geffen featured at Backstage At The Geffen and See What I'm Saying, both commissioned pieces written for Los Angeles' ControlFreakz. 
 
Sanders currently serves as founder and director of Out Loud Artistry, a performing arts training and mentorship program with a mission to develop skilled performing artists that leverage their artistry to positively impact and transform their communities and world around them.

We all have some measure of stress, and Robert Sapolsky explores its causes as well as its effects on our bodies (his lab was among the first to document the damage that stress can do to our hippocampus). In his research, he follows a population of wild baboons in Kenya, who experience stress very similarly to the way humans do. By measuring hormone levels and stress-related diseases in each primate, he determines their relative stress, looking for patterns in personality and social behavior that might contribute. These exercises have given Sapolsky amazing insight into all primate social behavior, including our own.

He has been called "one of the best scientist-writers of our time" by Oliver Sacks. Sapolsky has produced, in addition to numerous scientific papers, books for broader audiences, including A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress Disease and Coping, and The Trouble with Testosterone.

His latest book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, examines human behavior in search of an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?

Tomás Saraceno’s oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering. His floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment.

Aerocene, an open-source community project for artistic and scientific exploration initiated from Saraceno's vision, becomes buoyant only by the heat of the sun and infrared radiation from the surface of earth. In 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and institutions of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, among them Imperial College and the Natural History Museum London.

Saraceno lectures in institutions worldwide and directed the Institute of Architecture-related Art (IAK) at Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany (2014–2016). He was the first person to scan, reconstruct and re-imagine spiders' weaved spatial habitats, and he possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection to existence. He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others. In 2009, Saraceno attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Ames. The same year he presented a major installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and was later awarded the prestigious Calder Prize. Saraceno's work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.

Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Trained as a medievalist, his recent books and work concern the deeply modern, including The Library Beyond the Book, co-authored with Matthew Battles, on scenarios for libraries in the digital age, and FuturPiaggio: Six Italian Lessons on Mobility and Modern Life.

His pioneering work in media, design, digital arts and humanities as well as his curatorial practice includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU and the Canadian Center for Architecture. He is CEO and co-founder of Piaggio Fast Forward, developing imaginative solutions to the light mobility and transportation challenges.

A visual artist, musician, human rights lawyer and activist, Laolu Senbanjo puts his mark on everything from canvas, to shoes, to walls and buildings, to clothing and even the body with his Sacred Art of the Ori. Born and raised in Ilorin, Nigeria, his Yoruba heritage is ever-present in his work, which marries modern detail and ornate style to create a vision of Afrofuturism.

His preferred medium is charcoal, "because it’s something as natural as life and death," he writes, and he also works in acrylics, inks and even wood. Senbanjo created work for the astonishing "Sorry" video from Beyoncé's Lemonade, and he has worked with Angelique Kidjo, Kenneth Cole, Alicia Keys, Usher and many more. 

In his groundbreaking research, Anil Seth seeks to understand the biological basis of conscious experience, and to use insights from consciousness research for the benefit of medicine, science and technology. His multidisciplinary research bridges neuroscience, mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. He has also worked extensively with playwrights, dancers and other artists to shape a truly humanistic view of consciousness and self.

Seth is the author of the bestselling Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, which puts forward a unique theory of what it means to ‘be you’ that challenges our understanding of perception and reality, it turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head.

Hear more about Seth's work and interests on The TED Interview and TED Radio Hour.

Seth is a professor at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness. Follow him on Twitter at @anilkseth, on Instagram at @profanilseth and visit his website at anilseth.com.

Mariano Sigman, a physicist by training, is a leading figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making. Sigman was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics, the Young Investigator Prize of "College de France," the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In 2016 he was made a Laureate of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

In The Secret Life of the Mind, Sigman's ambition is to explain the mind so that we can understand ourselves and others more deeply. He shows how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and imagine, why we feel certain emotions, how the brain transforms and how who we are changes with it. Spanning biology, physics, mathematics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and medicine, as well as gastronomy, magic, music, chess, literature and art, The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how neuroscience serves us in our lives, revealing how the infinity of neurons inside our brains manufacture how we perceive, reason, feel, dream and communicate.

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. The play was performed all over the US 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 Showtime film. Her latest show, Older and Wider, was filmed in April 2020.

David Titley is a Professor of Practice in Meteorology and a Professor of International Affairs at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the founding director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. He served as a naval officer for 32 years and rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Titley’s career included duties as commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command; oceanographer and navigator of the Navy; and deputy assistant chief of naval operations for information dominance. He also served as senior military assistant for the director, Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

While serving in the Pentagon, Titley initiated and led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change. After retiring from the Navy, Titley served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for Operations, the chief operating officer position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Titley serves on numerous advisory boards and National Academies of Science committees, including the CNA Military Advisory Board, the Center for Climate and Security and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Titley is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

In 1999, Jun Wang founded the Bioinformatics Department of Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI, now known as BGI Shenzhen), one of China’s premier research facilities. Until July 2015, Wang led the institution of 5,000+ people engaged in studies of genomics and its informatics, including genome assembly, annotation, expression, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, transcriptional regulation, genome variation analysis, database construction as well as methodology development such as the sequence assembler and alignment tools. He also focuses on interpretation of the definition of "gene" by expression and conservation study. In 2003, Wang was also involved in the SARS genome analysis and the silkworm genome assembly and analysis in cooperation with Chinese Southeast Agricultural University. The Pig Genome Project was completed at BGI under his leadership, as well as the chicken genome variation map and the TreeFam in collaboration with the Sanger Institute. In 2007, he and his group finished the first Asian diploid genome, the 1000 genome project, and many more projects. He initiated the "million genomes project" which seeks to better understand health based on human, plant, animal and micro-ecosystem genomes.

In late 2015, Wang founded a new institute/company, iCarbonX, aiming to develop an artificial intelligence engine to interpret and mine multiple health-related data and help people better manage their health and defeat disease.

From conducting orchestras in Broadway pits to writing and arranging music for a presidential inauguration, Jason Michael Webb has dedicated his life to using music to heal, uplift and encourage.

Webb;s early musical training consisted of formal classical study, playing in small churches and listening to pop music. By 21, he had a degree in classical piano, played in the biggest churches in New York City and made his orchestral solo debut with the Queens Symphony Orchestra. He then went on to become Musical Director of the six-time Grammy-winning Brooklyn Tabernacle, for whom he co-wrote and produced four albums for The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, leading to two Stellar Award nominations and a Dove Award win. His arrangement of BTC's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was featured at the 2013 inauguration of President Barack Obama and simultaneously heard by over one billion people worldwide.

Webb also recently served as musical director of the Tony- and Grammy-winning 2016 Broadway Revival of Oprah Winfrey's "The Color Purple", directed by John Doyle and based on the timeless novel by Alice Walker. Webb is now currently the US Music Supervisor of the tour, as well as Music Director/Arranger for Cynthia Erivo, who won a 2016 Tony Award as Celie in the Broadway Revival.

Mr. Webb’s writing can also be heard on the TV series "Empire", Netflix’s film Juanita, and numerous recording projects and original musicals, including "The First Noel" (produced annually at the world famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC) and the South African musical "Ilathi," which premiered July 2017 at the New York Musical Festival. Webb has conducted live and recording orchestras from New York to LA, including pianist Lang Lang's 2016 love letter to NYC, "New York Rhapsody", which featured performances by Rufus Wainwright, Regina Spektor and Suzanne Vega.

David Whyte grew up amid the grounded practicalities of Yorkshire, England, of a very imaginative, storytelling Irish mother. Not choosing between these two sides is what perhaps gave him his first insight into the complexities of human identity. He is quoted as saying that all of his poetry and philosophy is based on what he calls "the conversational nature of reality." His time as a scientist and naturalist fuide in the Galapagos Islands led him to explore what he calls the frontier nature of human identity. Whyte draws from this diverse background and a deep philosophical curiosity to craft poetry and prose that is at once highly relatable, yet altogether new. His work spans the worlds of literature, philosophy and organizational leadership, making him a clear, wise voice in an increasingly complex world. 

His books include The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love; The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship; River Flow: New & Selected Poems; Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words and Pilgrim.

Serena Williams sits at the top of the tennis world; she's won 23 career Grand Slams, which is the most Grand Slam singles titles in history, with her most recent win at the 2017 Australian Open. In some analysts' eyes, she's quite simply the greatest athlete of all time.

But Williams has extended her influence far beyond the tennis court. Through her activism, high-profile endorsements, TV and film appearances and writing (including a guide to life written with her sister, Venus), Williams inspires millions of fans worldwide.

Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist who works with individuals, couples and families. As an advocate for psychological health, he has spent the last two decades adapting the findings of scientific studies into tools his patients, readers and audience members can use to enhance and maintain their mental health. As an identical twin with a keen eye for any signs of favoritism, he believes we need to practice emotional hygiene with the same diligence with which we practice personal and dental hygiene.

His books -- Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts; The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem; and How to Fix a Broken Heart have been translated into 26 languages. He also writes the popular "Squeaky Wheel Blog" on PsychologyToday.com.

In January, Winch partnered with TED to launch Dear Guy, a science-based advice column for TED's Ideas blog. His new podcast, Dear Therapists, is cohosted with fellow TED speaker Lori Gottlieb and executive produced by Katie Couric. He has also dabbled in stand-up comedy.

Jason Yang has become one of the most popular sensations on the acoustic and electric violin circuits in the US and abroad. With more than 197,000 subscribers and 35 million views on his YouTube channel, he reaches extremely diverse audiences through multiple genres of music.

Yang has performed all over the world with Madonna as her violinist. In 2012, he completed the MDNA Tour, which consisted of 88 sold-out shows throughout Europe, North America, South America and the Middle East. He also performed alongside Madonna and Stevie Wonder in the memorial tribute to Prince at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards.

Yang enjoys engaging in performances and projects in a wide spectrum, from playing a violin-soloing Joker in full prosthetic makeup for Warner Bros.' "Batman: Arkham City" to delivering an emotional rendition of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" on Glee. In 2013, he was contracted by HBO to score an arrangement from the "Game of Thrones" soundtrack to be performed by himself with a chamber orchestra at the official Season 2 release event in New York City. A few days later, he performed on The Colbert Report with fellow MDNA dancer, Lil Buck.
 
In the corporate world, Yang has performed for clients such as Panasonic, Mazda, Adidas, Ford, Paul Mitchell, Hilton, Skechers, Frito-Lay, Wendy’s, Telemundo, La Prairie and Amway Global.
 
The New Jersey native is currently based in Los Angeles, where he graduated from the University of Southern California with a major in international relations and a minor in music industry.

Taiwanese dancer, choreographer, inventor, and videographer Huang Yi’s pioneering work is steeped in his fascination with the partnership between humans and robots. He interweaves continuous movement with mechanical and multimedia elements to create a form of dance which corresponds with the flow of data, effectively making the performer a dancing instrument. Named by Dance Magazine as one of the “25 to Watch,” Huang is one of Asia’s most prolific choreographers.

HUANG YI & KUKA is a poetic work that intertwines modern dance and visual arts with the realm of robotics, revealing humanity through a series of vignettes between live dancers and KUKA, a robot conceptualized and programmed by Huang. "Dancing face to face with a robot is like looking at my own face in a mirror ... I think I have found the key to spin human emotions into robots," Huang asserts.

HUANG YI & KUKA is an original production of Huang Yi Studio +, developed at 3LD Art & Technology Center, in association with Sozo Artists. Commissioned by Quanta Arts Foundation.

In 2007, Helen Zaltzman sat down with collaborator Olly Mann in a suburban London living room and launched Answer Me This! (AMT), an infectiously funny podcast based on listener questions. AMT became a sensation and vaulted her to early celebrity in the comedy podcast pantheon -- it went on to garner a bouquet of awards, land a BBC5 radio show, and spawn a companion book.

Zaltzman podcast, The Allusionist, is a humorous look at linguistics, part of the podcast network Radiotopia.

Manoush Zomorodi's passion and expertise lie in investigating how technology is transforming humanity. She is the author of Bored and Brilliant: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Spacing Out, which explores the fascinating side of boredom. In 2018, she cofounded Stable Genius Productions, a media company aimed at helping people navigate personal and global change. Its first project is ZigZag, a show about the changing culture of business and work.

Zomorodi is also the creator and host of Note to Self, "the tech show about being human," which is a coproduction with WNYC Studios. The show was named "Best Tech Podcast of 2017" by the Academy of Podcasters. She’s won numerous awards, including two Gracies for Best Radio Host. She has two kids who still enjoy her company. For now.