John La Grou unveils an ingenious new technology that will smarten up the electrical outlets in our homes, using microprocessors and RFID tags. The invention, Safeplug, promises to prevent deadly accidents like house fires — and to conserve energy.
Ed Ulbrich spoke at TED2009 representing a team of filmmakers, artists and technologists who’ve been working on a significant breakthrough in visual storytelling — a startling blurring of the line between digital creation and actor.
Ulbrich is the executive VP of production at Digital Domain, for whom he’s executive-produced Academy Award-winning visual effects for Titanic, What Dreams May Come, Fight Club, Zodiac, Adaptation and other features, as well as music videos and more than 500 commercials. In 2007, he was named to the Creativity 50 — top innovators in advertising and design.
A software engineer, Gever Tulley is the co-founder of the Tinkering School, a weeklong camp where lucky kids get to play with their very own power tools. He’s interested in helping kids learn how to build, solve problems, use new materials and hack old ones for new purposes. He’s also a certified paragliding instructor.Full Bio
During the last organisers’ meet, the idea of making a promo video for TEDx Chennai was booted up (again). So lets execute this idea.
This is a call for all people who are reading this blog to make a short video on TEDx Chennai. The only thumb rule is that the video should capture the spirit of TED as well as that of Chennai.
A series of “TEDx comes to Chennai” videos with video montage of the famous places of Chennai can be a good start. A montage of famous people in Chennai could be another. Perhaps, a theme song for TEDx Chennai? (keeping in tradition with our films) This is just pointer in a direction. The possibilities are endless.
Case in point : Here is a award winning ad of a famous brand after they launched in Chennai.
This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some
Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called “collaborative filtering” and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations — or “things like this” — fueled by other users.
Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher. Mistry is passionate about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.
Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”
Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.
Kamal Meattle has a vision to reshape commercial building in India using principles of green architecture and sustainable upkeep (including an air-cleaning system that involves massive banks of plants instead of massive banks of HVAC equipment). He started the Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park (PBC-STIP), in New Delhi, in 1990 to provide “instant office” space to technology companies. PBC-STIP’s website publishes its air quality index every day, and tracks its compliance to the 10 principles of the UN Global Compact, a corporate-citizenship initiative.
Meattle has long been a environmental activist in India. In the 1980s he helped India’s apple industry develop less-wasteful packaging to help save acres of trees. He then began a campaign to help India’s millions of scooter drivers use less oil. His next plan is to develop a larger version of PBC-STIP, making a green office accessible to more businesses in New Delhi and serving as an example of low-cost, low-energy office life.
Many people think the lines on the map no longer matter, but Parag Khanna says they do. Using maps of the past and present, he explains the root causes of border conflicts worldwide and proposes simple yet cunning solutions for each.
Political scientist Parag Khanna travels the world with his eyes open — and has become a trenchant critic of the standard wisdom about the second and third worlds. Khanna’s recent book, The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century, looks at the epic political manipulations of nations struggling to end up at the top of the global heap. Esquire calls Khanna one of the 75 people who will influence the 21st century, precisely because it’s these smaller countries that will shape the world’s future.
Khanna argues that we’re entering a time of apolarity — when the traditional centers of gravity (US/Europe/Russia/China) will no longer hold. He sees a 21st century that has much in common with the feudal 16th century, where non-state actors have as much influence on the course of world events as countries do. His next book will explore this new medievalism and its effect on the diplomatic-industrial complex.
