Theme: Great xPectations

On 11th November 2015 we’ll hear stories of pioneering work, life-changing moments and passion projects, illuminating the past and future connection that Bristol and the South West have with progress and innovation.

Colston Hall
Colston St
Bristol, Bristol, City of, BS1 5AR
United Kingdom

Al Crisci MBE

Would you be prepared to put your neck on the line to give prisoners a second chance in life? Al Crisci MBE stepped up to the plate and decided he'd help prisoners turn their lives around through engaging them in food and catering. He is the founder of phenomenon that is The Clink Charity - a trail-blazing initiative giving prisoners a chance to change their prospects and lives through gaining qualifications in catering and hospitality while in prison. There’s not a lot that Al doesn’t know about the food business. He left school at 17 and trained as a chef, working for Michelin star restaurants in London and running his own restaurant and wine bar in Croydon. In 1994 he joined Highdown prison, serving more than 2000 meals a day, where the vision for The Clink began.

Daniel Edmund

Daniel Edmund is a young British-American who was born in Bristol, U.K and raised just outside of Washington D.C. He now runs his own business Bristol, Milk for Tea, an aspirational organisation that aims to inspire men to better themselves and their community through popular culture and friendly dialogue. Daniel is committed not just to helping men break free from some of society’s unhelpful stereotypes, but also to show the culture-changing power that comes with pursuing your passion.

David Sloly

In the mid 90’s David Sloly started his dream job as a radio journalist, but 5 hours later he was fired. It turned out to be his big break! Entrepreneur, business mentor and story evangelist, David has built an exciting career out of storytelling, which has taken him around the world and into the boardrooms of Google, Virgin and Dell to help them reconnect with their purpose. David traces his passion for storytelling back to his early days travelling, and later as a journalist, where he met some ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell. In 2013 he began to analyse the essential elements required to create an authentic story and in 2015 released his book ‘Why You Need a Business Story and How To Create It’ that includes a unique five-step process to enable anyone to create stories. David Sloly is now a business partner at the B2B technology marketing agency HarveyDavid that specialises in marketing automation, content creation and social media marketing.

Dr Dawn Harper

Dr Dawn Harper is the person that you wish was your GP. One of the no-nonsense doctors on Channel 4’s BAFTA-winning series Embarrassing Bodies, she’s the kind but firm one - she won’t beat around the bush with her diagnosis, and you always feel better after listening to her advice. Off-screen Dawn is a part time GP in Stroud where she takes a particular interest in women’s health, preventative medicine and weight management. She’s written five books on obesity and diabetes - and is passionate about tackling type 2 or ‘lifestyle’ diabetes, and the crippling effect it is having on the British National Health Service.

Dr Paul Bremner via a Robot Avatar

Robots that we can communicate with are no longer the realm of science fiction fantasy - they are our reality, explains Dr Paul Bremner in this TEDx first, with Paul delivering his talk via a humanoid robot avatar called Bob. Dr Paul Bremner and his team from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory's Being There project, investigating whether the use of robot avatars allow people to have rewarding remote interactions which can foster rapport, trust and engagement with others. Paul’s primary research focus is on human-robot communication using hand gestures along with speech. To analyse these interactions they are using a range of sensing technologies to detect key social signals such as people's emotional state. Their research is leading the thinking on how to evaluate and develop autonomous social robots of the future. The world-class BRL team is based at the University of the West of England and is a unique collaboration of leading scientists from universities across the UK.

Jane Evans

Jane is a Trauma Parenting and Behaviour Expert and Author who has spent the last 20 years helping children deal with difficult issues and get a better start to life. Jane has linked her experiences with the latest neuroscience and attachment research, which she has been studying for over 10 years, to develop this easy to understand approach to anxiety. Watch this talk to find out how our Meerkat Brain, Elephant Brain and Monkey Brain interact when we are growing up, and most crucially how we can help children calm their inner meerkat, whatever troubles they have experienced.

Jess Ratty

“The opportunity to change the world has never been so tangible” says Jess Ratty in this call-to-action talk about the power and compassion of the crowd. Jess Ratty is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Brand Communications Manager of Crowdfunder. She’s been named one of the UK's most connected LinkedIn networkers having featured in their Stories of Success for 2015.

Kim Ingleby

“What does your brain feel like today?” Kim Ingleby is one of the UK's Leading health and fitness experts. She’s coached team GB Olympians and BBC Strictly Come Dancing professional dancers, She runs her own business in Bristol, and has won International Personal Trainer of the Year in 2007 & 2015 and Global Trainer to Watch in 2013. But her biggest challenge, one that no one could have predicted, was a terrifying turning point in June 2013 when Kim was training for a triathlon and contracted Weil’s Disease and then Encephalitis.

Kirsty Cockburn

Kirsty Cockburn is the Director of Communications and Fundraising at BBC Media Action, an international charity that uses radio, TV and social media to help improve people’s lives in the world’s poorest countries. Kirsty’s passion for social justice has taken her around the world where she has worked as a journalist and as an aid worker for most of her life and knows first-hand the powerful role that media and communication can play in enabling people to access reliable, useful and timely information.

Lynne Elvins

“Women can do ‘dad’ things in exactly the same way that men can do ‘mum’ things.” In this thought-provoking and very personal talk, gay parent Lynne Elvins explores what ‘family’ means in the 21st Century. She describes how we can all re-connect and be part of wider families, providing caring, kind and inspirational role models for the next generations, regardless of our sex or whether we share the same DNA or not. Lynne Elvins is a design strategist and runs her own consultancy business. Lynne and her partner Emma, became the first gay couple to be approved for adoption in Bristol, UK.

Meabh Quoirin

Meabh has spent the last 13 years as a trends forecaster and has been MD of the Future Foundation since 2009. Future Foundation is all about spotting, interpreting and storifying the future. But far from being about gazing into a crystal ball, Meabh makes it her business to be ‘across everything’. Meabh and her team might just be the reason you started sharing gifs, trawling the dark web or sold your bitcoins. Beyond the day job Meabh guest lectures at DIT on digital marketing, writes as a LinkedIn influencer and regularly speaks in public. 2016 platforms include Cannes, AdWeek Europe, Marketing Society Annual conference and of course TEDxBristol 2015. In the spirit of sharing - Meabh loves cycling to work, poetry and being Irish especially loves talking to strangers all over the world. In case you were wondering, Meabh is pronounced “Mave”.

Patrick Aryee

Patrick Aryee is passionate about nature and wildlife and believes animals and plants hold the key to developing much life-saving science - but only if we save them from destruction and extinction first. Patrick is a Bristol-based biologist and television presenter who took a punt after graduating from Bristol University and decided to pursue a career in wildlife filmmaking. He went on to become an integral crew member of the BBC Natural History productions Madagascar and Attenborough: 60 years in the Wild. His first on-screen appearance was for BBC Two's Super Senses; a show exploring the extraordinary world of animal senses. He currently presents natural history series for the BBC, Sky 1 and National Geographic.

Professor Kate Pullinger

Kate Pullinger is a pioneer of creative writing in the digital age. Merging literature and fiction with digital workspaces, her titles include Inanimate Alice, Landing Gear, and Flight Paths. Kate’s talk for TEDxBristol is about a very special trans-media collaboration which captured the hearts and imaginations of people across the UK and beyond. Created with writer Neil Bartlett to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WWI, Letter to an Unknown Solider invited people to write a letter to the haunting statue of the unknown soldier who stands alone reading a letter on London Paddington’s platform 1. 22,000 people took part, including school children, college students, toddlers and pensioners and many others who’d never tried creative writing before.The result was a very modern memorial, made only of words.

Tom Savage

At 21 Tom Savage set up one of the world's leading non-profit conservation organisations, Blue Ventures, 24 hours from the nearest telephone in southwestern Madagascar. Since then, he has founded a recruitment business with offices in London and San Francisco, won the Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the European Innovator of the Year award, featured in the Prime Minister's book Everyday Heroes and helped start Tenner, now supported by Sir Richard Branson. Inspired by Swiss Family Robinson, he also spent a year designing and building an eco-house in a remote part of Kenya and has travelled to over 60 countries, living in half a dozen. Closer to home, Tom now runs an award-winning big data business in Bristol, which he started whilst living in a van in Silicon Valley. For TEDxBristol he explores some of the head-scratching questions that he thinks many of us secretly ask ourselves every day about why we work so hard, and at what cost?