Theme: Bridging Spaces

For a sixth consecutive year, TEDxThessaloniki brings the TED experience to Thessaloniki, maintaining the non-profit nature and innovative spirit of TED. Since the first event, leading thinkers and practitioners have taken the stage and a community of thousands of TEDx’ers has been formed. ΤΕDxThessaloniki is currently an established and much awaited event in Greece. Our events are a unique experience to all participants and become hotly discussed issues in online and offline conversations long after their end. TEDxThessaloniki is organized by a voluntary team of highly motivated people coming from a vast range of different backgrounds, all eagerly working for the event throughout the year. On the day of the event, an additional number of volunteers contribute, all of them sharing a passion to bring the best possible TED-like experience to Thessaloniki. The TEDxThessaloniki team members provide all help and guidance to the speakers, from the very first steps until their presentation on stage. Participants, team members and speakers are all part of the TEDxThessaloniki community, a bond still experienced with speakers from past years.

Leoforos Megalou Alexandrou
Thessaloniki, Kentriki Makedonia, 54621
Greece

EKMEK

Honoring the best aspects of Greek songwriting tradition and at the same time clearly influenced by their affection for Mexico and Latin American music, ‘Ekmek’ band early drew the audiences’ attention and gained its interest as one of the most creative upcoming bands. Their first album ‘Glykainei kai den paxainei’ (Lyra, 2011) rapidly gained extended Greek radio airplay allowing songs such as ‘Esy eisai i aitia pou ypofero’ (cover version of Manolis Chiotis’ song), ‘Ax Maria’, ‘I balanta tis logikis’ to rise up, while their song ‘O trapezitis’ [The Banker] became the soundtrack of a Deutsche Welle documentary about the Greek financial crisis. Meanwhile their live performances included provocatively heterogeneous cover versions of various songs ranging from Depeche Mode to Manolis Chiotis and from Rihanna to Kilaidonis establishing the band as one that needs no introduction.

High Society

High Society is a group of artists who are mainly involved in stilt walking and street theater. In collaboration with Circus Taradadan they present circus events comprised of stilt walkers, jugglers, air acrobats and fire shows. While professionally working both with groups in Greece and circus schools abroad, High Society group combines touching street theatre aesthetics with fascinating contemporary circus performances. All the participants of today’s show are meeting up for the first time at TEDxThessaloniki, creating a bridge where soul and imagination are walking hand in hand with a new reality; creating a bridge between the reality and magic of our world.

Plus 'n' Minus Collective

Plus 'n' Minus is a jazz band, based in Greece.

Polkar

Polkar is a music band, based in Greece.

Stringless

Stringless is a vocal band based in Greece.

T!NG

T!NG team was created in late October 2006 and since has developed extended educational and acting work. It has organized international playback team meetings from Russia, Italy, Germany and Hungary. The meetings concluded with joint performances by the participating teams. It has also organized youthand adult educational seminars in cooperation with Vafopoulio Cultural Center. Moreover, T!NG team has been responsible for the training of another playback team, AquNa This. Finally, T!NG team has performed multiple times in theatres and unique occasions in Northern Greece.

Vis Motrix

Vis Motrix is a choreography/dance group, based in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Alexis Pantazis

Entrepreneur

Alexis is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Hellas Direct, a new insurance company founded in 2011 with the view of changing the way Greek car insurance companies service their clients. The company specialises in car insurance, selling policies directly via the web and over the phone. Prior to Hellas Direct, Alexis was an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs where he led principal investing and new strategic initiatives for the firm in the European investment management field. A former strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, Alexis also worked for Miramax Films in New York and the Competition Directorate General of the European Commission in Brussels. Over the past few years, Alexis has privately invested in a number of different ventures, focusing on angel financing and the strategic use of technology in the financial services space. He has held advisory roles and participated at Board level across a number of different start-up companies.

Amy Robinson Sterling

An expert in crowdsourcing and neuroscience, Amy is the Executive Director of EyeWire which started at MIT, and is now an independent nonprofit that collaborates primarily with Princeton but also MIT and New York University, among others. EyeWire is a game to map the brain played by nearly 200,000 people worldwide. In EyeWire, gamers solve 3D puzzles that map out neurons, allowing neuroscientists to better understand how the brain works and decipher the mysteries of how we see. Amy was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015. She writes the Neurotech series for Scientific American in partnership with MITx and has spoken in numerous countries ranging from TED to The White House to the Game Developer’s Conference. Under her leadership, EyeWire has won numerous science awards and its design was featured by Times Square NYC, the San Francisco Exploratorium, and Boston’s Koch Image Gallery. Robinson was featured in NBC’s Nerd Alert and by Science/AAAS Careers.

Anastassia Tsoukala

Anastassia Tsoukala was born in Athens. She studied Law in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and received her post-graduate degree in Sorbonne. She is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Paris, a researcher in Sorbonne and a member of the Athens Bar Association. She has served as counselor and expert in both European and Greek Institutions. She has been a member of the National Commission for Human Rights. She applies herself to the examination of different social control forms and the process of drafting and legitimizing security policies, in order to showcase their conflicts with the rule of law and human rights. During the last years, her academic work has been enriched by a wealth of articles in the Greek press.

Cassandra Stavrou

Cassandra runs a successful company called Propercorn. A London based popcorn brand, who pride themselves on doing things properly. Having always had an entrepreneurial appetite, and determined to create a snack without a tradeoff between taste and health, Cassandra left her job aged 25 to start her own popcorn business. Now three years since its launch, PROPERCORN is available in the UK, France, Ireland, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, has 25 employees, and last year made a turnover of almost £6million with an ambition to triple that this year! As well as selling over 2 million packs of their award- winning popcorn every month, Cassandra and PROPERCORN are soon to launch a small clothing line, a foundation and mentor budding entrepreneurs and businesses through their initiative, PROPERCORN Platform. It is the official snack of London fashion week and is widely considered to be one of the fastest growing snack brands in Europe.

Danese Cooper

Danese has a long history of successfully combining work in social justice and digital inclusion with leading open source advocacy at some of the largest global technology companies. She joined PayPal as a Distinguished Member, Technical Staff – Open Source as of February 2014. She also runs DaneseWorks, an open source consultancy whose clients have included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Numenta, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia, AutoDesk and if(we) Inc. Prior to founding DaneseWorks she was CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation (home of Wikipedia). Since 1999, she has been involved in developing and evangelizing the Open Source movement and its attached methodologies. At Intel she worked on projects designed to bridge the Digital Divide and fed a growing interest/participation in the Social Software movement. Prior to the dawn of Open Source she enjoyed a long career at proprietary companies including Apple, Microsoft and Symantec.

Harry Cliff

Dr Harry Cliff is a particle physicist from the University of Cambridge who works on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest scientific experiment, at CERN near Geneva. Harry’s research interests lie in searching for evidence of new physical phenomena at the highest energies ever probed by experiments. In particular he works as part of a team that makes extremely precise measurements of exotic particles known as beauty quarks. By comparing these precise measurements with theoretical predictions they hope to find signs of new elementary particles or forces of nature that could in turn lead to a deeper understanding of the laws of physics. He is also Fellow of Modern Science at the Science Museum, where he recently curated the critically-acclaimed “Collider” exhibition and is very active in communicating physics to the general public.

Isaac Holeman

Isaac Holeman is a designer-researcher striving for global health equity. As an ethnographer and a co-founder of the social enterprise Medic Mobile, his work is about seeing through the eyes of the poor and marginalized and responding pragmatically. Medic Mobile received a Skoll award in 2014, and Isaac has been featured twice in Forbes Magazine as one of the top 30 social entrepreneurs under the age of 30. Lately he practices design and pursues research with Medic Mobile, as a fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Academy and as a Gates Cambridge Scholar in innovation, strategy and organizations.

Jerome Kaluta

Jerome Kaluta was born and raised in Athens. His roots are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire). Jerome is an MC, singer, composer and performer who has managed to combine influences of African and European music, since he was brought up with funk, soul, reggae and disco, and incorporate them into his music production and performance, the so called Urban Soul He has undertaken classical guitar studies and training in voice placement. Since 2011 Jerome has volunteered as a coach for the “Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Professional Reintegration Day Centre” basketball team.

Melissa Fleming

Head of Communications and Chief Spokesperson at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Melissa Fleming is a leading communications professional, working to draw attention, drive empathy and generate support for the world’s 50 million refugees and displaced people. As Head of Communications and Chief Spokesperson at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), she leads media teams to bring news and stories of people on the run to the public consciousness. She is a champion for public communication through social media, including on her own Twitter account. She also leads an innovative multi-media production team producing refugee stories of survival and resilience. She believes in the power of public speaking to move audiences. Her TED talk, “Let’s help refugees thrive, not just survive,” has been viewed over 700,000 times around the world and has been subtitled in 20 languages. She is also co-organizer of TEDxPlaceDesNations in Geneva. She writes a regular column for the Guardian and is a contributor to UNHCR’s blog.

Nikkos J. Frangos

An incurable visionary, Nikkos J. Frangos is an entrepreneur, investor and producer of films and documentaries. His investment activities range from the fields of renewable energy, environmental protection and shipping to the IT industry, where he has funded and is continuing to advise more than 18 companies in the sector. With a strong experience and track record in setting up funds, fund-raising and fund management, Nikkos is a partner and co-founder of numerous companies, including Openfund, supporting entrepreneurship and startup ideas in Greece. With a passion for the performing arts, he’s also an investment angel to various ventures in music and filmography. He studied Economics at the London School of Economics, acting at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Film Directing at Hammersmith & West London College.

Nikos Dedes

Nikos Dedes is a founding member and president of Thetiki Foni (Positive Voice), an organization of people living with HIV in Greece. He is an ex-president of European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG) and ex-coordinator of the Committee of Representatives of Patients and Consumers of the European Medicines Agency. He is a member of various European organizations as member of the board or coordinating committees such as the Board of European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European Network of Clinical Tests for HIV (NEAT id), a member of the European Guiding Principles for the Treatment of HIV (EACS), a member of the Advisory Committee for Strategic and Technical Planning for HIV/AIDS of the World Health Organization (WHO HIV/AIDS STAC) while he regularly participates in advisory meetings of the European Centre on Precaution and Control of Diseases (ECDC) and the UN Program on AIDS (UNAIDS).

Penelope Stavropoulou

Penelope is an alcoholic in rehab. She was born in Athens in March 1960. When she graduated from high school, she turned to a private journalism academy, to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a war correspondent, which was not meant to be. She then decided to study Business Administration in London but returned after three months. While reminiscing of a trip to the Great Theatre of Epidaurus with her mother at 13, where she was mesmerized by the magic theatre, she decided to follow her heart and study acting. In 1984 she graduated from the Drama School of the National Theatre. Since then she has participated in high profile productions of both the National and the Free Theatre, and collaborated with prominent directors such as Michailidis, A. Papathanasiou, K. Koutsomitis, the internationally renowned Volonakis and others. She is the mother of twins, brought in this world through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). In her own words: “I am and have become what I could not”.

Philippa Young

Philippa Young is a British writer and a filmmaker living in Beirut, Lebanon. She is the co-founder of What Took You So Long, a guerilla production company that produces documentary films to the most remote areas of the world. Along with her team, they work with an informal and flexible method that fits the situation, culture, country, and people we are shooting. Their guerilla documentary work is about building relationships through living with the people they film, travelling by public transport, and working with local partners and volunteers. She also serves on the editorial board of Makeshift Magazine, a journal of hidden creativity.

Theodosios Sapounidis

Theodosios Sapounidis graduated from the Department of Electronics Engineering and then completed his undergraduate studies in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Aristotle University’s Polytechnic School. He gained a Master’s Degree in Informatics before continuing to a PhD where his thesis focused on using objects to help children learn the basic principles of programming. During his studies, he received many awards and with the Cubes Coding proposal won two international prizes: the Open Education Challenge award and the second prize of The Neo Ubimedia MindTrek Awards 2014. Cubes Coding teaches children the basic principles of programming and code writing through games and can be also used by older people to practice their mental skills.