Theme: Reading the compass / Διαβάζοντας την πυξίδα

compass / an instrument used to tell one’s orientation, utilising the displayed direction of the North as a point of reference. We’re all familiar with the naval compass, but what is happening to our internal compass? Through the constantly changing environment, we are often called to orient ourselves, set a path, and find inner balance as well as balance with the world around us.
The TEDxThessaloniki 2017 team chose this title for all the above mentioned reasons. This timeless quest for inner balance is equally necessary in today’s world. Through the ideas that will be presented on the stage of TEDxThessaloniki, our goal is to broaden our horizons, introduce new variables when thinking about several contemporary issues, redefine and –perhaps even– reset our compass on some of them.
Why? Because by reading and adjusting our compass, the compass of our world, we manage to find our balance in the constantly changing global society.
This year, on the stage of M2 Thessaloniki Concert Hall stage, speakers from around the world will present their ideas on topics such as education and technology, data journalism, contemporary digital culture, and the rights of the elderly people in civil society. We will also embark on a trip to the world of information and translation of numbers, as well as the world of cryptography.
Let’s calibrate the compass together on April 22, 2017!

Thessaloniki Music Hall
25 Martiou & Paralia
Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 54646
Greece

Carte Postale

“Carte Postale” is a multi-member band. Their music is based on the piano, the accordion, the trumpet, the bass, the drums, the ukulele and the English nostalgic lyrics. Their first album was released in April 2014 by the indie label The Sound of Everything. In the fall of 2014, they won the Jumping Fish Contest with the song “Rio”, after a public vote. The Carte Postale are: Despina Gotsopoulou (vocals, guitar) Anthony Spathis (guitar, piano, ukulele,) Constantine Spiliotopoulos (bass),Costas Nicolopoulos (accordion), Jason Vakrinos (trumpet), Giorgos Nikolopoulos (drums).

The Social Body Dance Lab

The Social Body Dance Lab is a professional contemporary movement and creation laboratory where the body becomes the main tool for communication and evolvement. Founded in September 2016 by Katerina Antoniadou, the group focuses on the technique and the expression of modern dance.

Chris Giotitsas

Researcher

Chris Giotitsas is an Internet researcher and research fellow at the P2P Lab. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at the School of Business, University of Leicester, UK, investigating free/open-source technologies and agricultural communities. His project combines theories about technology and social movements in order to examine how the various individuals and groups involved in open source agricultural technology frame their activities and how this influences the development process and form of the technology itself. Chris is also an editorial assistant of Ephemera Journal.

Danai Papadatou

Psychologist

Clinical Psychologist Danai Papadatou specialises in bereavement counseling and helps families and communities come to terms with death and traumatic events. Having worked in the oncological ward of a children's hospital, she learned from her young patients of the importance of living a life with quality and substance. In 1995, she co-founded "Merimna", a non-profit organisation that offers emotional support to families faced with bereavement and palliative care to children with life-limiting illness.

Dimitris DK' Kyrsanidis

World Champion Parkour / Free-running

Dimitris DK' Kyrsanidis started freerunning when he was 12 years old. Winning the 2014 and 2015 editions of Red Bull Art of Motion in Santorini brought him worldwide fame and catapulted him into the freerunning elite. He recently won the 3rd place in the 2017 WFPF Jump Off Championship.

Foteini Baldimtsi

Cryptographer

Foteini Baldimtsi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University where she does research and teaches about cryptography, security, data privacy and blockchain technologies.

Georgios Grigoriadis

Data analytist

Georgios Grigoriadis is the founder and Managing Director of Baresquare, a digital analytics company based in Greece. Georgios deep-dived into digital analytics while this rather youthful industry was still trying to self-define itself. His mission is to lead a strong, loyal team of analytics experts in a journey to stimulate business, social and individual growth through decisive answers fueled by data and statistics; a journey that goes beyond the limits of human computation, and with respect to the human well-being.

Giannis Vlastaris

Journalist - Author

A distinguished journalist, Giannis Vlastaris has an accumulated experience of almost 35 years in this field. Throughout the duration of his career, he served in various branches of journalism, mainly focusing on the political genre. For the last 20 years he has served as the director of Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia newspaper and Epsilon magazine, which helped define the special edition magazine genre among Greek press. For one decade, he worked as a reporter and political editor in the news programmes of ERT, as a researcher in informational programmes and as a producer in a series of special programmes.

Jonathan Albright

Media analytics researcher - Journalist

Jonathan Albright is a professor, award-nominated data journalist, and researcher in news and media analytics. His work lies at the interface of communication, culture, and technology—focusing on the thematic analysis of online and socially-mediated news events, deep data-driven journalistic methods, and creative visual storytelling. Jonathan's work has been featured in The Guardian, Fortune, The Washington Post, and Mashable. He writes on Medium, The Conversation, the Huffington Post, and LSE's Impact/USA Politics and Policy, and can be found on Twitter and Medium as @d1gi.

Liz Mestheneos

Sociologist

Dr. Elizabeth Mestheneos is a UK-trained sociologist who relocated to Greece in 1983. She became an independent social researcher and undertook many projects on ageing. She also co-founded the NGO “50+ Hellas” in 2006 which promotes the human rights of older people and their well being. She continues to advise on EU projects, many concerned with new technologies e.g. AAL, ReAAL, JUMP, Accessible cities.

Michael Benton

Paleontologist - Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Michael Benton is the Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A key theme in his work is the Permo–Triassic mass extinction, the largest mass extinction of all time, which took place over 250 million years ago, where he investigates how life was able to recover from such a devastating event. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the history of life on Earth and he has written more than 50 books, including palaeontology textbooks for students and a children's book on dinosaurs.

Michael Lolis

Member of the European LGBT Police Association

Michael Lolis was born in 1986 in a small village near Ioannina, Greece. Having graduated from the Hellenic Police Academy, he is serving at the Department Against Racist Violence in Athens and he is also a member of the European LGBT Police Association. To further complement his work on human rights, he is studying towards a degree in Public and European Law.Michael Lolis is a member of the European LGBT Police Association, who broke some walls speaking openly in his place of work, a highly conservative environment, about homosexuality and the need there is for society to accept LGBT individuals.

Tony Perry

Molecular embryologist - Head of the Laboratory of Mammalian Molecular Embryology at the University of Bath, UK.

Dr Tony Perry is Head of the Laboratory of Mammalian Molecular Embryology at the University of Bath, UK. At the center of his research is the remarkable and mysterious process by which fertilization transforms a sperm and egg into a single embryo cell that can give rise to an entire individual - we know very little about how this occurs. One way to discover more is to push the system to its limits, and Tony has authored first reports of mouse and pig nuclear transfer cloning. Tony has developed methods to introduce external genetic information (transgenesis) or changing the information already present (genome editing). His presentation outlines how this might play out in human applications.

Venetia Koussia

Boardroom Advisor

Dr Venetia Koussia, holds a long-standing career in senior management positions and is the former President and Managing Director of the Greek branch of ManpowerGroup (2002-2016), the world’s leader in innovative workforce solutions. Dr Koussia believes in the power of the good example and she devotes hundreds of hours annually from her personal time in assisting people to unleash their potential and overcome gender, age or other barriers.