Theme: Where Ideas Brew

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Outreach Auditorium
IIT Kanpur
Kalyanpur
Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, 208016
India

Alok Bajpai

Psychiatry, Physics, Film, Music, Literature and Teaching are only some of the things that occupy Dr. Alok Bajpai's wide world. He is currently a Senior Consultant of Psychiatry at Regency Hospital, Kanpur and consultant psychiatrist for IIT Kanpur students. A consistent focus of his work throughout has been child and adolescent mental health. He is also a regular columnist who writes about issues of psychiatry and sexuality for general readers. A special passion of Alok is the transformational processes of the mind to enhance inner harmony and peace as Mahatma Gandhi remains his leitmotif and example. He regularly anchors a multimedia interactive program on Mahatma Gandhi for schools and colleges - essentially to introduce and provoke children youth and adults to think and re-discover Gandhi’s message of nonviolence.

Devi Murthy

Devi Murthy, visionary of Kamal Kisan and founder of Simple Farm Solutions Pvt. Ltd is an electrical engineer turned social worker. According to her, there is a lack of empathy for small farmers in India and this compelled her to work towards helping them improve their farm productivity and lessen their everyday struggles. She works with her team in rural areas of Karnataka to provide the farmers modern farming equipment through service centers. Devi Murthy’s dream is to “see a day in the future when mechanization services become a lifestyle choice for a farmer”. Working tirelessly towards her vision, she has greatly improved the living standard of farmers in Karnataka.

S. R Ramanan

‘Rain Man Ramanan’ is an Indian Meteorologist. He joined the Meteorological Department of India in 1980 and worked as a weather forecaster in Northern Hemisphere Analysis Center in New Delhi and at Aviation Meteorological Office of Chennai Airport. He became the Director of Area Cyclone Warning Center at the Regional Meteorological Center in Chennai. Ramanan retired in 2016 after 36 years in service. He played a protagonist’s role during the Chennai floods and became a household name. However, he remained quite nonchalant in the face of all the attention and maintained that he was ‘just doing his job’. Ramanan is famous for his witty remarks and easy mannerism, which makes him different from our image of a usual weatherman. When asked if it would rain the next day, he would say "Take an umbrella with you. It will be useful any which way - rain or sunshine".

Sandeep Shukla

Professor Sandeep Shukla is currently the Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur and Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. He is also a Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor and a Dr. Deep Singh and Daljeet Kaur Faculty Fellow. With a Ph.D. and Masters from University at Albany, SUNY, he is the recipient of ACM Distinguished Scientist and Humboldt Bessel Award among many others. Sandeep was elected an IEEE Fellow for his "contributions to applied probabilistic model checking for system design". While his research focuses cyber security, embedded systems, critical infrastructures and smart grid; mentoring of students, research supervision, as well as project management, is his passion.

Sukant Khurana

Dr. Sukant Khurana is a scientist, artist, writer, podcaster, and movie maker, who is focusing his various talents to deal with the complexity of problems of alcoholism. He combines data science work in global alcoholism patterns with conducting massive on ground surveys about mental health issues in developing countries like India, where government data is not sufficient. In addition, Dr. Khurana is working within the auspices of CDRI, his host institution, on creating two podcasts for common folks, one on neurological disorders and other on IOT. Parallely, he is creating several series on alcohol in form of a unique art form, which has been hailed by art critics as a "new synthesis" of combining several genera to the service of a message. Taking all un-clichéd ways, crossing boundaries of neurobiology, mathematics, data-science, citizen-science, drug discovery, art, and public interaction, he is passionate about conveying the nuances of alcohol and alcoholism to the masses.

Supriya Paul

Supriya Paul is the Co-Founder of Josh Talks, a platform that finds and showcases remarkable ideas and stories from all across India through offline events and online video content. In the last two years, they have hosted 20 conferences across 9 cities in India and reached out to more than 25,000 people offline and more than 5 million people online. Josh Talks was recently rated as the top 50 startups of India by Economic Times. Supriya is highly committed to her work and has a passion for team centric environments with a special focus on social volunteering opportunities.