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).

John F Kennedy Presidential Library
Columbia point
Dorchester, Massachusetts, 02125
United States

Adam Wilber

As a keynote speaker and creative thinking workshop leader, Adam engages, challenges, and inspires audiences with the promise that everyone can learn how to be creative. The impacts of innovation range from success in business to personal fulfillment and happiness. Adam brings compelling energy to the stage with the perfect mix of magic entertainment and unique creativity concepts that will revolutionize the way that you think and dream. Adam performed his very first magic trick at the age of six and instantly fell in love with the art form. Magic is a wide category with dozens of specialties and he was eager to master all of them. Adam practiced diligently to perfect the classic, iconic tricks of mentalism, illusionism, and sleight of hand, but it wasn’t enough – the real thrill was rooted in invention and innovation. Upgraded magic tricks and brand-new illusions skyrocketed Adam’s career as a professional magician. The never-before-seen inventions and illusions were highlighted on national television shows, including Penn & Teller, and in front of thousands of awestruck audiences at private and corporate events. In addition to inventing tricks and props for himself, Adam is the GM of Ellusionist, a company that invents tricks for other magicians. With the creative capacity to think through both sides of the illusion, Adam not only fooled audiences, but he also stunned his fellow magicians. Today, Ellusionist is the world’s largest magic company with a line of must-have magic essentials. Adam sits at the helm as general manager with full creative control and marketing experience for multi-million dollar products. Magic gave Adam an outlet to grow, challenge, and refine his creative skills. Through every invention, revolutionary business decision, and real-time improvisational quip on stage, he cemented his position as the authority on creativity and innovation. Now, he’s on a mission to teach others and spark an inferno of creativity in every audience.

Amy Wilkinson

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Andrea Campbell

Andrea Joy Campbell was first elected as the District 4 Boston City Councilor on November 3, 2015, representing primarily the neighborhoods of Dorchester and Mattapan, as well as parts of Roslindale and Jamaica Plain. On January 1, 2018, at the start of her second term, Councilor Campbell was unanimously elected Boston City Council President by her colleagues. She is the first African-American woman to serve in this role. Born and raised in Boston, and educated in all Boston Public Schools, including Boston Latin School, Councilor Campbell went on to graduate from Princeton University and UCLA Law School. She began her career at a nonprofit in Roxbury, providing free legal services to students and their parents on education matters, including school discipline and special education needs. She has worked as legal counsel in both the public and private sectors, and before embarking on her run for City Council, served as deputy legal counsel for Governor Deval Patrick. On the Council, Councilor Campbell has established herself as an accessible, responsive, and pragmatic leader. She began her first term by chairing and expanding the Council’s Committee on Public Safety to include Criminal Justice in an effort to bring important conversations around re-entry services for returning citizens, solitary confinement, and the school-to-prison pipeline, to the Council. As one of the lead sponsors of the Community Preservation Act, she led the effort for its successful passage in 2016, which will generate millions of dollars annually for affordable housing, historic preservation, and open space in the City of Boston. And, in 2017 she secured the first-ever dedicated line item in the City’s budget to specifically fund youth development programming and youth serving organizations. Councilor Campbell continues to focus on issues of public safety and criminal justice, affordable housing, and racial equity initiatives. As Council President, she will work to ensure that the Council is accessible and transparent, has technological tools to do its work efficiently and effectively, and will encourage the body to tackle issues through an equity lens. She lives in Mattapan with her husband, Matthew, and her son, Alexander.

Ashley Paré

Ashley Paré is the CEO & Founder of Own Your Worth LLC, an organization breaking glass ceilings through career negotiation. As a Leadership Coach, Negotiation Expert, and Speaker, Ashley is committed to helping clients reach their goals, feel confident, and earn more. She works with organizations, private clients, and entrepreneurs to create thriving cultures and careers. She is the creator of the Activator Leadership Program™ and leverages over 12 years’ experience in global Human Resources. Ashley has been featured in The New York Times, CNN Money, and PBS News Hour. You can learn more about her work at www.ownyourworth.com.

Catalina Gorla

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David Kong

David Sun Kong is a Synthetic Biologist, community organizer, musician, and photographer based in Lexington, MA. He is the Director of the MIT Media Lab’s new Community Biotechnology Initiative. David is a pioneer in developing “lab-on-a-chip” technologies for synthetic biology and a leader in the global community biology movement. He conducted his graduate studies at MIT’s Media Lab, receiving a Master’s degree for developing technology for printing nanostructures with energetic beams and a Ph.D. for demonstrating the first gene synthesis in a microfluidic (“lab-on-a-chip”) system. He was recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology as a “LEAP” fellow, served as a guest faculty member at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA, and is co-founder and managing faculty of “How To Grow (Almost) Anything, an international course on synthetic biology. He founded and chaired new Microfluidic and Hardware Tracks for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) and is the official iGEM DJ. He was Technical Staff in the Bioengineering Systems & Technologies group at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and a founding member of the synthetic biology team. He is also the founder of Metafluidics, an open repository for fluidic systems. He is also the founder and Board President of EMW Community Space, an art, technology and community center in Cambridge MA and is a long-time organizer in the Asian American arts community. David has performed around the country as a DJ, beat-boxer, vocalist, and rapper in hundreds of venues including South by Southwest, the Staples Center in Los Angeles and Brooklyn Bowl, opening for hip hop legend Questlove. He is also an an award-winning vocal arranger and producer. His photography has been exhibited at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, the Japanese American National Museum, and other museums and galleries across the country.

Dima AlBasha

Dima AlBasha was born in Damascus and raised in Aleppo, Syria. She received her BA in English Literature from Aleppo University. Dima cofounded AlBasha Language & Computer Science Institute in Syria and later partnered with New Horizons International Institute. She worked in the Norwegian Consulate and in 2005 she started her career in the insurance business and became a senior underwriter at one of the largest insurance companies in the Middle East. Dima came to Newton, MA with her daughter Angelina in 2012. She is currently working in MPL underwriting at Coverys, a medical professional liability insurance company. Since coming to the United States, she has become a promoter of interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding through speaking at educational as well as religious institutes, bridging gaps among different cultures & people of various perspectives.

Dima Basha

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Edward Glaeser

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1992. He regularly teaches microeconomic theory, occasionally urban and public economics and has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston for a decade. He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, and law and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

Eric Standop

With over 15 years experience in facial diagnosis, face recognition and face reading, Eric has trained under 3 legendary Masters across 3 continents to become the only Master Face Reader worldwide that fluidly merges Chinese and South American face reading methodologies, Greek techniques in physiognomy, modern studies in micro-expressions, and health- and nutritional-diagnosis. His astute diagnostic abilities on a wide range of human conditions such as physical ailments, personality strengths and weaknesses, leadership style, relational philosophies and inherent skill sets, have made him the go-to advisor for powerful decision makers as well as individuals who seek to better understand themselves. Words connect. They bridge strangers. They can also manipulate. As a high powered entertainment marketing executive, Eric Standop was good with words but he found them lacking in their ability to relay underlying truths in the people and situations he faced. The face is different. A smile, a glance or glare can be more powerful and reveal raw emotion where words often fail. The face speaks its own language and most people use intuition to read it. Eric wanted to control it. To really understand people and see their true being. To help others recognize it within themselves. He found his destiny. Finally, Eric looks behind the fog of words and reads in the face the authentic side of a person. Ultimately, who wouldn’t want a blunt, unadulterated view of himself or others? Eric was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. Now, he travels the world speaking, advising, writing and reading faces.

Graciela Mohamedi

Graciela Mohamedi has been an activist her whole life, influenced by her Puerto Rican mother and Algerian father she was taught at a young age to lead. After high school, Graciela decided to challenge herself physically and mentally by joining the US Marine Corps. She spent her time in the military working on the airfields and trapping F-18s. It was when she became the mother of two little girls that her true activism formed. She knew to be the mom she aspired to be she needed to focus on education, as such she took a risk and moved her children to the United Kingdom to study for her PhD in Applied Physics at Oxford University. After completing her studies, she returned to the country she loved to become the outspoken activist she was meant to be. Currently, she teaches Physics at Boston University and Brookline High School, while guiding her own children through life. She is committed to grassroots activism, stimulated by the challenging political climate, and was one of the founders of March for our Lives Boston. Moreover, she has dominated the Boston progressive scene speaking at or taking a major organizing role in many marches since 2016. Graciela’s focus is on ensuring the health of American public education and increasing representation of people of color.

Jeff Karp

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Jim Stone

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John Markoff

John Markoff joined The New York Times in March 1988 as a reporter for the business section. He now writes for the science section from San Francisco. Prior to joining the Times, he worked for The San Francisco Examiner from 1985 to 1988. Markoff has written about technology and science since 1977. He covered technology and the defense industry for The Pacific News Service in San Francisco from 1977 to 1981; he was a reporter at Infoworld from 1981 to 1983; he was the West Coast editor for Byte Magazine from 1984 to 1985 and wrote a column on personal computers for The San Jose Mercury from 1983 to 1985. He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism and an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. The Times nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, 1998 and 2000. The San Francisco Examiner nominated him for a Pulitzer in 1987. In 2005, with a group of Times reporters, he received the Loeb Award for business journalism. In 2007 he shared the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Breaking News award. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation.

John Werner

speaker

Julie Chang

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Kathy Roth-Douquet

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Michael Whitehead

Before his spinal cord injury, Mike Whitehead was an avid multi-sport athlete who enjoyed basketball, volleyball, hockey, soccer and badminton. He was introduced to wheelchair rugby when his future teammates, including David Willsie, came to visit him at the Parkwood Rehabilitation Hospital in London, Ontario. Whitehead quickly became hooked on the contact and the level of competition and made the team just one year after his initial injury. Today, he works for VESCO Metalcraft measuring athletes for rugby wheelchairs and also at Canada Wheelchair Rugby.

Mike Whitehead

Before his spinal cord injury, Mike Whitehead was an avid multi-sport athlete who enjoyed basketball, volleyball, hockey, soccer and badminton. He was introduced to wheelchair rugby when his future teammates, including David Willsie, came to visit him at the Parkwood Rehabilitation Hospital in London, Ontario. Whitehead quickly became hooked on the contact and the level of competition and made the team just one year after his initial injury. Today, he works for VESCO Metalcraft measuring athletes for rugby wheelchairs and also at Canada Wheelchair Rugby.

Mira Wiczek

Mira Wilczek is President and CEO of Cogo Labs and a Senior Partner at Link Ventures. She serves on the Board of Directors at EverQuote, CareDash, and Hopjump, and the Advisory Board of Vestigo Ventures. She is also a Co-Director at the Brahe Educational Foundation. In 2017 Mira was named Top 40 Under 40 by the Boston Business Journal. Prior to joining Cogo, Mira was founder and CEO of Red Panda Security, Principal Investigator under the DARPA CFT program, and Director of Business Development at Lyric Semiconductor, where she garnered industry recognition including TR50, Silicon 60, and an EE Times ACE Award and led the successful sale of the company to Analog Devices. She started her career as an ethical hacker at IBM, architecting their first automated penetration testing platform. Mira holds patents both granted and pending in the fields of cyber security and sensor data fusion. She has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, as well as an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Mira Wilczek

Mira Wilczek is President and CEO of Cogo Labs and a Senior Partner at Link Ventures. She serves on the Board of Directors at EverQuote, CareDash, and Hopjump, and the Advisory Board of Vestigo Ventures. She is also a Co-Director at the Brahe Educational Foundation. In 2017 Mira was named Top 40 Under 40 by the Boston Business Journal. Prior to joining Cogo, Mira was founder and CEO of Red Panda Security, Principal Investigator under the DARPA CFT program, and Director of Business Development at Lyric Semiconductor, where she garnered industry recognition including TR50, Silicon 60, and an EE Times ACE Award and led the successful sale of the company to Analog Devices. She started her career as an ethical hacker at IBM, architecting their first automated penetration testing platform. Mira holds patents both granted and pending in the fields of cyber security and sensor data fusion. She has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, as well as an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Nichol Bradford

Nichol Bradford is fascinated by human potential, and has always been interested in how technology can help individuals expand beyond their perceived limits to develop and transform themselves to the highest level. She spent the last decade exploring these ideas in the online game industry, serving as a senior executive with responsibility for strategy, operations and marketing for major brands that include: Activision Blizzard, Disney, and Vivendi. Most recently she managed the operations of Blizzard properties, including World of Warcraft, in China. Now, as the CEO of the Willow Group, Nichol is applying those same skills to the realm of elevating psychological well-being. Willow is a transformative technology company focused on employing rigorous scientific research to develop training protocols, hardware and software that can produce a reliable and positive change in the human experience. Nichol has an MBA from Wharton School of Business in Strategy, and a BBA in Marketing from the University of Houston. She is a fellow of the British American Project, currently serves on the board of the Brandon Marshall Foundation for Mental Health, and is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Pablo Paredes

Pablo Paredes earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He is part of the faculty, as an Instructor, in the Radiology, and the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Departments at Stanford University. Prior to joining the School of Medicine, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science at Stanford University for two years. During his PhD career, he held internships on behavior change and affective computing in Microsoft Research and Google. Before 2010 he was a senior strategic manager with Intel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a lead product manager with Telefonica in Quito, Ecuador and an Entrepreneur in his natal Cuenca, Ecuador. In these roles, he has had the opportunity to closely evaluate designers, engineers, business people and researchers in telecommunications, product development, and ubiquitous computing. He has advised several PhD, masters and undergrad students.

Ravi Khanna

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Rebecca Love

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Roz Picard

Professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, co-director of the Media Lab’s Advancing Wellbeing Initiative, and faculty chair of MIT’s Mind+Hand+Heart Initiative. She has co-founded Empatica, Inc. creating wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc. delivering technology to help measure and communicate emotion. Picard holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master’s and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. She started her career as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories designing VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developing new algorithms for image compression. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Lab faculty. She became internationally known for constructing mathematical models for content-based retrieval of images and for pioneering methods of automated search and annotation in digital video including the creation of the Photobook system. The year before she was up for tenure she took a risk and published the book Affective Computing, which became instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Today that field has its own journal, international conference, and professional society. Picard also served as a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems in 1998, helping launch the field of wearable computing. Picard has authored or co-authored over 250 scientific articles and chapters spanning computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, human-computer interaction, wearable sensors and affective computing. She is a recipient of several best paper prizes, including work on machine learning with multiple models (with Minka, 1998), a best theory paper prize for affect in human learning (with Kort and Reilly, 2001), a “best paper of the decade 2000-2009” by IEEE Intelligent Transporation Systems (with Healey, 2005) measuring driver stress, a best Face and Gesture paper prize for work with facial expressions (with McDuff, Kaliouby and Demirdjian, 2013), a best UBICOMP paper for an automated coach (with Hoque et al, 2013), and the best paper at NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Health (with Jaques, Taylor, Nosakhare, and Sano, 2016.) Picard is an active inventor with multiple patents, including wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction. In 2005 she was named a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing. CNN named her one of seven “Tech SuperHeros to Watch in 2015.” Picard has been honored with dozens of distinguished and named lectureships and other international awards. She is a popular speaker and has given over 100 keynote talks. Picard has served on numerous international and national science and engineering program committees, editorial boards, and review panels, including the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) division of Computers in Science and Engineering (CISE), the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the Editorial Board of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research. Picard interacts regularly with industry and has consulted for many companies including Apple, AT&T, BT, HP, i.Robot, Merck, Motorola, and Samsung. Her group’s achievements have been featured in forums for the general public such as The New York Times, The London Independent, National Public Radio, Scientific American Frontiers, ABC’s Nightline and World News Tonight, Time, Vogue, Wired, Forbes, Voice of America Radio, New Scientist, and BBC programs such as “Hard Talk” and BBC Horizon with Michael Mosley. Picard lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her amazing husband and three energetic sons.

Stephen Kennedy Smith

Stephen Kennedy Smith is a principal at Park Agency – Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the Kennedy family office, and an investor and entrepreneur. Stephen also is the editor of JFK- a Vision for America, published by Harper Collins . Stephen is currently a lecturer at the Sloan school of Management in the visionary investing program, as well as a fellow at the Connection Science Group at MIT. He currently involved as a board member, advisory board member or partner in a number of health care and technology businesses, including, Locomobi transportation, The Marwood Group- a healthcare-focused strategic advisory firm; Pear Therapeutics, a digital health care company Resolute Bio, and New Frontier Bio. His current investment and business focus is scaling innovative healthcare, and neuroscience companies. Stephen is a board member of the John F. Kennedy Library, and The Joseph P Kennedy Foundation. He also serves on the advisory board at INCAE Business School. He is cofounder and vice president of the World Leadership Alliance, an organization of business and political leaders that promotes, democracy , international understanding and trade. He received his BA from Harvard University, J.D. from Columbia University, and MA Ed from Harvard University School of Education. He has served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. He has taught in the advanced negotiation program at Harvard Law School and is a three-time recipient of the Danforth Award for excellence in teaching at Harvard University. He is also a recipient of the Lyndehurst Foundation Prize for social and artistic achievement. Mr. Smith was Deputy Campaign Manager for Senator Edward Kennedy during his Presidential and Senatorial campaigns, Youth Coordinator for the campaign of Mario Cuomo, served on the New England Steering Committee for the Obama presidential campaign, and continues to be active in Democratic politics.

Stuart Haber

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Togzhan Kassenova

Dr. Togzhan Kassenova at a young age found herself passionately involved in studying the nuclear challenges that confronted her native Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For forty years, her country had been used as a testing ground for Soviet nuclear weapons, and upon gaining its independence in late 1991 was burdened with over a thousand Soviet nuclear weapons which it gave up to become a nuclear-free state. Dr. Kassenova had already received her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds at the age of 25 where she explored how former arch enemies – Russia and the United States – managed cooperation on the most sensitive issues related to nuclear security after the end of the Cold War. At the age of 33, Togzhan went on to become the youngest appointee in the history of the UN history to serve on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters, combining her deep interest in nuclear policy with her understanding of the conduct of quiet diplomacy in globally-sensitive matters. Her most important project to date is a book manuscript on the nuclear history of her native Kazakhstan. More recently, Dr. Kassenova has expanded her professional interests into the area of financial crime prevention. She is pursuing executive education in financial integrity and is a certified anti-money laundering specialist (CAMS). She is exploring ways to assist governments and the financial industry to build up defenses against those countries and non-state actors that illegally use the global financial system to pursue proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Dr. Kassenova is a senior non-resident scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs (George Washington University) and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Tom Gruber

Tom Gruber is a product designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. When Siri was released by Apple in 2011, it was a watershed moment in the history of Artificial Intelligence, bringing AI to the mainstream user experience. Now an integral part of Apple’s products, Siri is used more than 2 billion times a week in over 30 countries around the world. At Apple for over 8 years, Tom led the Advanced Development Group that designed and prototyped new capabilities for Siri and related products that bring intelligence to the interface. Tom promotes the philosophy of Humanistic AI, which he presented in a popular TED talk. He served as founding board member of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. In previous lives, Tom applied AI to support collective human intelligence. His research at Stanford in ontology engineering helped lay the groundwork for semantic information sharing and the Semantic Web. He invented HyperMail, the open-source software that turns email conversations into collective memories; HyperMail and its progeny have helped to create a dynamic conversational history of the Web. He was founder and CTO of Intraspect Software, which pioneered the space of Collaborative Knowledge Management — software that helps large communities of professionals contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge. He designed and built RealTravel, a Collective Knowledge System where travelers from around the world share their experiences. Tom has served as an advisor to pioneering companies in Social Networks (LinkedIn, Radar Networks), Collaboration (SocialText, Mindjet), and Semantic Search (Powerset / Microsoft and the Internet Archive). He is passionate about underwater photography and ocean conservation.

Zoe Buratynsky

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