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).

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Armando Solar-Lezama

Armando Solar-Lezama is a professor at MIT, where he leads the Computer Aided Programming Group and is also the Associate Director and COO of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He is also the creator of PlaySkript.com, an online platform and programming language for creating diagrams and visualizations. Prof. Solar-Lezama was born in Mexico City, where he lived until his family migrated to Texas when he was fifteen. In Texas, attended Texas A&M University, where he earned B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. From there, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his PhD for his early work on getting machines to write fragments of programs automatically. After his PhD, he became a faculty member at MIT, where he started the Computer Aided Programming group. His group is well known for its foundational contributions to the field of program synthesis, a field focused on getting computers to help with the more challenging aspects of programming. His group did early work on leveraging techniques from automated verification and bug finding to help synthesize programs, and more recently has been at the forefront of applying deep learning for program synthesis problems, including early work on using early language models to correct errors in programs and the use of reinforcement learning to generate code. His group is also known for leading the application of techniques from program synthesis to problems outside of software development in areas as varied as education, computer aided design, robotics and computational biology.

Bill Freeman

I'm a professor at MIT and also lead a research group at Google. Here's text from my web page bio, but the single sentence above is sufficient: William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) there. He was the Associate Department Head of EECS from 2011 - 2014. Since 2015, he has also been a research manager in Google Research in Cambridge, MA. His current research interests include mid-level vision and computational photography. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, motion magnification, and belief propagation in networks with loops. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2019, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2005. He shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Physics for a consulting role with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which reconstructed the first image of a black hole. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. In 2019, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the highest award in computer vision."

Carlos Portela

Carlos Portela is the d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Dr. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. His current research lies at the intersection of materials science, mechanics, and nano-to-macro fabrication with the objective of designing and testing novel materials—with features spanning from nanometers to centimeters—that yield unprecedented mechanical and acoustic properties. Dr. Portela’s recent accomplishments have provided routes for fabrication of these so-called ‘nano-architected materials’ in scalable processes as well as testing nanomaterials in real-world conditions such as supersonic impact. Dr. Portela was recognized as an MIT TR Innovator Under 35 in 2022, is a recipient of the 2022 NSF CAREER Award, the 2019 Gold Paper Award from the Society of Engineering Science (SES), and his work has been featured in The National Nanotechnology Initiative Supplement to the President’s 2020 Budget (National Science and Technology Council).

Cathy Drennan

Professor of Biology and Chemistry Cathy Drennan combines X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and other biophysical methods, with the goal of “visualizing” molecular processes by obtaining snapshots of enzymes in action. Drennan earned her AB from Vassar College, and her PhD from the University of Michigan. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, she joined the MIT faculty in 1999, and was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor (a teaching recognition) in 2006 and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (a research recognition) in 2008. Drennan has led by example, dedicating herself to both research and teaching. Her educational initiatives include creating free resources for educators that help students recognize the underlying chemical principles in biology and medicine, and that train graduate student teaching assistants and mentors to be effective teacher–scholars. Recently, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology chose Drennan as the recipient of the 2023 William C. Rose Award for her outstanding contributions to biochemical research and commitment to training younger scientists. Among her additional honors are the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, the Dean’s Educational and Student Advising Award, a Committed to Caring Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She has also been named an MIT MacVicar Fellow, an AAAS Fellow, an ASBMB Fellow, an Alfred P Sloan Fellow, a Searle Scholar, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Ellen Roche

Ellen Roche is currently an Associate Professor (Latham Family Professor) at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She directs the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab. She completed her PhD at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on applying innovative technologies to the development of cardiac devices. Her research includes development of novel devices to repair or augment cardiac function using disruptive approaches such as soft robotics, combination of mechanical actuation with delivery of cell therapy, and use of light activated biodegradable adhesives. Dr. Roche was employed in the medical device industry for over five years as a research and development engineer and employs her understanding of the medical device industry and the regulatory pathways to medical device commercialization in her academic research. She is the recipient of multiple awards including the Fulbright International Science and Technology Award, the Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Science, an American Heart Association Pre-Doctoral Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an NIH Trailblazer Award and a Charles H. Hood Award for Excellence in Child Health Research.

Holden Mui

Pursuit” is the work of MIT undergraduate Holden Mui ('25), making its debut at TEDxMIT’s April 2023 event. The student group performing the piece features Holden on the viola alongside Audrey Lee (violin, '25) , Eliana Shin (cello, '26), Jade Buckwalter (flute, '26), Katherine Panebianco (clarinet, '26), Tristan Shin (trumpet, '23), and Jonathan Song (piano, '26).

Kevin Chen

Kevin Chen is currently the D. Reid Weedon, Jr. ’41 Career Development Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, USA. He received his PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University in 2017 and his bachelor’s degree in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 2012. His research interests include developing high bandwidth and robust soft actuators for microrobot manipulation and locomotion. He has published in top journals including Nature, Science Robotics, Advanced Materials, PNAS, Nature Communications, IEEE TRO, and Journal of Fluid Mechanics. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the TRO 2021 best paper award, the RAL 2020 best paper award, the IROS 2015 best student paper award, the RAL 2021 Outstanding Associate Editor award, and a Harvard Teaching Excellence Award.

Léonard Boussioux

Léonard Boussioux is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Foster Business School, in Information Systems and Operations Management and holds a PhD from MIT in Operations Research. He specializes in healthcare and sustainability challenges and bridges operations research and artificial intelligence to develop multimodal decision tools that integrate sustainability into business and public policy practices. He also leverages generative AI to solve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. His research and entrepreneurial work have received wide recognition, including winning the MIT 3-minute thesis competition and awards from INFORMS, MIT, IEEE, UNESCO, and Google. He previously interned at Google X, Mila, UC Berkeley, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Léonard is also a passionate teacher and has received multiple teaching awards at MIT, including the Goodwin Medal, the institute's highest teaching award for a student.

Mathias Lechner

Mathias Lechner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he works with Prof. Daniela Rus. He developed robust and trustworthy machine learning models with particular breakthroughs in interpretable, safe, and verifiable AI. His work has been recognized and published at top-tier venues, including flagship conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and AAAI. Furthermore, his works have also been featured in the high-impact journals Nature Machine Intelligence and Science Robotics, reflecting his contributions' significance and impact. Mathias completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) in 2022 at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) under the able supervision of Tom Henzinger. Prior to his PhD, he received this distinguished MS and BS degree at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).

Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at MIT, co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen and fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. His research contributes to an egalitarian approach to Creole languages and their speakers, as in his native Haiti. His writings also engage intellectual history and critical race theory, especially the links between power-knowledge hierarchies and the hegemonic (mis)representations of Creole languages, Indigenous languages and other non-colonial languages and their speakers in the Global South and beyond. His work is anchored in a broader agenda for human rights and social justice, with Haiti as one spectacular case of a post-colony where the national language spoken by all (Haitian Creole) is systematically disenfranchised while the (former) colonial language (in this case, French) spoken by few is enlisted for socio-economic, political and geo-political domination. Such devalorization of Kreyòl and other non-colonial languages worldwide, especially in the Global South, is embedded in long entrenched patterns of structural racism and white supremacy whereby language and education are enlisted as tools for neo-colonialism from within and from without. Michel DeGraff tackles these political challenges as he unveils age-old myths about Creole languages in linguistics and as he engages the MIT-Haiti Initiative in a broad campaign for democratizing access to quality education and for the universal respect of human rights. Through the strategic use of Open Education Resources in Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), Platfòm MIT-Ayiti effectively sets up a model for other communities to constructively enlist their native languages as tools for quality education and for inclusion in all other spheres where knowledge and power are created and transmitted. More details at: http://mit.edu/degraff, http://facebook.com/mithaiti, http://twitter.com/mithaiti, http://instagram.com/mithaiti

Mina Konaković Luković

Mina Konaković Luković is an Assistant Professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and a Principal Investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where she has led the Algorithmic Design Group since July 2022. Before that, Mina was a Schmidt Science Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT CSAIL, mentored by Professor Wojciech Matusik. She earned her PhD in 2019 in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Professor Mark Pauly. She received her MSc and BSc from the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Mathematics. Her research focuses on computer graphics, computational fabrication, 3D geometry processing, and machine learning, including architectural geometry and the design of programmable materials. She received the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention and the Eurographics PhD Award. She was awarded the 2021 SIAM Activity Group on Geometric Design Early Career Prize.

Neil Gershenfeld

Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Designing Reality, Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS. He has been elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of 40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. He's been called the intellectual father of the maker movement, founding a growing global network of over two thousand fab labs in 125 countries that provide widespread access to prototype tools for personal fabrication, directing the Fab Academy for distributed research and education in the principles and practices of digital fabrication, and chairing the Fab Foundation. He is a co-founder of the Interspecies Internet and of the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College, Strathclyde University and the University of Antwerp, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.

Pratyusha Sharma

Pratyusha Sharma is a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. Her research aims to discover the simplest rules required to both understand and emulate intelligent behaviors like our own or even that of other more complex or simpler species. To this end, she works on understanding the structure of solutions neural models implement, understanding the complexity and structure of naturally arising animal communication systems in the wild and how language and similar structures can support long-horizon reasoning and planning in embodied agents and robots. Prior to this, she received her Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.

Ramin Hasani

Ramin Hasani is a Principal AI and Machine Learning Scientist at the Vanguard Group and a Research Affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ramin’s research focuses on robust deep learning and decision-making in complex dynamical systems. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Associate at CSAIL MIT, leading research on modeling intelligence and sequential decision-making, with Prof. Daniela Rus. He received his Ph.D. degree with distinction in Computer Science at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria (May 2020). His Ph.D. dissertation and continued research on Liquid Neural Networks got recognized internationally with numerous nominations and awards such as TÜV Austria Dissertation Award nomination in 2020, and HPC Innovation Excellence Award in 2022. He has also been a frequent TEDx Speaker.

Tara Boroushaki

Tara Boroushaki is a Ph.D student at MIT. Her research focuses on fusing radio frequency (RF) sensing with vision through artificial intelligence. She designs algorithms and builds systems that leverage such fusion to enable capabilities that were not feasible before in applications spanning augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, smart homes, and smart manufacturing.

Victoria Bousis

In her 20’s, Victoria started as a career prosecutor for the Attorney General of Illinois to bring justice to the disenfranchised. Later, as a producer for over a decade, she transcended social, political, and geographical barriers to bring powerful messages about the human experience to global audiences with notable films showcased at Venice, TIFF, and Sundance. Victoria followed technological advances and embraced VR and narrative gaming to speak to future generations. In 2018, Victoria earned a Master’s in Media, Technology, and Innovation from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), converging cinema, gaming and neuroscience to deliver powerful character-driven stories to be experienced by audiences with agency. Victoria founded UME, a creative and technology company to pioneer the future of storytelling via the game engine to creater virtual worlds and digital humans for film and series through virtual production pipelines, web 3.0, and customized XR experiences for brands across fashion, entertainment, sports, music, and art. UME partnered with Dundas and DressX for the Metaverse fashion Show in Decentraland, creating custom avatars and wearables to compliment the physical collection as seen in Paris Fashion Week 2023. She is about to disrupt fashion in her upcoming project. Victoria's ground-breaking immersive film, Stay Alive, My Son, based on the true story of Pin Yathay is her directorial debut, officially selected in Cannes’ development showcase has garnered international acclaim. Chapter One premiered at Venice, Berlin Human Rights, Thessaloniki, FilmGate, winning numerous awards. In 2023, Chapter Two premiered in SXSW and won the PGA Innovation Award for 2023, making movie history for its innovative storytelling approach. In collaboration with the UNHCR, Stay Alive My Son is also impacting change by empowering audiences and policy-makers to support of family preservation and reunification. Honored as a pioneering woman in XR and Virtual Production by the Hollywood Production Association and WiTH (Women In Technology), she is considered a specialist in spatial computing and a pioneering voice across XR speaking globally at various events including NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), NFT NYC, SMTPE, MESA, to mention a few.