Theme: An Afternoon in the Garden of Ideas

Join us this weekend for TEDxSFU Live: An Afternoon in the Garden of Ideas. Experience a carefully curated set of highlights from TED2023, and networking and conversation opportunities with our neighbours in False Creek. Stroll through our exhibits at our space dedicated to hosting conversation, sparking ideas, and encouraging discovery.

Every year, TEDxSFU conferences provide a platform for industry professionals, advocates, educators, and storytellers to showcase their ideas worth spreading. TEDxSFU continues to engage over 2,500 members in the Metro Vancouver area annually through community members conferences, dialogue sessions, and after-party events. We're excited to gather a community of supporters who share similar desires to build community and spaces for storytelling, dialogue, and exploration of today's most intriguing and pressing topics.

Creekside Community Centre
1 Athletes Way
2120 West 2nd Ave
Vancouver, British Columbia, V5Y 0C2
Canada

Amy Baxter

Pain management pioneer

Amy Baxter develops low-cost, low-tech mechanical solutions to pervasive health care problems. Pediatric emergency physician Amy Baxter's wide-ranging medical research career has included work on PTSD, pain relief for infants and much more. Perhaps most notably, she is the pioneer behind the Baxter Animated Retching Faces Scale, a tool to assess and monitor the presence and severity of nausea. On a mission to eliminate unnecessary pain, Baxter founded Pain Care Labs in 2006. Distressed by other doctors' indifference to needle pain, she developed a prototype to help moms get their kids vaccinated pain-free. This led to the launch of Buzzy, a device that can help with needle fear and pain — and which has now been used in more than 45 million procedures. Having quit formal medicine in 2016 to focus on research and innovation, her current NIH-funded work focuses on providing alternatives to opioid use for lower back pain.

Eileen Isagon Skyers

Media art curator

Eileen Isagon Skyers is an expert on digital art and culture. Artist and curator Eileen Isagon Skyers has nearly a decade of experience producing online exhibitions at non-profit and contemporary arts institutions including David Zwirner, Rhizome and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Through recent roles in curation and creative direction for various web3 platforms, she has conducted extensive research on contemporary digital art and culture in an effort to understand the community-building potential for artists working on the blockchain. She is cofounder and CCO of a new cultural fund called Gemma. Skyers's own moving image work has been exhibited in the US, UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Mexico. Her first book, Vanishing Acts, looked at the role of network-based art practices, and her writing has been published in Frieze, Hyperallergic and Dirt, among other publications.

Imran Chaudhr

User experience visionary

Imran Chaudhri spent more than 20 years at Apple creating some of the world's most beloved consumer products. Now he's using AI to rethink and reshape the role of technology in our lives. With thousands of patents to his name, Imran Chaudhri is best known for his work at Apple, where he helped to create iconic products such as the Macintosh, iPod, iPad and Apple Watch. He is particularly lauded for developing the user interface and interactions on the iPhone. Driven by his insistence on putting the human experience front and center in the design process, his work has helped to define how the world interacts with technology. In 2018, Chaudhri and fellow Apple alum Bethany Bongiorno cofounded Humane, a company creating AI-driven technologies and platforms for the intelligence age. Looking to build for the world as it could be tomorrow, their first device will be unveiled later in 2023.

Lucas Rizzotto

Mixed reality experiential artist

Lucas Rizzotto blends art, tech and storytelling to create projects that ask deep questions and invite millions of people to imagine what the future might look like. The creator of the viral web series Lucas Builds The Future, Lucas Rizzotto creates ridiculous yet surprisingly insightful tech projects that show us glimpses of the future – and then makes hilarious videos about them for millions to see. Be it a VR time machine that lets you replay memories from your past, an ad blocker that replaces real-life ads with independent art or an AI microwave with a mind for murder, Rizzotto’s projects entertain and inspire. His latest startup, Pillow, is creating a mixed-reality platform that turns your bed into a metaverse. Rizzotto has collaborated on tech projects with Microsoft, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, SpaceX, Meta and Google. He has lectured at Columbia, MIT and Stanford, while his VR films have premiered at Sundance, Tribeca and SXSW.

Luis von Ahn

Educational equity technologist

Crowdsourcing pioneer and Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn builds systems that combine the skills of humans and computers to take on large-scale problems neither can solve alone. Luis von Ahn is an entrepreneur and former professor at Carnegie Mellon University known for co-inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. He is the cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning platform and most downloaded education app, which allows you to learn languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Navajo, Zulu — even Klingon! — for free. von Ahn’s work takes advantage of the ever-growing, internet-connected population to achieve collaboration in unprecedented numbers. He was named one of the “10 Most Brilliant Scientists” by Popular Science and one of the “100 Most Innovative People in Business” by Fast Company; in 2018 he won the Lemelson-MIT Prize honoring world-changing inventors.

Yat Siu

Future-focused technologist

Yat Siu is a veteran technology entrepreneur and digital property rights advocate who believes digital property rights are the key to a thriving web3 economy and open metaverse. Yat Siu is the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, an umbrella group of businesses in digital entertainment, blockchain and gamification on a mission to establish a truly open metaverse. Siu established Hong Kong Cybercity/Freenation, the first free web page and email provider in Asia. In 1998, he created Outblaze to provide multilingual white-label web services. After selling Outblaze’s messaging unit to IBM, he began to focus on digital entertainment projects and the promise of web3. Siu was named a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” at the World Economic Forum in 2002 and “Young Entrepreneur of the Year” at the DHL-SCMP Hong Kong Business Awards in 2009. He was recognized on Cointelegraph's list of most influential people in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world in both 2021 and 2022.