Theme: The Power of Imagination

Our event was about exploring and experiencing the power of imagination, trying to understand what it is, how it works, why it matters so much... yet we did not stop there. Since we wanted to explore and experience its power, we needed to venture beyond just these narrow confines and see it in action. We looked for the most intriguing examples in all corners of our lives. For without imagination there is no art, no science, no innovation. We cannot access the realms of the big, the small, or the hidden. Without imagination there can be no empathy. We need it to have an idea of any reality other than our own. We also need imagination to render anything new, to go beyond what and how our world already is. We need it to create visions and without it we cannot discover hitherto undetected connections and relationships. Without imagination there can be no hope, and finally, above all and simply put, we need imagination to lead a life worth living... The conference took our audience on an adventure of the mind, an intellectual and emotional journey through five consecutive sessions: Exploring Within -- Connecting the Dots -- Extraordinary Journeys -- A New Beginning -- Dream Bubbles

Urania Movie Theatre
Budapest
Hungary

Carin King

is a men's fashion and style expert, writer, speaker, producer. Founder and CEO of Purple Eagle, a dress sense agency for men. She started working in the fashion industry during her time at university and very soon after created her first PR and lifestyle agency for international fashion and design brands in Germany. Later, she was involved in the creation of a second, award winning company in the customer care industry, one of whose major clients was the British government. Subsequently she returned to her ‘first love’ by creating Purple Eagle, an academy offering bespoke classes to high powered business men in how to dress to impress. She has arranged many high profile events, worked as a journalist and in more than 150 television shows.

Carolyn Steel

is an architect, lecturer and writer. Food is a shared necessity - but also a shared way of thinking. Looking at food networks offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved. Steel’s chief interest is in exploring the inner lives of cities, and her work has focused on developing a lateral approach to urban design that looks at the everyday routines that shape cities and the way we inhabit them. She has run design studios at the London School of Economics, London Metropolitan University and at Cambridge University, where her lecture course ‘Food and the City’ is an established part of the degree programme. In her book “Hungry City” she traces food's journey from land to urban table and thence to sewer.

Vilmos Csanyi

is an ethologist, author, professor. He has written forty-one books, including the university textbook on ethology and published around 200 scientific articles. The ethology department in Hungary grew out of his research. His recent academic career has focused on questions of human ethology, specifically the period of human evolution preceding spoken language, for which family dogs proved ideal studies. Many of the world’s leading research laboratories have adopted his methods and the study of dogs has become a rapidly growing branch of cognitive ethology. In recent years he has published literary fiction: short stories and novels, six volumes so far.

Peter Csermely

is a biochemist and professor at Semmelweis University. He is the chairman of LINK-group, an interdisciplinary group formed by researchers and research students to map the topology and dynamics of networks from amino acids to social networks and ecosystems. Not content to only research networks, he actively creates them too. He launched KutDiák, which helped more than ten thousand talented high school students from Hungary and neighbouring countries to take part in the most advanced research projects carried out in Hungary. He is chairman of the Hungarian National Talent Support Council and he was a member of the Committee of Wise Men, a think tank founded by the former Hungarian president of the Republic, László Sólyom to suggest solutions to fight corruption and improve education. His blog at www.csermelyblog.hu had received more than 200 000 page hits in its first year.

Julian Treasure

studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it. He wrote the book “Sound Business”, a complete introduction to harnessing the power of sound in business, from branding and marketing to the telephone, the web and physical spaces such as shops, restaurants, offices and reception areas. He is also the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses - offices, retailers, hotels -- on how to improve sales and brand value by using sound effectively in every aspect of business, from corporate reception areas to marketing to retail spaces. Treasure keeps a blog called Sound Business that ruminates on aural matters (and offers a nice day-by-day writeup of TEDGlobal 2009).

Gabor Karsai

is a philosopher, former rector and teacher of Tan Kapuja Buddhist College Budapest. Karsai was CEO of KOGART Holding Plc until its merger, becoming Deputy CEO of Bankár Holding Plc, the management group behind the wide ranging business interests of businessman Gábor Kovács, ranging from healthcare to art. Karsai is also the director of KOGART House and the onetime Pauline-Carmelite Monastery at Sopronbánfalva that will operate as a centre for education and meditation from the end of this year. Karsai describes all of his former and current endeavours as permeated by promoting spiritual-mental development in society.

Lakshmi Praturi

is the co-host of TEDIndia 2009 and founder of Ixoraa Media. Lakshmi began her business career at Intel, and then moved to a VC firm, where she focused on connecting India's legendary software-development community with US tech. She began to focus more strictly on relationship-building with her move to the America India Foundation, where she founded the AIF's Digital Equalizer program, offering technology education to thousands of children and teachers in India. She combined her accomplishments as a business leader, social entrepreneur and a cultural catalyst of change to form Ixoraa Media, whose mission is to strengthen the ties between the United States and India through sponsored corporate, cultural, and media events.

Zsuzsanna Szvetelszky

is a social psychologist and gossip researcher. She studies and analyzes the informal networks within communities and companies and the dynamics of spreading networked information, beliefs and stories. Her scientific and applied research includes uncovering self-organising hierarchies, processes and goals; the comparative study of professed and followed values, and the representation of the “norm of breaking norms”. She has written a monograph on the nature of gossip, and her articles on the theory of gossip research have been published in international journals of physics and evolutionary psychology. She lectured on the value of gossiping at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) and Szegedi Tudományegyetem (University of Szeged).