Theme: FACETS

Stemming from one of the world’s most renowned universities, TEDxTUM aims to intellectually challenge and inspire Germany’s thinkers and doers by spreading innovative ideas and showcasing different perspectives. At TEDxTUM 2015, we want to explore facets from the lives of various people with different backgrounds, and facilitate the emergence of new ideas worth spreading at the Technische Universität München (TUM).
A facet is a flat surface on a gem: a calculable, geometric unit. It is also a specific aspect of a personality trait: an incalculable, emotional perception. But only together do these singular facets form beautiful gems; each of them differently built, reflecting the light in their own unique way, and shining bright.
In their singularities, all gems are extraordinary; much like our lives. We constantly balance between the predictable symmetry of our ideas and the capricious glitter of our reality. In all of these facets, we sense the rational and the emotional – facts, technology, and economy – but also the roles, culture, and values they contain. We see the inevitable balance of all edges forming a whole, and feel the volatile aspects of what is contained in the dynamics of life: the many different roles we assume in our visions and plans. Every new idea is an additional facet and shapes another perspective- even more so if these ideas are shared throughout the world.

TUM Main campus
Arcisstraße 21
Munich, Bayern
Germany

Bake This

Bake This was founded in 2011 by a group of theatre loving expatriates and was the first improv group in Munich to perform entirely in English. Rehearsing first in a local bakery, the group used this as inspiration to come up with the name Bake This. Today the group performs regularly in Munich. Bake This has also taken their passion for improv from the stage to offices, seminars and schools where they give workshops on the basics of improv including accepting new ideas, being flexible and just plain having fun. Like all improv, nothing Bake This does on stage has been planned and it will never be seen twice. Using this spontaneous and invigorating form of theatre they challenge their audiences to take part in their own way; to create, to laugh, to love, to follow their impulses, and to say ‘yes and’.

Mandara

Mandara is a collective of musicians from Augsburg/Germany. Their instruments as well as their music are exotic and fascinating. With flutes, strings, percussion and shruti-box they create harmonic sounds to relax and dream.

Max Zorn and Audrey Sykes

In January 2012 an unemployed twenty-something with a science degree climbed up a streetlamp and stuck on it a portrait made of brown packing tape. It was the start of Stick Together, a project driven by urban tape artist Max Zorn and his manager Audrey Sykes to spread street art at night. Fans around the world received his handmade art with the task of sticking them on their city’s street lights. Max Zorn’s tape art took off as he became the face of a new type of street art for the night. In its first year, Stick Together received thousands of participants from Africa to the Americas. And like the tape layers on his artworks, the layers of Max Zorn’s identity began to add. His identity went from street artist to upcyclist to fine artist to bringing new art to foreign cultures. This is the story of an overnight success that stays alive by being new, shocking, and involving a global community.

Munich International Ballet School

The Munich International Ballet School is a private dance school for children, amateurs and professionals. It covers various kinds of dance ranging from classic ballet to hip-hop, jazz, street dance and historical dances. Since inception, the school built an international reputation for its excellent tuition and many former students are today dancing at highly renowned academies and theaters. Moreover, many students have been known to acquire the highest of ranks at international dance competitions.

Cade McCall

Dr. Cade McCall is the Research Group Leader for the Virtual Reality Lab at the Social Neuroscience Department of The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Dr. McCall uses virtual worlds to study human behavior, physiology, and subjective experience as they emerge and unfold within naturalistic environments. His research demonstrates that subtle patterns in gaze and movement reveal a great deal about our underlying emotional and motivational states when we interact with other people or explore an unfamiliar environment. Dr. McCall’s work is published in a wide range of academic journals in the fields of affective neuroscience, social psychology, and media psychology.

Dongheui Lee

Prof. Dongheui Lee is an assistant professor at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technische Universität München. She is also head of the Dynamic Human Robot Interaction for Automation System Lab and a Carl-von-Linde Fellow at TUM Institute for Advanced Study. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the department of mechanical engineering, Kyunghee University, South Korea. After that, she worked as a research scientist at the Advanced Robotics Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). In 2007, she received her PhD degree at the department of Mechano‐Informatics of the University of Tokyo, Japan. After her PhD degree, she joined the center of Information and Robot Technology at the University of Tokyo as a project assistant professor. Professor Lee’s research interests include human motion understanding, human robot interaction, machine learning in robotics, and mobile robot navigation.

Erik Ringertz

Erik Ringertz is the CEO of Netlight Consulting, an international IT consulting firm originated in Stockholm, Sweden. Since its founding in 1999, Netlight has gained a reputation for its inspirational culture and management and has been ranked as one of the top Swedish enterprises for the last several years. Erik was awarded titles such as “Super Talent” and “Executive of the Year” for his managerial accomplishments. Erik Ringertz spent his childhood and teenage years in Munich, before moving to Stockholm in the 1990s. There he graduated from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a degree in Industrial Engineering and Management. He initially worked at Ericsson before joining Netlight. In 2014 he moved back to Munich with his wife and four children to take part in the company’s expansion in Germany.

Essraa Nawar

Essraa Nawar has been the Coordinator of Library Development and Marketing and the Chair of the Arts, Exhibits and Events Committee at the Leathery Libraries at Chapman University, California, since 2009. Over the years she has studied, lived and worked in many places, including the Gulf area (Qatar), Washington D.C., where she worked for The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and Alexandria, Egypt where she worked for Bibliotheca Alexandrina. In 2009, she moved with her husband and family to Orange County, California in 2009. Essraa is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Orange County Register and several other online magazines and blogs. Essraa was also recently appointed to join as a Women Leader in the Internet Marketing Association. She is very passionate about and active in the topics of diversity, cultural and religious intelligence, interfaith dialogue and empowering Muslim Women. She thrives best in diverse environments and believes in the power of humanity.

Jenny Rankin

Dr. Jenny Grant Rankin, who will teach at University of Cambridge in 2016 for the PostDoc Masterclass, is an award-winning educator and an active member of Mensa. She has served as a teacher, school administrator, district administrator, and the Chief Education & Research Officer of Illuminate Education, an edtech data systems company. She presents her research findings annually for the U.S. Department of Education at STATS-DC and at other noteworthy conferences. Dr. Rankin has served as judge for the University of Pennsylvania's Milken-Penn Graduate School of Education Business Plan Competitions and played a role in numerous state and national initiatives related to assessment data. She serves on several research committees, including those for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Dr. Rankin also served on the Panel of Experts and Advisory Board for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report.

Marc Buckley

Marc Buckley considers himself an innovative visionary and creative thinker. He believes in human kindness, diversity, trust and freedom. As a moonshot pioneer, he is an optimistic realist who is curious by nature and permeates a positive mental attitude. Marc is a life hacker and has taken on the roles of farmer, truck driver, gardener, football player, cowboy, lumberjack, river guide, ski instructor, polo player, missionary, magazine editor, American Red Cross health and safety instructor trainer, OSHA trainer, photographer, club DJ & radio discjockey, policeman, EMT, lifeguard, soccer coach, life coach, model, and much more. Marc studied at University of Utah, University of Phoenix, Heidelberg University and Bucerius Law School. Since then, he has become the founder and partner of several successful companies, amongst others he co-founded ANJA GmbH & Co. KG with his wife Anja. He is also proud father of three grown children and grandfather to one grandchild.

Melusine Reimers

Melusine Reimers studied Philosophy and Psychology in Bonn and holds a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, Sociology as well as Theater, Film and Media sciences. She’s interested in doing philosophical research about society and contemporary political topics. The main topic of Melusine’s philosophical interest is the construction of 'the subject' in relation to the construction of borders and nationality, social norms and habits. For her, being a philosopher means having a social responsibility to do something that deals with problems of people living in our modern era. In 2013 Melusine Reimers founded aeWorldwide to transmit philosophy and political theory in practice. aeWorldwide is an organization that helps asylum-seeking academics to integrate into an academic environment in Germany. Its main focus is to change the image of refugees in society and media, opening minds and thus finding a way to a long-term integration of refugees.

Mike Tyka

Dr. Mike Tyka studied Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Bristol. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 2007 and went on to work as a research fellow at the University of Washington, studying the structure and dynamics of protein molecules. In particular, he has been interested in protein folding and has been writing computer simulation software to better understand this fascinating process. In 2009, Mike and a team of artists created Groovik’s Cube, a 35 feet tall, functional, multi-player Rubik’s cube. Since then, he co-founded ATLSpace, an artist studio in Seattle and has been creating metal and glass sculptures of protein molecules. In 2013 Mike went to Google to study neural networks, both artificial and natural. This work naturally spilled over to his artistic interests, exploring the possibilities of artificial neural networks for creating art.

Pedro Oliveira

Pedro Oliveira received his Ph.D. in Operations, Technology and Innovation Management from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and both his M.Sc. in Operations Research and Systems Engineering and his licenciatura in Naval Engineering from IST. Today, he is Academic Director of the Lisbon MBA, Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics Together with 3 former Lisbon MBA students, he co-founded PPL Crowdfunding Portugal, a leading crowdfunding platform. More recently he founded Patient Innovation, a nonprofit social network for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.

Petra Dorfner

Petra Dorfner takes on many different roles. She is a molecular biotechnologist by training, an interdisciplinary thinker, a team player, a science manager, a problem solver and a project manager. She works at the Graduate School of Bioengineering at TU München, a place where around 50 doctoral candidates find cutting-edge opportunities for conducting their doctoral projects at the interface of engineering, medicine as well as natural, life and computer sciences. Petra is also an optimist by experience of life, a world traveler, a frequent museum visitor mostly for modern art, a dreamer not only at night but also by day and a friend in good and bad times. She is also a wife and believes that becoming a mother was the best thing that ever happened to her. Day after day she aims to develop and discover new sides to herself and grow as a person.

Steven Goldfarb

Dr. Steven Goldfarb is an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. Most recently, Dr. Goldfarb has focused efforts on the development of global scientific communication tools and strategies. He chaired a committee in 2006 to address communication requirements of the large worldwide collaborations of the LHC experiments. In this role, Dr. Goldfarb helped to define policy and to design working environments facilitating the active participation of scientists, regardless of geographical location. From 2011-2015, Dr. Goldfarb served as the ATLAS Outreach and Education Coordinator. During this time, he oversaw worldwide communication of the Higgs boson discovery in July 2012, and launched an initiative to employ video facilities in the ATLAS control room at CERN to directly interact with the public. Since then, the ATLAS Virtual Visits program has reached classrooms and other public venues around the world and received a Digital Communication Award in 2012.