Theme: Crossroads

Each year, TEDxGunnHighSchool aims to center its annual conference's content around a central theme. Previous themes have included Be The Variable, More Than A Number, and Trailblazers. This year, inspired by the convergence (and divergence) of many unexpected paths and ideas in our lives, we decided to choose our theme as Crossroads.

With our distinguished set of speakers and performers, we hope to provide a conference experience where the audience will explore how ideas along different paths intersect, such as artificial intelligence and art, tech startups and non-technical hustlers, happiness and high school, and social media and youth activism.

Palo Alto High School (Haymarket Theater)
50 Embarcadero Road
Palo Alto, California, 94303
United States

Advait Arun

Student activist

Advait Arun is a senior at Gunn High School, and politics has always been a subject of interest to him. Last year, he worked on Ro Khanna's (CA-17) Campaign for Congress and served on Anna Eshoo's (CA-18) Student Advisory Board. On the Student Advisory Board, he conducted a large-scale survey on fake news and media bias at Gunn, learning a lot about students views on media. This year, he serves as Gunn's student representative on the Palo Alto Unified School Board, where he advocates for student voices and handles district issues. He is President of Gunn's Model United Nations club, and is the co-Editor-in-Chief of The Chariot, Gunn's political magazine. He is also a member of Gunn Theatre. In his free time, you can find him reading, playing with his dog, or hanging out with friends. Advait will be speaking on the interactions of youth activism, politics, and social media.

Amjed Aboukhadijeh

Entrepreneur

Amjed is a rebel and a hustler who's passionate about getting disruptive technology into the hands of consumers. He attended college at UCLA, where he juggled academics, athletics, and entrepreneurship. While in college, Amjed witnessed his older brother, who was somewhat of a child prodigy, build and sell his tech startup to the tech giant Yahoo. He decided at that moment to move to Silicon Valley and pursue his own success in the tech world. But, after a few faltering attempts to replicate his brother’s formula, he learned that his true gift was not for engineering but rather sales. Since then, Amjed has paved his own way in the tech world by focusing on his unique talents. Over the last 4 years, he’s worked at Oracle, Salesforce, and PropelPLM, a fast-growing startup where he was brought in as the first sales hire. Along the way, he’s learned how to develop and maintain a tenacious work ethic, how to build business relationships, and how to succeed in today’s Silicon Valley.

Brian Buntz

Founder of Non-Profit

In 2007, he founded Dream Volunteers & Young Dreamer Network, serving at the helm on a pro-bono basis. Since then, Brian has supported over 100 youth internationally with their education and has personally led an average of 12 service trips a year for high school students, college students, and young families interested in making a difference in communities throughout Guatemala, Costa Rica, India, Vietnam and Ghana. Throughout these trips, he has witnessed the transformative power of service, cultural immersion, and self-reflection. Brian developed the personal growth curriculum that students use on the trips to answer questions that young adults often face: Who do I want to be? How can I be deliberate in my decisions, not just letting life's current carry me where it will? What choices can I make that are in alignment with who I want to be? What are the values, interests, passions, and fire that get me out of bed in the morning — and how can I use them to make a real impact?

Douglas Eck

Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain

Douglas Eck is a research scientist working on Magenta, an effort to generate music, video, images and text using machine intelligence. The question Magenta asks is, "Can machines make music and art? If so, how? If not, why not?" The goal of Magenta is to produce open-source tools and models that help creative people be even more creative. Before starting the Magenta project, Douglas worked on music search and recommendation for Google Play Music. Before then, he was an Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Montreal. He helped found the BRAMS research center (Brain Music and Sound; www.brams.org) and was involved at the McGill CIRMMT center (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology; www.cirmmt.org). Aside from audio signal processing and machine learning, Douglas has worked on music performance modeling. Douglas will be speaking on the creative power of machines and the intersection of art and machine learning.

Ethan Houston

Student + traveler

Ethan Houston will be talking about the effects of never living in one place for more than a handful of years and the advantages of traveling and being exposed to different cultures and languages from a young age. He will discuss his experiences with living in Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden), Western Europe (France), the United States, and the Far East (China), and learning Norwegian and Chinese as additional languages. Ethan will be speaking on his experiences abroad and the surprising similarities various cultures share despite seeming so different.

Gaya Gupta & Youngju Kim

Classical Musicians

Gaya Gupta and Youngju Kim and both juniors at Gunn High School. Gaya Gupta has played the bass under her teacher Bruce Moyer for the past five years after switching from five years on the violin. In addition to playing small ensembles, Gaya is part of Gunn’s Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra. She is also currently the principal bassist in Peninsula Youth Orchestra. In addition to music, Gaya also spends her time pursuing classical Indian dance and enjoys reading and spending time with friends and family. Youngju Kim has been playing the violin under his teacher Margarita Dimov for almost as long as he can remember, and has exceeded a decade of experience with the instrument. The violinist in the Chipped Rosin Duo deeply enjoys many genres of music, including jazz, Romantic works, and more contemporary pieces. He also dabbles in the guitar and voice. Additionally, as a self-proclaimed Renaissance man Youngju draws, practices martial arts, and is in the process of becoming tetralingual.

Gunn Hip Hop

Dance Group

The Gunn Hip Hop club centers on the teaching and appreciation of Hip Hop dance. From learning choreography, to analyzing other dances, to freestyling and having fun, we bring creativity and joy to our community.

Jenny Gao

Student

Jenny Gao is a senior at Gunn and hopes to share her experience with self-love, mental illness, and Gunn culture. She plans to study psychology in college but is unsure about her future. However, she has confidence that it'll work out. Some of her hobbies include binge watching Youtube (especially aesthetic vegan cooking channels), playing piano, and cuddling cats until her allergies force her to stop. Jenny will be speaking about overcoming outside expectations and self-acceptance.

Kartik Chandra & Doug Klink

Jazz Musicians

Kartik Chandra is an undergraduate at Stanford University studying computer science and English. He enjoys writing poetry, playing jazz, and cooking lasagna late at night. Doug Klink is a classically trained violinist who grew up in Estes Park, Colorado. He attended high school at Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he began to diversify musically, picking up mandolin and piano, singing in an a cappella group, and exploring jazz violin. Now a freshman at Stanford, Doug plays in a student jazz combo, comically dubbed “1 Violin and 6 Jazz Instruments,” where he met Kartik Chandra. Doug plans to study Computer Science, and when he isn' playing music is likely surfing, rock climbing, or camping with friends. Kartik and Doug will be performing a set of original jazz compositions on the piano and violin.

Konstantin Guericke

Co-founder of LinkedIn

Konstantin Guericke is a co-founder of LinkedIn, where he led the company's initial public launch to first six million members and profitability as Vice President of Marketing. For the past six years he has been serving as a board member of Doximity, the largest professional network for U.S. healthcare professionals, with more than 80% of physicians as members. Konstantin most recently was a partner with Earlybird's $200 mil Berlin-based venture fund. Previously, Konstantin was the CEO of jaxtr, a social communications start-up with over ten million registered users, and he also served on the boards of Rallypoint and Whitepages. Konstantin enjoys mentoring student and European entrepreneurs over walks and holds a B.S. and M.S. in Engineering from Stanford University.

Michael Bautista

High School Math Teacher

Michael Bautista is a Bay Area native and holds degrees from Stanford University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and National University. He is passionate about helping students develop mathematical curiosity, computational thinking skills, and a growth mindset. Michael loves to use strategies that target different modes of learning, especially by using music to help teach math. During the summers, Michael serves as a coach for Ignited, a non-profit organization that connects teachers with summer fellowships in industry. Outside of school, Michael enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, and loves to compose music. Michael will be speaking on the value of integrating the arts within the modern classroom.

Trinity Suh

Student Author

Trinity Suh is a sophomore and a Political Science major at Foothill College. She is also a senior at Los Altos High School. She is a second degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do, a “professional” Netflix binge-watcher, and an avid shopper. She enjoys reading and writing poetry, listening to and playing all kinds of music, and of course, eating spicy Cheetos.

Young Lee & Jerry Guo

Student Philosophers

Young Lee and Jerry Guo are student philosophers from Palo Alto. Using their philosophical inquiries as a vehicle for exploration, they have discovered a lot about themselves and the world around them. They will share their insights the profound changes they have gone through their experiences with the reality and the virtual, combining ideas from the works of various philosophers, including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Lacan, and Sajeeda Al-Hussein.