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).

MIT Media Lab
75 Amherst St, Cambridge, MA 02139
1H
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139
United States

Aaron Aaron

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Aaron Buchwald

Aaron Buchwald is a software engineer on the platform team at Ava Labs and the lead engineer for the Avalanche C-Chain.

Aaron King

Aaron King has been involved in various longevity projects for the last 10-15 years. He has written overviews of the network of longevity organizations as well as the landscape of scientific pathways in pursuit of longevity. After growing tired of being marooned on a rock in the middle of the pacific ocean, he moved from Maui to Palo Alto to be closer to the hub of research and discovery.

Alex Casassovici

Alex is the CEO and founder of Azarus.io. Azarus is the pioneer of Overlay Games, a new kind of game overlaying on top of Live Stream that lets Viewers play together as they watch. Alex is a serial entrepreneur and a technologist. He advises companies and invests through various syndicates in the technology sector. He is an international speaker covering the impact of blockchain in gaming and the use of content in games engagement and retention strategies. When he’s not working, you can find him trail running in the Marin headlands, leading the local elementary school’s engineering club, scuba diving in kelp forests, or completing quests, solving puzzles, or bush-hiding in PC, console, and mobile games.

Andrew Andrew

Andrew is the CEO and Cofounder of Socialstack, a Web3 community platform and ecosystem focused on building impact-driven communities backed by Celo, Polygon, and Seed Club. He previously was the youngest ever Fellow at the Milken Institute and the co-founder of Zwile Media, a syndicated portfolio of podcasts including African Tech Roundup and The Global Startup Movement.

Andrew Berkowitz

Andrew is the CEO and Cofounder of Socialstack, a Web3 community platform and ecosystem focused on building impact-driven communities backed by Celo, Polygon, and Seed Club. He previously was the youngest ever Fellow at the Milken Institute and the co-founder of Zwile Media, a syndicated portfolio of podcasts including African Tech Roundup and The Global Startup Movement.

Andrew Piscione

"Andrew is a US-born, Argentina-raised Angel Investor, Engineer and advisor specialized in Fintech, DeFi and Web3 applications, also MBA student at MIT very involved with the Blockchain initiatives and the Media Lab, and he is Argentine Ambassador to the Global Blockchain Business Council member of the Effective Altruism Club founded by Sam Bankman Fried here at MIT. He is currently building the Entrepreneur in residence program at Valor Capital Group, one of the biggest if not the biggest VC in Latin America, with a big crypto practice with a portfolio that includes Coinbase, Celo, Circle, BlockFi, Strike and Lemon Cash. "

Angela Dalton

Angela Dalton is the CEO and Founder of Signum Growth Capital. SGC operates at the intersection of the emerging metaverse and peer to peer, blockchain enabled, online economies. Areas of expertise include video gaming, media and music – culture meets crypto. Signum Growth Capital acts as Lead Advisor to Web3 Foundation and ARK Invest. Prior to Signum Growth Capital, she served in Tech/Media leaderships roles and as a Managing Director at three traditional financial firms - Guggenheim Securities, Evercore Partners and UBS. Angela was an initial investor and Co-Founder of Evercore Partners Equities from 2010 to 2015. Ms. Dalton earned an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. and B.S. from the University of Kansas. Since 2018, SGC's website has been titled "Into the Metaverse" with a goal of recruiting talent from every corner of the globe.

Ayush Khandelwal

"In his talk, Ayush Khandelwal discusses how NFTs can augment our approach to digital assets, digital freedom, and digital identity to make long-lasting, meaningful changes. He goes over the challenges that face mass NFT adoption, namely, environmental impact, speed & scalability, and the lack of regulation in this space, and the importance of shifting the narrative around NFTs to bring real-world utility & empower individuals around the world. "

Beth Porter

Beth Porter has pioneered research and developed products that transform online teaching and learning. Beth launched the Open edX initiative at edX, an open-source digital learning software used by more than 55 million learners worldwide. Beth was instrumental in architecting the original Texas OnCourse program, a state-funded career and college counseling platform serving all Texas schools. A former VP at Pearson Education and edX, Porter’s expertise stems from a deep passion for education, and desire to provide high quality tech-enabled learning experiences. She has led multiple product and engineering teams to deliver customer-focused educational technology products. As part of her work building EdTech products that truly solve higher education’s engagement problem, Porter is co-founder, President and COO of Esme Learning, an AI-powered digital learning platform. She has worked with clients in technology, education, and publishing to develop product strategy and vision, provide technical direction and architecture, and conceive end-to-end solutions that meet business needs. Porter also co-founded Riff Analytics, AI-enabled collaboration software that was acquired by Esme Learning in 2021. Porter is a lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Management.

Cecilia Tham

"Cecilia Tham works in the intersection of design, technology, strategy and impact. She is the founder of Futurity Systems that provides Futures-as-a-Services to companies and organizations. Futurity helps its clients build better futures faster. She is listed on Forbes Top 40 Futurists in Spain, Top 100 Most Influential Women by Startup EU, as well as being an award winning entrepreneur who served on the advisory board for SXSW, City Council of Barcelona, UN World Food Programme and several private companies. "

Christopher Ries

Chris is the co-founder of Sphere, a Web3 buy-now-pay-later platform. Previously, he was managing a large portion of the security product portfolio at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (i.e. a competitor of AWS) and helped the federal government secure its critical infrastructure. He was the original product manager at Cylance Inc. (acquired by BlackBerry for $1.4B) and graduated from UC Irvine focusing on computer science areas like human computer interaction and malware analysis.

Dave Troy

Dave Troy is a researcher, writer, and entrepreneur based in Baltimore, Maryland. He has been studying social media data since 2007. He is a Fellow with New America Foundation’s Future Frontlines initiative, and writes regularly about information warfare, history, and politics for his blog and other publications. He is the host of the podcast Dave Troy Presents, and speaks regularly at conferences about the societal effects of disinformation and information warfare. Contact information is available at davetroy.com.

Esther Dyson

Web3 could change the world - but in what direction? Esther Dyson offers a cautionary tale - and some possible remedies if we're smart enough to use them.

Giuseppe Stuto

Giuseppe Stuto is a first US generation, Boston-based entrepreneur who currently serves as the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of 186 Ventures, an early stage VC fund. Prior to co-founding 186 Ventures, Giuseppe was the Co-Founder and CEO of Fam, a group video software company that scaled to north of seven million users and that was acquired by Draftkings. Today Giuseppe spends most of his time investing in and helping entrepreneurs build in Web3 / Crypto, FinTech, and enterprise SaaS.

Harsha Vardhini Pogunul Srinivasalu

Co-Founder at Vizzhy Inc | MIT Sloan Fellow MBA | Legatum Fellow | MIT Women Spotlight 2022 | MIT100K Accelerate Winner | MIT DeltaV

Hossein Rahnama

Hossein Rahnama is an associate professor of data science at the Creative School and an entrepreneur. As a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he co-founded the well-known DMZ, his research explores artificial intelligence, data governance, and the creative design of data-driven services. He is also the founder and CEO of Flybits Inc., a data intelligence company that is serving a global customer base that has raised more than $60M of funding and has offices around the world. Rahnama has written more than 40 publications and patents in computer and data science. In 2021, he became a fellow at the MIT Connection Science Group and one of the 7 global directors of the City Science Group at the MIT Media Lab. He was appointed by the governor general of Canada to serve as a council member at NSERC (National Science and Research Engineering Council of Canada) and is currently serving on the board of Canadian Science Publishing and the Home Capital Group. In 2012, MIT Technology Review selected him as one of its global TR35 list - The list of top 35 Innovators under the age of 35. In 2021, he was named as one of the Top 50 Artificial Intelligence CEOs. In 2017, he was selected as part of Canada's 40 under 40.

James Boyd

James Douglas Boyd is the Launch Director of the Wolfram Institute, a Product Manager at Wolfram Research, and the Academic Director of Metamathematics at the Wolfram Summer School.

Jan Liphardt

Jan grew up in Michigan and New York. He received a BA from Reed College (1993-96) and a PhD from Cambridge University, UK (Churchill College, 1996-99). Today he is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. In Cambridge, he used stochastic context free grammars (SCFGs) to find patterns in genomes; the computational problem is that some biological regulatory patterns are palindromes, which are difficult to detect with conventional machine learning or statistical tools. Palindromes are longer range, possibly knotted, correlations among elements within strings (such as genomes). The human brain can pick out the palindrome in 1111234111114321111 (1234<->4321), but it’s not so easy to do that with a conventional computer, especially with degenerate/noisy palindromes. Jan used SCFGs to find signals in the yeast genome that may regulate translational recoding, a process in which one strand of RNA can encode two different proteins. After his PhD, he joined the labs of Carlos Bustamante and Nacho Tinoco, Jr. (in the UC Berkeley Physics and Chemistry Depts.). With Carlos and Nacho, he developed methods for using light to stretch single strands of RNA, and then used these tools to study the dynamics of small, violently perturbed small systems. After 2 years as a postdoc, he became the divisional fellow of the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He joined the Berkeley Physics faculty in 2004. Jan is a Searle Scholar, a Sloan Research Fellow, a Hellman Fellow, and the recipient of the 2007 Mohr Davidow Ventures Innovator’s Award. Basic research in his lab is funded by federal agencies such as the NCI, NIGMS, NSF, and the DOE. Jan teaches the "Engineering Living Matter" (BioE80) course with Drew Endy, the module on AI/Machine Learning in BioE301C, and a crypto/blockchain class (BioE60 - Beyond Bitcoin: Applications of Distributed Trust). Jan's full publication list is at Google Scholar and his personal blog is here janliphardt.com.

Jeremy Kepner

Dr. Jeremy Kepner is Head and Founder of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC), and also a Founder of the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator. Dr. Kepner is one of five Lincoln Laboratory Fellows, a position that "recognizes the Laboratory's strongest technical talent for outstanding contributions to Laboratory programs over many years." Dr. Kepner is recognized as one of nine MIT Fellows of the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM), for "contributions to interactive parallel computing, matrix-based graph algorithms, green supercomputing, and big data." Additional appointments include the MIT Mathematics Department and MIT Connection Science. Dr. Kepner received a PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton University as a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow in 1998 (advisor: Prof. David Spergel) and a BA in Astrophysics from Pomona College in 1991.

Joel Dietz

https://connection.mit.edu/joel-dietz

John Wu

John Wu is President of Ava Labs, an Andresseen Horowitz backed technology company building the next-generation blockchain platform: Avalanche. John’s objective is to open up financial services and products to all. In this role, he leverages his expertise from over 20 years as a fintech executive and technology investor to create a blockchain-enabled solution for originating, issuing, and trading financial assets. John was previously CEO of the SharesPost Digital Assets Group, enabling compliant token trading of private shares and funds. Prior to that, he was a technology investor and the founder of Sureview Capital, a global hedge fund backed by the Blackstone Group. John began his investment career at Tiger Management, before managing a global technology portfolio at Kingdon Capital. Education: John received his MBA from Harvard University and holds a BS in Economics from Cornell University.

Khalid Jones

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Lindiwe Matlali

"Lindiwe Matlali is the Founder and CEO of Africa Teen Geeks; an NGO that teaches kids how to code. She is currently studying towards MS in Technology Management from Columbia University in New York as well as a Graduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Stanford University. Her numerous accolades include Young Business awards top 3 finalist, Mail & Guardian Top young South Africans 2014, TechWomen Fellow 2017, Innov8tive Magazine Top 50 Visionary Women in #Tech To Watch in 2017, Destiny Magazine Power of 40 a list of South Africa's powerful women under 40 and Named one of the Top 50 most inspiring women in tech 2017, MTN Women in ICT Community Builder Recognition Award 2018 and Fairlady/Santam Social Entrepreneur 2018. Lindiwe is also an accomplished speaker, and this is her third TEDx talk. "

Michael Healy

Michael is co-founder of Unit, the leading token builder focused on powering the token economy using the Unit Network blockchain, powered by Polkadot. His mission is to solve wealth inequity, by providing a more cooperative economy. He is focused on social impact and positive change through education, entrepreneurship and empowering individuals. Michael is a self-taught full-stack, mobile and blockchain developer. Alongside, has design and video expertise which support in building useful products. Michael has been in the crypto and blockchain industry since 2010 and has built several successful businesses with exits, ranging from an encrypted peer-to-peer video conferencing technology, used by millions of users globally, one of the UK’s largest student social networks, the Wikileaks android application and many mobile apps used by millions of users worldwide. Alongside starting and growing businesses, Michael has advised and supported startups, investors and corporates in Asia, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. He was a finalist of the Thiel Fellowship by Peter Thiel and awarded the Silver medal in the Mathematics Olympiad. Michael worked at top pan-European Venture Capital firm, Wellington partners(€800 million under management). As well as working for the Founders Forum, the leading technology conference and network globally(founder of $500m company to be invited) He founded a coding education bootcamp company which co-led the introducing coding into the british education system. He has done work for Google, KPMG, Saatchi & Saatchi, L’Oreal, Imperial College, Unilever, London Business School and other top startups/corporates/organisations. . Michael is Singaporean, Irish and British, growing up in Singapore, moving to the UK at 16. He enjoys travelling and experiencing different cultures, having visited 88 countries. He is an Ironman triathlete. He has lived in Singapore, London, New York City, Bali, Shanghai, Berlin, Dubai, Hong Kong. He looks forward to live, travel and work in more places in the future.

Mike Troiano

I'm a storyteller, seeker, and student. I've been a bouncer, a salesman, a bartender, an ad man, a cook, a marketing guy, an executive, and a writer. I make a living these days as a VC outside Boston, surrounded by a family who loves me and a dog who understands me.

Mudit Gupta

CISO at Polygon and Technical Partner at Delta Blockchain Fund

Mudit Mudit

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Natalie Salemank

Natalie Salemink is the Founder and CEO of Skadi Labs, which is a prime mover technology company architecting key DeFi and DAO infrastructure. Natalie has been full time in crypto since 2015 working on a variety of blockchain start-ups such as DigiCash and Prismatic. She also contributes to a range of DAOs, like Blockathon DAO. Her formal background is in economics and data science.

Natalie Salemink

Natalie Salemink is the Founder and CEO of Skadi Labs, which is a prime mover technology company architecting key DeFi and DAO infrastructure. Natalie has been full time in crypto since 2015 working on a variety of blockchain start-ups such as DigiCash and Prismatic. She also contributes to a range of DAOs, like Blockathon DAO. Her formal background is in economics and data science.

Navroop Sahdev

Navroop Sahdev is the founder and CEO of The Digital Economist, a global impact organization with the mission to drive technological convergence toward a human-centered global economy. Along with the world’s most respected digital economists, in 2019 she co-authored “Blockchain Economics: Implications of Distributed Ledgers: Markets, Communications Networks, and Algorithmic Reality”, the first book on the economics of blockchain. She has co-authored Hyperledger’s "Blockchain for Business" online course which has trained close to 200,000 entrepreneurs globally, and counting. Navroop is currently a Connection Science Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, part of a curated group of top scholars and entrepreneurs in emerging technologies with a track record of outstanding achievement, who are building the future of Distributed Ledger Technologies, Digital Identity and Digital Networks. She is also the founder and CEO of Rethink Markets, a global action-tank focused on the Economics of Emerging Technologies, with the mission to bridge the gap between scholarly economics and business applications. A pioneering economist and technology futurist, Navroop’s work lies at the intersection of emerging technologies, economic science and business strategy. Navroop is frequently interviewed by Forbes as a subject matter expert on the economics of emerging tech and requested as a keynote speaker at industry conferences. She was listed as one of the Top Blockchain Influencers in 2018 by Media Shower. She holds three masters in IP Management, Economics of Innovation and Applied Economics. Previously, she has worked at Harvard University and the United Nations Environment Programme.

Paul Chou

"Paul is Co-Founder and CEO of Foundation Coin, which is creating a new architecture for cryptocurrency designed to facilitate value movement in the face of upcoming breakthroughs and their associated challenges. For more detail, please reference the Forbes article linked below as it's a good primer on the basics of what we are tackling. Ignore the optically interesting stuff, just focus on the substance. This is not an easy challenge, but we are looking forward to it. Prior to his current position, from 2014-2020, Paul was CEO and co-founder of LedgerX, a New York cryptocurrency derivatives platform. While at LedgerX, he led the development of, and signed the final applications for, the first 3 Commodity Futures Trading Commission licenses granted exclusively for cryptocurrency trading. The licenses allowed for LedgerX to operate as a Swap Execution Facility (SEF), a Designated Contract Market (DCM), and as a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO). In 2018, he was appointed as a government advisor to the CFTC's Technology Advisory Committee. He served on TAC until 2020, when he was asked to leave after expressing candid views about the deficiencies in the US approach to crypto regulation. In 2011, Paul was accepted to Y Combinator (Class of S11), a prestigious accelerator fund that was an early backer in Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, and Coinbase. During this period he worked on web and mobile projects to help customer service individuals, as well as getting exposure to Bitcoin for the first time. From 2006-2010, Paul was a trader on the Quantitative Trading desk within the Securities Division of Goldman Sachs, where he was responsible for the development, trading and risk management of algorithmic equity trading strategies for U.S. and Japanese markets. He held Series 3, 7, 55, and 63 licenses from FINRA while at Goldman and was a member of the National Futures Association. Paul earned a B.S. in Computer Science, and a B.S. in Mathematics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he worked in the Laboratory for Financial Engineering, where he developed models of market participant behavior and devised a new valuation method to capture the implied optionality of businesses. He was a founding member of the MIT Sloan trading club and led MIT's team at several international trading competitions."

Priya Bhasin

After half a decade as a product manager at Apple, Priya is building something new now as an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan. Building upon a deep technical background in computer science with a Masters from USC and an undergraduate degree from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology, she has also served as a Machine Learning Fellow at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Ryan McNutt

Techy wanting to build the world I wish to live in. I previously built a startup that got 100k users that automatically applied people to jobs using a ML algo I built. I am working to bring credit to everyone by 2025.

Scott Lyon

Scott Lyon is the Founder and CEO of SolaceVR, the world's only Spiritual Metaverse focused on providing digital tools and virtual community to the next generation of faith-seekers. Previously Lyon held Fortune 500 executive positions in marketing / sales / business development and was part of the successful ground floor launch teams behind Cars.com and BankMobile. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Stanford University, and was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist while studying at Oxford University.

Sterling Proffer

Sterling Proffer is the founder of CEOs.co, an advisory firm helping creators, entrepreneurs, and organizations navigate the future of the creative industries.

Tareq Amin

Tareq Amin currently serves as Group Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer of Rakuten, Inc. and Representative Director, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technology Officer of Rakuten Mobile, Inc. At Rakuten Mobile, Amin is leading the design and rollout of the company’s next-generation fully virtualized cloud native mobile network in Japan. Leveraging technologies across the cloud, virtualization, OpenRAN and end-to-end automation, the Rakuten Mobile network offers greater flexibility, scalability, security and resiliency, and revolutionizes the way mobile services are provided and consumed. Full-scale commercial LTE service began in April 2020, with 5G service launch following in September of the same year. Amin is also heading the development of the Rakuten Communications Platform, a cloud-native telco platform that enables telecommunications companies and enterprises around the world to build secure and open mobile networks at speed and low cost. Before joining Rakuten Mobile in 2018, Amin served as Senior Vice President of Technology Development and Automation for Reliance Jio. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the Technology Development and Automation organization, including innovation, development and operations. His organization led software development, systems engineering, next-generation access networks, technical operations and R&D. Amin drove end-to-end network design and deployment to meet coverage, capacity, and performance needs of India’s largest green field LTE TDD network, supporting industry leading data connectivity and innovative services such as VoLTE/HD Voice and eMBMS. Prior to this, Amin served as Vice President of Carrier Solutions for Huawei, where he led the company’s strategy for all major technologies and solution innovations, and as Senior Director of National Planning & Performance at T-Mobile, where he managed all budget allocation of capacity, performance and software development related expenditures across USA markets. Amin holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Portland State University in Oregon.

Taylor Wrobel

Software engineer for 10+ years at companies of all shapes and sizes

Thomas Arul

Thomas Arul is a Serial Entrepreneur, Technologist, Investor, Blockchain Evangelist and Public Speaker with over 25 years experience based out of Boston. He has co-founded and bootstraped 2 successful startups and sits in multiple boards. Thomas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bleumi Inc. (Bleumi.com) Bleumi Inc, a leading Blockchain Web3 Payment company. Thomas is Chairman and Co-Founder of Abris.io a Web3 NFT Marketplace and Services company.

Thy-Diep Ta

Yip is cofounder at Unit Network, a leading full-fledged DAO builder for the token economy. She has founded Unit Masters, the signature free blockchain literacy program that has trained several thousand pioneers across the globe in Web3 Fundamentals. She is a governor at H.E.R. Dao and co-founder at DLT Talents, both providing scholarships to hundreds of women to enter the blockchain economy. Yip has received several recognitions for her work in closing the gender equitability gap and in well-being. Her Meditate to Earn project Proof of Meditation one the ETHDenver Hackathon. In 2022, Yip was recognized as one of 100 inspirational women of Web3 (https://unstoppablewow3.com/) alongside Galia Benartzi (Bancor), Catherine Wood (ArkInvest), Kathryn Haun (Haun Ventures), and Laura Shin (Unchained). Previously, she worked at McKinsey & Co in the Global Financial Services Practice, and at Rocket Internet. She holds an MBA from INSEAD business school and is advisor at Antler, Techstars, Plug&Play, Launchpool.xyz. She is a passionate meditation teacher, poet, and author of the book “Beautiful Brains Change tomorrow… today”, a mindfulness manifesto and guide into entrepreneurship. She invests into projects that work at the frontiers of technology to advance United Nations SDG.

William Graylin

"Mr. Graylin is an innovator and entrepreneur, having founded 6 high-tech ventures, been an executive leader and board member for Fortune 500 companies, a military officer, and is an active philanthropist. He is currently the Chairman and CEO of OV Loop, Inc., a super-app platform (think WeChat for the U.S.). Plus Indigo Technologies, with patented Robotic Wheels breakthrough to deliver a whole new class of smoother, roomier and more affordable light EVs. Mr. Graylin was former Global Co-GM of Samsung Pay after Samsung acquired his company LoopPay. Mr. Graylin also founded ROAM Data, world’s largest white label supplier of Square-like mPOS solutions. Mr. Graylin us currently serving on the Board of Synchrony Financials as well as several high-tech startups. He is serving as Chairman of non-profit Global Unites (youth movement for conflict transformation, in 13 countries) Mr. Graylin immigrated to the U.S. from China at the age of 12, he earned two Bachelors degrees from the University of Washington (Electrical Engineering Computer Science/EECS and Chinese Linguistics), and earned two Masters degrees from MIT (MS EECS and MS Business), and is currently a Connection Science Fellow with MIT Media Lab. Mr. Graylin has numerous patents on payments, security and voice-powered communications. His service to his country includes 6 years as a U.S. Nuclear Submarine Officer, and his family continues this tradition with two son in the United States Naval Academy. "