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The activity will count with nine speakers and online transmission with simultaneous audio in Spanish for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is possible with the collaboration of TEDxCERN partners: Latin America-Europe Anilla Cultural in Uruguay, RedCLARA, RedCUDI (Mexico), LACNIC and Internet House of Latin America and the Caribbean. On-line registration is already available.

Important: TEDxCERN free of charge, in order to participate in the on-line transmission you need to register on-line HERE.

This year at TEDxCERN we explore curiosity. Ideas that started as ripples in science,technology and education are merging and converging, creating their own waves of change. What new dimensions of our cosmos will waves in the fabric of space time unveil? Can a computer learn and think like a human? How much can we learn about the earth under our feet by watching it from above?

This year speakers will explore the innovations percolating though their fields. They will share stories about their passions and fascinations and how their research has grown from small ripples of curiosity into waves transforming the way we see and interact with the world around us.

Speakers:

Gary F. Marcus is a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and CEO and co-founder of the recently-formed Geometric Intelligence, Inc. His research on language, computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive development has been published widely in leading journals such as Science and Nature. He is also the author of four books including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, and The New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He contributes frequently to the The New Yorker and The New York Times. He is an avid critic of connectionism and deep-learning fever in AI.

Jun Wang is one of China’s most famous scientists. Wang has led BGI, the genome-sequencing powerhouse since 2007, when it stopped using the name Beijing Genomics Institute and moved its headquarters to Shenzhen. He now plans to devote himself to a new “lifetime project” of creating an AI health-monitoring system that would identify relationships between individual human genomic data, physiological traits (phenotypes) and lifestyle choices in order to provide advice on healthier living and to predict, and prevent, disease.

Dennis Lo directs the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After 22 years of persistent research, Dennis Lo succeeded in decoding a fetal genetic blueprint found within maternal blood. The advance is already saving lives by allowing pregnant women to be noninvasively screened for genetic abnormalities in fetuses they carry. Lo is currently working on developing a plasma DNA-based test that can be used to detect different types of cancer.

Sheila Rowan is the director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at University of Glasgow and a contributor to the LIGO observatory, the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory and a cutting edge physics experiment. For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.

Laura Baudis is a professor at the Physik Institut at the university of Zurich and a specialist in dark matter. One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of dark matter. Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable universe, from the scales of galaxies up to the largest.

Michael Grätzel is the world’s leading expert on dye-sensitized solar cells, after all, he invented it. His lab’s work on that topic crossed CleanTechnica’s radar back in 2011, when it seemed that the work would lead to “solar skyscrapers” and other building-integrated solar applications, as well as consumer products. You can find dye-sensitized solar cells in many commercial applications today, including a showcase installation in Switzerland, where transparent solar panels form a facade for the new SwissTech Convention Center on the EPFL campus.

Samira Hayat is a PhD student at University of Klagenfurt, where she has been part of the team that develops drone systems for the good. These systems should save lives in swarms. The autonomous drone system developed by Lakeside Labs and U Klagenfurt is one of «15 novel ideas for 2015» featured by the WIRED magazine.

Shannon Dosemagen is Founder of Public lab, a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, they seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.

Brij Kothari is the founder of PlanetRead. He believes that “same-language subtitling”—providing subtitles for the lyrics of catchy Bollywood songs—offers valuable reading practice. Brij Kothari has leveraged the ubiquitous presence of television in rural India and the billion-strong Indian population’s voracious appetite for film songs to infuse reading practice into entertainment. By creating a technological tool devoid of any major infrastructural inputs and hence easily replicable, Brij has demonstrated a model that can spread globally.

The team of interpreters (English-Spanish) is coordinated by the Prof. Federico Brum of the School of Public Translation of the University of the Republic, in Uruguay

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