Huang Yi
Choreographer, dancer, inventor
As a child, Huang Yi longed for a robot companion. As an adult, he created a robot to dance with: KUKA.
Taiwanese dancer, choreographer, inventor, and videographer Huang Yi's pioneering work is steeped in his fascination with the partnership between humans and robots. He interweaves continuous movement with mechanical and multimedia elements to create a form of dance which corresponds with the flow of data, effectively making the performer a dancing instrument. Named by Dance Magazine as one of the "25 to Watch," Huang is one of Asia's most prolific choreographers.
Harmoniously weaving together the art of dance and the science of mechanical engineering, Huang Yi & KUKA is a poetic work that flawlessly intertwines modern dance and visual arts with the realm of robotics. HUANG YI & KUKA reveals humanity through a series of vignettes between live dancers and KUKA, a robot conceptualized and programmed by Huang. "Dancing face to face with a robot is like looking at my own face in a mirror...I think I have found the key to spin human emotions into robots," Huang asserts.
HUANG YI & KUKA is an original production of Huang Yi Studio +, developed at 3LD Art & Technology Center, in association with Sozo Artists. Commissioned by Quanta Arts Foundation.
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Joshua Roman
Cellist
Dubbed a "Classical Rock Star" by the press, cellist Joshua Roman has earned a national reputation for performing a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicating the essence of the music at its most organic level. Before embarking on a solo career, he was for two seasons principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. For his ongoing creative initiatives on behalf of classical music, he has been selected as a 2011 TED Fellow, joining a select group of Next Generation innovators who have shown unusual accomplishments and the potential to positively affect the world.
Roman's 2009-10 season engagements include debuts as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the Albany, Arkansas, and Santa Barbara Symphonies, the New Philharmonic Orchestra in Illinois, Oklahoma's Signature Symphony, and Kentucky's Lexington Philharmonic. In recent seasons he has performed with the Seattle Symphony, where he gave the world premiere of David Stock's Cello Concerto, as well as with the Symphonies of Edmonton, Quad City, Spokane, and Stamford, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, among others. In 2008, Roman performed Britten's third Cello Suite during New York's Mostly Mozart Festival in a pre-concert recital at Avery Fisher Hall. In April 2009, he was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra's debut concert at Carnegie Hall.
In addition to his solo work, Roman is an avid chamber music performer. He has enjoyed collaborations with veterans like Earl Carlyss and Christian Zacharias, as well as the Seattle Chamber Music Society and the International Festival of Chamber Music in Lima, Peru. He often joins forces with other dynamic young soloists and performers from New York's contemporary music scene, including Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, and artists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's CMS Two. In spring 2007, he was named Artistic Director of TownMusic, an experimental chamber music series at Town Hall in Seattle, where he creates programs that feature new works and reflect the eclectic range of his musical influences and inspirations.
Committed to making music accessible to a wider audience, Roman may be found anywhere from a club to a classroom, whether performing jazz, rock, chamber music, or a solo sonata by Bach or Kodály. His versatility as a performer and his ongoing exploration of new concertos, chamber music, and solo cello works have spawned projects with composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Mason Bates, and Dan Visconti. One of Roman's current undertakings is an online video series calledThe Popper Project-wherever the cellist and his laptop find themselves, he performs an étude from David Popper's "High School of Cello Playing" and uploads it, unedited, to his YouTube channel. Roman's outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers, and displacement camps, communicating a message of hope through music.
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Anab Jain
Futurist, designer
Superflux co-founder and TED Fellow Anab Jain parses uncertainties around our shared futures, to create provocative experiences, tools and tactics that we can adopt today.
In 2009, Anab Jain co-founded the design firm Superflux with Jon Ardern, inspired by influences as far-flung as avant-garde architecture and Andrei Tarkovsky. The challenges Jain explores are some of the biggest -- climate change, biotech, intelligent machines -- and her resulting work "navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being and acting."
In her work, Jain creates worlds, stories and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world. Superflux is building tools, methods and commons that can enable us to mitigate the shock of food insecurity and climate change. Recently they produced a series of civilian drones, and created a vision of a near-future city where these intelligent machines begin to display increasing autonomy with civic society. Among Superflux's previous projects is a headset allowing blind subjects injected with a light-sensitive virus to develop a kind of "super-sight" sensitive to spectrums that ordinary vision cannot detect.
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Laura Galante
Cyberspace analyst
Laura Galante analyzes how states use cyberspace: a domain where militaries, intelligence services, criminal groups, and individuals pursue their interests with far fewer restraints than in the physical world.
At FireEye, Galante's teams have profiled advanced cyber threats, investigated network breaches, and portrayed the political, military and financial implications of cyber operations. Part of the original Mandiant Intelligence team, Galante has led strategic analysis, developed intelligence capabilities and offerings, and directed publications including APT28: A Window into Russia's State Cyber Espionage ; Red Line Drawn: China Recalculates its Use of Cyber Espionage; and Hacking the Street? FIN4 Likely Playing the Market among others.
In November 2016 she spoke at the UN Security Council's Arria Formula meeting on cybersecurity and international peace and security. She frequently appears on and provides commentary to: CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, BBC, Fox News, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press, and other global and industry media. Prior to her work at FireEye and Mandiant, Laura led a contractor team analyzing cyber capability development and military doctrine at the U.S. Department of Defense. She supported the 2010 U.S.-Russia bilateral information security talks.
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Garry Kasparov
Grandmaster, analyst
Garry Kasparov is esteemed by many as the greatest chess player of all time. Now he's engaged in a game with far higher stakes: the preservation of democracy.
When 22-year-old Garry Kasparov became the world's youngest chess Grand Champion, few could predict his turbulent career in chess or as a dissident. His chessboard wizardry was already the stuff of legend when, in 1997, Kasparov made headlines when he lost a rematch to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, ushering AI into the public sphere.
Kasparov's book Winter Is Coming details the rise of Putin's Russia, Kasparov's persecution and self-exile, and serves chilling warnings of reactionary forces gathering in the West. He is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding his predecessor Vaclav Havel.
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Titus Kaphar
Artist
Titus Kaphar's artworks interact with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums.
As Titus Kaphar says of his work: "I've always been fascinated by history: art history, American history, world history, individual history - how history is written, recorded, distorted, exploited, reimagined, and understood. In my work I explore the materiality of reconstructive history. I paint and I sculpt, often borrowing from the historical canon, and then alter the work in some way. I cut, crumple, shroud, shred, stitch, tar, twist, bind, erase, break, tear, and turn the paintings and sculptures I create, reconfiguring them into works that nod to hidden narratives and begin to reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history."
His latest works are an investigation into the highest and lowest forms of recording history. From monuments to mug shots, this body of work exhibited at Jack Shainman gallery December-January 2017 seeks to collapse the line of American history to inhabit a fixed point in the present. Historical portraiture, mug shots, and YouTube stills challenge viewers to consider how we document the past, and what we have erased. Rather than explore guilt or innocence, Kaphar engages the narratives of individuals and how we as a society manage and define them over time. As a whole, this exhibition explores the power of rewritten histories to question the presumption of innocence and the mythology of the heroic.
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Tim Ferriss
Human guinea pig, author
Tim Ferriss is author of "The 4-Hour Workweek," a self-improvement program of four steps: defining aspirations, managing time, creating automatic income and escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5 life.
Tim Ferris brings an analytical, yet accessible, approach to the challenges of self-improvement and career advancement through what he calls "lifestyle design." His 2007 book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and his lectures on productivity are stuffed with moving, encouraging anecdotes -- often from his own life -- that show how simple decisions, made despite fears or hesitation, can make for a drastically more meaningful day-to-day experience at work, or in life.
Word-of-blog chatter in Silicon Valley may have propelled his book to bestselling success, but Ferriss himself takes a fervid stance against the distractions of technology toys that promote unnecessary multitasking. Following the success of his book, Ferriss has become a full-time angel investor.
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OK Go
Band
A wildly creative band of music- and video-makers, OK Go is building a media empire on the back of endless, boundless ingenuity.
With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire (Paracadute), collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that aims to encode Hungry Ghosts on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.
The band has been honored with a Grammy, three MTV Video Music Awards (one of them from Japan!), a CLIO, three UK Music Video Awards, two Webby Awards (including one for their collaboration with The Muppets and Sesame Street), a spot in a Guggenheim installation. Their latest video is "The One Moment," directed by the band's singer, Damian Kulash Jr.
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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Religious leader
In a world violently polarized by extremists, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is proposing and advocating solutions to mounting religious intolerance.
Rabbi Lord Sacks is one of Judaism's spiritual leaders, and exercises a primary influence on the thought and philosophy of Jews and people of all faiths worldwide. Since stepping down as Chief Rabbi of the UK and Commonwealth in 2013, Rabbi Lord Sacks has become an increasingly well-known speaker, respected moral voice and writer; his 2015 book is Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence.
Granted a seat in the British House of Lords in 2009, Rabbi Lord Sacks is a key Jewish voice for universalism and an embrace of tolerance between religions and cultures. He rejects the "politics of anger" brought about by the way "we have acted as if markets can function without morals, international corporations without social responsibility, and economic systems without regard to their effect on the people left stranded by the shifting tide." He also sees, as a key idea for faith in our times, that unity in heaven creates diversity on earth.
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Serena Williams
Athlete
With her legendary spirit and unstoppable serve, tennis legend Serena Williams has become one of the world's most enduring athletic superstars.
Serena Williams sits at the top of the tennis world; she's won 23 career Grand Slams, which is the most Grand Slam singles titles in history, with her most recent win at the 2017 Australian Open. In some analysts' eyes, she's quite simply the greatest athlete of all time. But Williams has extended her influence far beyond the tennis court. Through her activism, high-profile endorsements, TV and film appearances, and writing (including a guide to life written with her sister Venus), Williams inspires millions of fans worldwide.
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Gayle King
Journalist
Gayle King is a co-host of "CBS This Morning" and Editor-at-Large of the award-winning O, the Oprah Magazine.
An award-winning journalist who has worked across television, radio and print, Gayle King is a co-host of CBS This Morning and Editor-at-Large of O, the Oprah Magazine.
King previously hosted The Gayle King Show, a live, weekday television interview program on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The program, which featured a discussion of a broad variety of topics that include politics, cultural developments, was also broadcast on XM Satellite Radio, where it premiered in 2006.
Before moving into print and radio, King worked for 18 years (1982-2000) as a television news anchor for CBS affiliate WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., during which period, she also hosted her own syndicated daytime program. Prior to joining WFSB, King worked at several other television stations, including WDAF-TV in Kansas City, Mo. (1978-1981), WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Md. (1976), and WTOP-TV in Washington, D.C. (1975).
King has received numerous awards for her extensive work as a journalist. In addition to three Emmys, she was honored in 2008 with the American Women in Radio & Television Gracie Award for Outstanding Radio Talk Show and in 2010 with both the Individual Achievement Award for Host-Entertainment/Information and the New York Women in Communications' Matrix Award.
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AtulGawande
Surgeon, journalist
Surgeon by day and public health journalist by night, AtulGawande explores how doctors can dramatically improve their practice using something as simple as a checklist.
AtulGawande is author of several best-selling books, including Complications, a memoir of surgery; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance; Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the Endand The Checklist Manifesto.
He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.
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Anna RoslingRônnlund
Co-founder of Gapminder
Anna RoslingRönnlund's personal mission: To make it easy for anyone to understand the world visually.
Always with the end consumer at heart, Anna RoslingRônnlund spends her days making sure everything at Gapminder -- a site she cofounded with Hans and Ola Rosling -- is easy to use and easy to understand. On Gapminder, users can explore data and statistics about the world -- and just maybe, up-end their worldview.
Passionate about the visual side of data, she invented the project Dollar Street, where she uses photos as data to examine stereotypes about countries, imcomes and families around the world -- like, for instances, the wide range of things that people use as toothbrushes.
Jon Boogz
Movement artist
Jon Boogz is a movement artist, choreographer, and director who seeks to push the evolution of what dance can be.
As a dancer and creator, Jon Boogz seeks to share with audiences of all backgrounds an appreciation of the melding of art forms while inspiring and bringing awareness to social issues. Boogz recently wrote, choreographed, directed and danced in Color of Reality, a short film in collaboration with visual artist Alexa Meade and fellow dancer Lil Buck.
First motivated to dance by the work of Michael Jackson, Boogz has choreographed for icons including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Naomi Campbell, Gloria Estefan; for Pharrell's Adidas Originals campaign to creative direct, choreograph, and perform in Movement Art Is: Standing Rock at ComplexCon; and as creative consultant for ads launching campaigns for Apple and Lexus. Boogz's collaborators include TriBeCa Film Festival, DAIS, Lil Buck, and Flying Lotus; his choreography is used in FOX's So You Think You Can Dance and Cirque du Soleil's MJ ONE; and he was featured at the Geffen Playhouse's "Backstage at the Geffen" with his dance company Control Freakz, Lil Buck, and spoken-word artist Robin Sanders to honor Morgan Freeman and Jeff Skoll.
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Lil Buck
Dancer, choreographer, educator
A viral video star known for his gravity-defying, elegant street dance moves, Lil Buck is a fertile collaborator across disciplines and media.
International phenomenon Lil Buck began jookin' - a street dance that originated in Memphis - at age 13 alongside mentors Marico Flake and Daniel Price. After receiving early hip-hop training from Teran Garry and ballet training on scholarship at the New Ballet Ensemble, he performed and choreographed until relocating to Los Angeles in 2009.
Named one of Dance Magazine's 25 to Watch, his collaboration with Spike Jonze and Yo-Yo Ma performing The Swan went viral in 2011. Since then he has collaborated with a broad spectrum of artists including JR, Damian Woetzel, the New York City Ballet, Madonna, Benjamin Millepied, and Spike Lee. Buck is an avid arts education advocate and recipient of the WSJ Innovator Award; collaborates frequently with global brands including Glenfiddich and Louis Vuitton; and recently launched a capsule collection with Versace.
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Raj Panjabi
Physician
A billion people around the world lack access to health care because they live too far from a clinic. Through Last Mile Health, 2017 TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi aims to extend health services to all -- by training members of the community.
Raj Panjabi was nine years old when civil war broke out in his native country of Liberia. His family fled, eventually resettling in High Point, North Carolina. Raj dreamed of going to medical school and, as a student in 2005, he returned to Liberia. He was shocked to find a health care system in total devastation. Only 50 doctors remained to treat a population of four million.
With a small team of Liberian civil war survivors, American health workers and $6,000 he'd received as a wedding gift, Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health in 2007. Initially focused on care for HIV patients, Last Mile Health has grown into a robust organization that partners with the government of Liberia to recruit, train, equip and employ community health care workers who provide a wide range of services to their neighbors in Liberia's most remote regions. In 2016, Last Mile Health workers treated 50,000 patients, including nearly 22,000 cases of malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea in children. While the organization focuses on integrated primary care, its network can be leveraged in a crisis. In the fight against Ebola, Last Mile Health supported government response by training 1,300 health workers in southeastern Liberia.
Panjabi is a physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and an advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative. He was ranked as one of "The World's 50 Greatest Leaders" by Fortune in 2015 and named to TIME's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2016. As the winner of the 2017 TED Prize, he has a bold wish to take his work even further.