Jennifer Healey: If cars could talk, accidents might be avoidable“I want you to think a little about what the driving experience is like now. You get in your car, close the door and you’re in a glass bubble,” says Healey in today’s talk, given at TED@Intel. “You can’t really sense the world around you. You’re in this extended body. You’re tasked with navigating it down roadways in and amongst other metal giants at superhuman speeds. And all you have to guide you are your two eyes.”

Healey has an idea for how to make driving significantly safer – let our cars talk to each other and share data about their position and velocity, so they can do the work of avoiding accidents for us. Healey points out that this method would give us a sense of all the cars on the road – not just the ones in our field of vision. There would be no surprise motorcycle pulling around you or truck coming out of nowhere, because your car would know exactly where these other vehicles have been and would be able to predict where they’re going. Vehicles would be able to create the safest routes for all parties on the road, actively avoiding accidents.

Healey says that testing for this system has been done in computer simulations and is now moving to robotic models.

It’s a fascinating idea, given in a passionate presentation. Here, other great TED Talks with ideas about cars.

1. Chris Bangle says great cars are Art
2. Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car
3. Chris Gerdes: The future racecar – 150 mph, and no driver
4. Larry Burns on the future of cars
5. Steven Levitt on child carseats
6. Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car?
7. Dennis Hong: Making a car for blind drivers

Read up on 5 cars of the future in this TED Blog piece »

Watch 12 talks about the future of cars, planes and rockets »

And check out 9 transportation devices that could make your commute far more fun »

Photo: Ryan Lash

On Sunday night, Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award on behalf of his film Argo as it was named the Best Picture of 2012. And today, he appeared on the TED2013 stage kicking off Session 10, “Secret Voices.”

“This is not a TED Talk. I will not be interesting or funny. This will not be exciting in any way,” he said. “Though I feel a little bit like Al Gore in the TED headset. He’s not here, is he?”

And then he gets serious. “At the Academy Awards, I mentioned my wife, and I said: The people we love, we have to work on those relationships,” he said. “The other thing that I work on is Eastern Congo.”

“I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to give back to the world. So I found one of the most damaged, suffering places in the world, where 1 in 5 children die before the age of 5. It’s a place where a million people are displaced, regularly, inside the country. Where there’s the worst gender-based violence in the world … There are a lot of things to lament, particularly in the last 15 years when 5.5 million people died from conflict-related violence.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

As Affleck says, many people object to this number. So he asks us to imagine that the number were 3 million people. Per capita, that would be roughly the equivalent of 12 million people in the United States. “That’s the population of Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia,” he says. ”If they had every single person who lived there die, we would probably take some steps. There would be a reaction.”

So why haven’t we responded?

“I think we are a naturally good people. We care about one another. When our neighbor has cancer, we go over with meatloaf and take care of their kid,” says Affleck. “I think what happens [when we think about the Congo] is that we feel it’s too big, it’s too difficult to look at … I can understand my aunt who passed away, but 3 million deaths I can’t understand. I don’t want to understand – it’s just too painful, so I disengage.”

Too many people say that the situation in the Congo can’t be changed and that corruption runs too deep.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” says Affleck. “I’ve seen and met people doing incredible things, mending the fabric of their lives – their family’s lives — brick by brick, stitch by stitch. It’s changed my views on what’s possible.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Tonight, Affleck is here to show us just a scratch off the surface of the amazing things happening in the Congo. And with that, he introduced the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, from the Congo, playing a composition called “Luba.”

In crisp suits, the musicians made beautiful music — their strings diving and soaring with beauty. And hope.

TED Live doesn’t require finding a good seat in the auditorium. With a TED Live membership, you can watch TED2013 and TEDGlobal 2013 from the comfort of your home, share it with your classmates or screen it with your co-workers in the office. In other words, there is no one way to watch.

You can grab some friends and gather around a laptop, like this group of TEDsters watching TEDGlobal 2012.

Or you can project it on a big screen, and accompany it with delicious snacks, like the attendees of the Duarte Design viewing party in Mountain View, California.

This group in Sistole, Colombia, got in the spirit by spelling out ‘TED’ before watching.

Or you can watch TED Live with cake, like these TED enthusiasts in Lisboa, Portugal.

Toker + Associates spelled ‘TED’ out of everyday objects during a screening party in Calgary, Canada.

Or you watch at home. We love how Susan Macaulay set up a TEDGlobal screening on her bike.

TED2013 will take place Feb. 25 to March 1 and TEDGlobal 2013 will be going down from June 10 to 14. With TED Live, you can watch everything as it unfolds in real time — but then again, you don’t have to. If you live in another time zone, you can take advantage of the “tape delay,” and you’ll also have access to the permanent archive, for rewatching the talks that just get you.

TED Live memberships are available for individuals, K-12 schools, higher education institutions and businesses.  With each membership comes an iPad Mini* to stream the conference, access the private Live Facebook group, and download TED Books. For more information, head to our website >>

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* Apple and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. No endorsement is implied.

At TED, we’re constantly impressed by the accomplishments of young innovators. With talks like Adora Svitak’s “What adults can learn from kids,” 12-year-old Amy O’Toole assisting Beau Lotto in “Science is for everyone: kids included,” and Thomas Suarez, who was developing apps before he could drive, we can’t help but be hopeful for the future. That is why we are thrilled to announce the third anniversary of TEDxYouthDay, a series of independently-organized TEDx events designed to empower and inspire teens and kids worldwide.

This Saturday and Sunday more than 100 TEDx events will participate in TEDxYouthDay, with youth conferences going down in 42 countries — including Egypt, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. A whopping 26 of these TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreamed through the TEDxYouthDay website. Additionally, more than 100 youth leaders — some as young as 11-years-old – have volunteered to report on these events, and will be writing, photographing and tweeting from events across the globe. You can follow their reporting on Twitter live on the 17th and 18th by following the hashtag #TEDxYouth.

TED will also be participating in the fun with TEDYouth in New York City, a free, day-long event for high school students. More than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and performers will dazzle participants with mind-shifting stories as well as incredible lessons on what they do best. (While the in-person event is fully booked, TEDYouth will also be livestreamed for FREE on Nov. 17, from 1 to 6pm EST, and interpreted into Spanish and Arabic. Sign up for a livestream reminder notification here.)

This year’s TEDxYouthDay theme is “Dream Big…Then Do It!” For the past month, youth from around the world have been sharing their big ideas for a better world. Here, some selections from the TEDxYouthDay photo campaign, for which young people completed the sentence, “A dream that I commit to making real is…” The breadth, depth, and creativity of these answers have astonished us — like the answer above from Instagram user shenjustshen – and we can’t wait to see what these dreamers will accomplish.

Also from Instagram user shenjustshen, a TEDxYouthDay participant writes that her dream is “to show the world that there is no such thing as perfection in art.”

A participant from TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege says he hopes to be the first man on Mars and Pluto.

TEDxYouthDay reporter Serena Chao shares her dream, to stay true to herself.

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team member shares his dream, “Finding a enjoyable and successful job.”

Instagram user sritahereje says she commits to the “spread of creative messages.”

A participant of TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege shares her dream: “To prove everyone wrong.”

TEDxYouthDay Reporter Jahbari Wallace aims high with his dream, filling in the sentence with the words “doing the right thing in every situation.”

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team members share her dream “to help stop starvation.”

This weekend, join us as we celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments and drive of our youth to keep this world an ever-incredible place. Settle down, make yourself a sandwich, and stay glued to the TEDxYouthDay website, where TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreaming throughout Saturday and Sunday.

Saunders was one of ten speakers featured at the event, which took place at the Unicorn Theatre, supported by TED partners Intel and frog. The evening’s theme was “Exploring Possibilities,” and the 220 attendees heard stories of exploration in an eclectic set of fields: from Saunders’ extreme geographies to the frontiers of science, from the writing of a new national constitution to the creation of new markets.

Hosted by TED’s European director Bruno Giussani, the Salon was opened by NY-based designer E Roon Kang, a TED Fellow who pointed to the “chain reaction of complications” that we bring into our lives and work as a byproduct of our quest for efficiency. (Ever thought of whether your smartphone, besides expanding the scope of your possibilities, has also made your life more complicated and stressful?) His design projects are informed by this paradox, for example when developing the new visual identity for the MIT Media Lab. For that project, with his collaborators, Kang took into account fluidity and ambiguity by avoiding a “fixed” institutional logo in favor of an algorithm that creates, based on set criteria, a different logo for each staffer.

In times of crisis, a general concern is how markets can create new economic opportunities. The second speaker, British policy entrepreneur Wingham Rowan, suggested that in order to expand opportunities, we also need to create new markets. He argued that there is a well of untapped economic potential in online marketplaces where people at every level of the skill scale and with spare hours to “sell” could meet the micro-demand for anything from last-minute warehousing personnel to teaching. Sure, websites likes Craigslist are doing some of this matchmaking already. But they have none of the sophistication, automatization and legal framework of, say, financial electronic markets. “Why only some — rather than all — can benefit from this kind of market infrastructure, where qualified offer and demand can meet and match immediately?” he asked.

Speaking of crisis, while a lot of attention is focused on the Southern edge of Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal), up north a small country is digging its way back from a dramatic 2008 financial meltdown: Iceland. One of the answers that the country gave to that crisis was to re-write its Constitution from scratch. (Side note: Unlike most other countries, the UK, where the TEDSalon took place, does not have a document called a “Constitution”: its constitutional law is disseminated across many written and unwritten sources, from treaties to royal prerogatives.) The third speaker was one of the people who led that effort, political scientist Silja Bara Omarsdottir, from the University of Iceland. The new text is ready for a final parliamentary discussion, and it was developed in a very open way, with a citizen assembly, hundreds of proposals submitted, a committee coordinating and having meetings on live webcast, online feedback loops to which every citizen could participate, and more. “It wasn’t crowdsourced,” Omarsdottir said: the committee held control of the text. But it was transparent, open and participatory at an unprecedented scale. “People felt involved, they felt ownership.”

Azerbaijani violin virtuoso Sabina Rakcheyeva was next to take the stage, with a cross-genre performance fusing Eastern and Western influences.

Every year, Intel, one of the TEDSalon’s partners, organizes the world’s largest pre-university science competition, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Millions of high school students around the globe take part, and the event plays a major role in motivating young people towards science. The winner of the 2012 Fair, Jack Andraka, is 15, and was awarded first place for developing a new method to detect pancreatic cancer. He explained how he researched the illness on the Web after a close family friend died of it, and hit upon a potentially interesting approach after smuggling into biology classes (“a stifler of innovation”) a science article about carbon nanotubes. Andraka said he wrote 200 letters to professors before finding someone willing to give him a chance and access to a facility at Johns Hopkins University. It took him many months, “and a lot of mistakes,” but he did succeed in creating a new, better, cheaper, simpler and more effective “sensor” for pancreatic cancer.

The Salon took place the day after the US presidential election — a big news day. The news ecosystem has been shaken up in recent years by ubiquitous cellphone/Twitter/YouTube reporting. Many important recent stories have been reported this way, from war zones, catastrophe areas and more. In many cases, however, the source of information may not be immediately recognizable or verifiable. Markham Nolan, editor of Storyful, spoke about methods to validate crowdsourced news. He detailed an example related to a gruesome piece of video footage filmed in Hama, Syria, showing dead bodies being thrown into a river from a bridge — and how via the aerial images of Google Maps and a series of other online tools it was possible to identify with certainty the place and verify the credibility of one of the three sources. “But while tools and algorithms can check and channel all this information, truth is fluid and human — and will forever remain a uniquely human trait.”

Geopolitical analyst Parag Khanna was next, introducing the concept of “Hybrid Age,” the age in which we are living, which is characterized by the blurring of traditional boundaries — between disciplines, between cultures, between political structures, between biology and technology. Earlier this year Khanna co-authored a TEDBook on this topic, Hybrid Reality, and in his talk he explored the impacts of these developments on work and political systems, advancing the idea of the TQ, the “Technology Quotient,” measuring an individual’s (or an organization’s, or a State’s) adaptability and preparedness for emerging technologies and the need to integrate and leverage them. After his talk, while answering questions from Bruno Giussani, he discussed North Korea, which he recently visited, and the massive railroad projects that — with Chinese financial backing — may in a not-so-distant future link up Eurasia, the landmass that goes from Europe to Vladivostok and Singapore. It is the biggest landmass on Earth and includes most of its inhabitants.

UCL neuroscientist Molly Crockett took the stage with a cautionary talk about the nature of the recent advances in her discipline, and how in particular brain scan images and data can be used and misused. Newspapers publish daily stories based on neuroscience results. But Crockett pointed at products sold with brain images on them that actually have no science to support the marketers’ claims, and at hand-picked study results used to support theories (and news stories) that the same results could also disprove. “The promise of neuroscience has led to high expectations and unproven claims. But we haven’t yet found a ‘buy’ button in the brain. We cannot tell if someone is in love by looking at their brains. Brain scans cannot read people’s minds. We have to be careful not to let these sorts of claims take away from the actual science of neuroscience.”

A performer who is very adept at exploring the future of music followed: Tim Exile. On top of creating a special performance for the TEDSalon, Exile also brought back Sabina Rakcheyeva for a surprise duet between two virtuosos, one playing the violin, the other playing an impressive array of electronic tools, creating a mesmerizing musical moment.

Back to science — to using genetic engineering to fight one of the deadliest viruses, dengue fever. Dengue affects tens of millions of people every year, and is becoming increasingly lethal as it travels north. A British company, Oxitec, believes it has found a technology that’s more effective and much less damaging to the environment than the currently used chemicals and pesticides: They genetically modify male mosquitos so that they cannot procreate. It’s controversial, like every time the words “genetic engineering” are used. But CEO Hadyn Parry calmly described the problem, and his team’s solution: while genetically modified crops are about giving crops an advantage, Parry said, “we use the same techniques for the exact opposite end: to introduce in the insects a big disadvantage — basically, birth control for mosquitos”.

The closing speaker was TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong, a doctor working at the intersection of biology and architecture at the University of Greenwich. She offered an exploration of designing and manufacturing with living materials. And she did so using a clever rhetorical device. “How might we design a chicken?” she asked. A metaphorical chicken, of course. But that allowed Armstrong to detail the principles of design that would apply to living materials — materials “that know what they are to become.”

Giussani took the opportunity of the TEDSalon to announce the publication of the newest issue of Design Mind magazine, published by TED partner frog and completely devoted to the TEDGlobal 2012 conference, which took place last June in Edinburgh, and to its theme of “Radical Openness.” The magazine, which is available online, expands on the theme through interviews, essays and graphics, including a debate about the connected world between Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott. TEDGlobal 2013 will take place June 10-14, 2013, in Edinburgh.

(Photos by Robert Leslie. TEDster Nesta Morgan was in the audience and sketched some of the attendees).

With Popcorn Maker, you can choose a YouTube video and add notes, live links, Twitter feeds, photos, links out to Wikipedia … all within the video window. And all the editing takes place within your own web browser — no special software needed.

Jump in and play: Popcorn Maker. Or read more about the launch on the Mozilla Festival blog. (Follow tweets at #mozfest.)

We’ve been experimenting with Popcorn Maker here at TED; you can see below what the Mozilla team did to add lots and lots of data to Beau Lotto and Amy O’Toole’s recent TEDTalk:

In the TED Blog comments, Ricardo Calil shared an elegant way to refine the user experience, by adding pauses to take in the new information. In the short clip below, he shows two techniques for using pauses:

What would you do? Share your work in the comments …

Popcorn Maker is part of Mozilla’s inspiring Webmaker program, which hopes to help build the next generation of creators on the web — from making simple web pages with Thimble to fooling around with code using X-Ray Goggles.

You’ve accomplished a huge amount for one so young. It probably helped that you grew up surrounded by a family of artists and musicians.

My family were always inclined towards performing and creative arts. My great-grandfather was an ancient music scholar. He wrote many books on music theory. And he was a multi-instrumentalist. He played the violin and an Eastern instrument called the harmonium, and the sarangi. His daughter — my father’s mother — followed in his footsteps and became a performer of Eastern music. She was a stage performer, and also played many instruments. Her brother is a professional storyteller, spoken-word poet, and an actor as well. My father is also a musician and a stage performer. My mother’s an artist as well as a stage performer. My sister, who is three years younger than me, is also a musician, as are my cousins. So everybody does something or the other.

When I was young, it was really difficult to get people to pay attention to me. Whatever I would do, somebody else could do that too. But that really pushed me to try to get better; I always wanted to be on the same level as my cousins. But now I just do it for myself. When I was younger I was much more competitive. I’m very grateful to have had that sort of environment to grow up in because it really helped me develop my work, and work on being a perfectionist. I enjoyed it a lot.

Do you play music with your family?

Not too often anymore. But sometimes I sit down with my uncles, and they play a few things and I play with them, and it’s fun. Mostly I play on my own, because I grew up playing Western classical music. I started playing classical piano at the age of 6. I was always messing around with instruments. My grandmother told my parents that I should get classical music training, and so I starting taking classical piano. I’m still learning.

I picked up guitar when I was 16. It was really different from piano because classical music is very — I wouldn’t call it restrictive, but it has a lot of rules. So when I started playing electric guitar, that really opened up stuff for me. There were no rules: you could do whatever you wanted. That was fun. So now I don’t prefer either style. I love both. I love classical music and other forms of music. I love writing orchestra pieces. That’s my favorite thing to do.

How did you get your first recording contract?

I was 18. I was performing at one of the venues back home, and this person from EMI was there. They liked what I was doing. They said, “Would you like to come and record?” Nobody really does anything that is risky back home. Everybody’s so afraid because most of the musicians are pretty set in their ways. They don’t want to experiment. But EMI offered me a completely different way to work. They said, “We don’t really know what you’re doing and we don’t want to tell you what to do. Just go ahead and do whatever you want.” Which I loved. There was no manager. There was nobody. I was completely alone in the studio with a very, very good engineer, who would allow me to stand on his head and say, “I want it to sound like this, I want to change that.” There was no real producer either. I was in complete control, and I loved that. So for two years I was working on music, on and off — I wasn’t working every day. When I’d get an idea I would go to the studio and start on it. Or when I conceived of a particular sketch of a beat, I’d go to the studio and refine it. I had complete freedom, which I really enjoyed. And that helped me make all my orchestra pieces.

Before this happened, I was actually supposed to go to the Berklee College of Music. I even got an audition. I thought about it for a very long time and ultimately decided not to attend my audition, preferring to stay in Pakistan and record the music, get it out of my system. I’d been studying music for so long, and I had all these ideas that were building up inside, and I needed to get them out. While I was recording, I attended art school at the Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture, studying illustration and fine art while working on recording my album, Circus in the Sky. I also took a minor in film and I learned how to manage everything for my films that I wanted to make. I didn’t want to waste time.

I’ve been doing art since I was small, so it wasn’t a problem for me to balance my painting and educational work with my music. I would finish everything in school and then go and work in the studio for seven or eight hours, recording my music, then go home and practice. It was a fun time.

Tell us about the different musical styles on Circus in the Sky.

There are 12 pieces on the album: guitar, piano and orchestra pieces. I love writing orchestra pieces, because it’s like a film. You can tell a story with it. With my guitar pieces, people get too wrapped up in the technique. They look at what I’m doing rather than what I’m playing. I’m okay with that, but I’d rather tell something with my music than have people say: “Wow, look at how he’s playing the guitar. That’s so different.” Honestly, it’s not very unique. I learned it from watching Preston Reed. Those who know the percussive style just see it as a variation of what others are doing. But people who are unfamiliar with that style of guitar playing are perhaps awed by it. I don’t really try to focus on technique or what I’m doing. I try to say something with the music.

That’s why I enjoy the orchestra pieces, because nobody sits there and goes, “Wow, look at how the violins are being played, and look at how the clarinets are being played.” They listen to it as a whole. So that’s what I want to do more of. Even my piano pieces, I start to do that. And the album actually tells a story from start to finish. Each piece borrows from the previous one and develops ideas from it — time signatures, rhythmic styles and everything — and it just builds up towards the end. I had quite a lot of fun working on that.

You were trained in classical piano, so how did you learn to write and arrange for orchestra?

Ever since I was small, my teacher always exposed me to orchestral music. Even when we’d talk about Mozart, he would say, “Yes, he was a brilliant piano player, but he wrote for orchestra.” And then we would listen to some of his orchestral pieces. We listened to Beethoven, Schubert. So I love that kind of music, and I love film scores. They amplify and accentuate so many things in film, all the emotions and the scenes.

Was the album well received by the critics in your country?

Oh, it really was well received actually. I’m very grateful that people are responding very well to it. I finished it just before I left for the TEDGlobal Conference — literally a week before. Everything was printed, the cover, the artwork, everything was ready. The final CD was done a week before I left. So it’s only been out for two months, and so far the reception has been very good.

And before that you also recorded a song called “Saeen.” From the video, it looks like you worked with a lot of musicians on it?

That piece was actually an adaptation of a song by a popular Pakistani music group called Junoon. They said, “We’d like you to do something with one of our pieces for our fifth anniversary album.” And I knew that song was really popular back home and in a few countries like Nepal and India. I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to live up to the original, so I just completely changed it and made it into a Middle Eastern orchestral piece. I replaced the vocals with a violin, creating a melody. I play almost every instrument, except for violin, on the recording, but I thought it would be pretty bland to have only me in the film. We decided to get a drum circle, and the violin player and I played in the middle of the drum circle. It was fun.

How many instruments do you play?

I’ve tried a lot of instruments. My main instruments are the piano and the guitar. But I can play the harmonica, the mandolin. I play the harmonium. I do percussion as well. I’m trained on a lot of things. It’s just fun to make sounds. I don’t really know how many instruments I play, but the ones I don’t, I really wish I could. I really, really wish I could play the violin because that’s my favorite instrument in the world. When I was younger I had a choice between the piano or the violin. I picked the piano, but I keep wondering what would have happened if I’d picked the violin.

Well, it’s not too late! You recently were in Florida, for the OneBeat fellowship, weren’t you?

Yes. OneBeat is a new initiative that was founded by the US State Department where they bring together musicians from all over the world for a bit over a month. The tagline for this tour was “32 musicians from 21 countries.” For a full month, we were together every day, and we had a two-week residency in Florida at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Daytona Beach before touring the East Coast for two and a half weeks. It was really cool because we were really cut off from everything else. It was just us and a few guards to keep watch — two weeks where we had to just make music and work on things.

I didn’t sleep much: all the time we’d be making music and working on different ideas and concepts and ideas and working on pieces for the shows that we’d be performing. Initially when we were all getting there, we didn’t know how all of us would gel, because there were musicians from all sorts of genres. There were Turkish musicians playing Turkish jazz and there were electronic musicians, country artists. I was the only classical musician probably.

We didn’t know how all of us would collaborate on something, because everybody was so different. But I remember, I was the first person who arrived, and the very next day I was sitting in one of the studios playing the grand piano. It was a really nice piano, and I was just practicing. And then slowly, one by one, all the musicians started coming in. We really didn’t talk much, we just all sat there. I was playing, then somebody joined me. And then another person walked in and they joined on their instrument. The percussionists walking by, they came in and started playing as well. It got to a point where all 32 of us were in that room, playing, and then the organizers also walked in, and it was a huge jam. It was a really magical moment. All of us were just playing. And we’d pause and let someone solo, and we’d pause again to let someone else solo. And that’s how we got to know each other.

Of all the fellows at TEDGlobal 2012, you seemed like the one the most affected by experience. And I was just wondering what was happening in your mind during that time, and how that’s unfolded in the last months since TEDGlobal.

TED was absolutely amazing. I think it’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had. I’d been watching the TED videos as well. I saw Kaki King’s videos, and I watched a lot of Andrew Bird performing too. It was the one-man orchestra that he did. I watched so much TED, but I didn’t know anything about the Fellows program. So when I got that email it was so surreal to me. I didn’t know something like that was there for people like me. And I didn’t even know I’d be eligible for it. I felt so grateful to be selected.

When I got to TED it was really a dream come true to be there. I love that sort of environment. OneBeat was great, but it was just music. TED is everything. And I love that, because I try to do bits of everything. I try to make my films as well, and music. So to be in that sort of environment was incredible. Everybody does everything, and there was so much to learn. And all the Fellows were amazing too. I don’t know how to describe it. I wish it hadn’t ended. I didn’t want to leave that environment because it fuels, I think, everybody’s creativity. And then, of course, I got to play with Preston Reed, which is something I’ll never forget. He has a particular way of standing — because he has long hair, he has to let the hair down his right side so it doesn’t get in the way of his eyes when he’s playing. And he always sticks his hair down his right shoulder and leans a bit towards his right side to play with his head tilted. It was such a thrill to be sitting onstage with him and watch him do that exact same move before he started playing. It was just amazing.

Has the experience settled into you, and has it informed the way that you have worked since then?

I still wish it hadn’t ended, but I have more time to reflect on it. It really has affected how I work. It’s made me a lot calmer. Before, I thought that my work wouldn’t lead to anything. And I think it’s given me a bit of a boost, because now I feel like I’m on my way to accomplishing something. And I got to be on that stage, which makes me really happy. I want to do more now, but it’s made me believe in myself a bit more.

What are you fantasizing about doing that you haven’t done yet?

What I really want to do is just keep on learning. And thanks to all the opportunities that have opened up with TED, I am in a position to do that — learn things that I normally wouldn’t have been able to. Not just in music; I’ve been in touch with all these people who, if everything works out, allow me to be in a position where I can do things that I thought weren’t possible before. I’ll be able to make more music, more experimental music, more experimental art, meet people who are doing things like that. And even opportunities for music schools — I know that.

For the first time at TEDGlobal, a small group of TED Translators came together to present ideas and talk about the future of the Open Translation Project. Discussions centered around how to better collaborate, communicate and capture knowledge amongst the TED translator community, as well as playing subtitled TEDTalks in schools and engaging with the TED community at large. Addressing the workshop attendees, TED’s June Cohen said, “Translators are knit into the fabric of what TED is — and what it’s becoming. Not only have you taken the TED mission farther than we imagined, but we’ve learned from you.”

Armenian translator Kristine Sargsyan presented on bringing translated TEDTalks into schools. Spanish translator Lidia Cámara de la Fuente talked about universal Spanish — that is, reconciling the language variations across Spanish-speaking countries. Kaloyana Milinova shared her story of collaboration with the MaYoMo translation team and TEDx in Bulgaria. Katja Tongucer, a German translator, explored how to improve translation quality through knowledge sharing.

Polish translator Krystian Aparta talked about translating terminology, telling the story of how he tracked down the perfect translation for a term in Janna Levin’s talk. Els De Keyser, a Dutch, French and Italian translator, connected online to talk about regionalism — and how translators and reviewers can work together to bridge differences by finding a mutually acceptable word. Serbian translator Ivana Korom talked about community building among the Serbian translators, and proposed the idea of regional translator workshops. And Jenny Yang, a Chinese translator, talked about how she noticed 3 different tribes of translators — and how and why they translate for TED.

Norwegian translator Martin Hassel brainstorms with TED engineers at the TED Translator Workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photos: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Photoblogging Mike’s picks: TED’s photo editor Mike Femia points us to this stunning shot of JR waiting around during rehearsals on the TED stage. Femia says: “The oversized TED logo this year became a piece of stage furniture. People interacted with it like a physical object, as seen in this photo of TED Prize winner JR waiting backstage for his rehearsal. This is the photo exactly as it came out of Duncan’s camera.”

Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson

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