TEDxSalford

‘Cliteracy’ - Workshop by Sophia Wallace

Conceptual artist Sophia Wallace wants you — and everyone you know — to be cliterate. CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws is a mixed media project that explores a paradox; the global obsession with sexualising female bodies in a world that is illiterate when it comes to female sexuality. CLITERACY is a new way of talking about citizenship, sexuality, human rights, and bodies. The project reveals the – phallic as neutral – bias in science, law, philosophy, politics, mainstream and even feminist discussion, and the art world – which is so saturated with the female body as subject. Using text as form, CLITERACY explores the construction of female sexual bodies as passive vehicles of reception defined by lack.

‘Privacy and Security’ – Breakout Session with Anthony Zboralski

Anthony Zboralski is a computer hacker who has worked as a security expert for nearly 20 years. He has experience performing penetration tests, security assessments and related services for industries areas ranging from manufacturing through telecommunications and banking to government. He has assisted numerous governments and dozens of Fortune 500 companies to help test the security of systems and highlight their vulnerabilities. He is now founder and CEO of Belua, an experimental search engine dubbed “the anti-google project”. This session will explore how designers and artists are reflecting public sentiment towards privacy and data in technology today.

‘Serial Entrepreneurship’ – Breakout Session with Jay Bregman

Jay Bregman is the Founder / CEO of Hailo – a network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers using a tool which helps to make cabbies’ days more sociable – and profitable. Hailo has raised $50M in investment from an all-star cast of investors including Union Square Ventures, Accel Partners, Wellington Partners, Atomico Ventures, Richard Branson and KDDI. Together they’ve funded Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Tumblr, founded Skype, and brought loads of other fanatistic companies to life all over the world.

‘How to Get Almost Everything for Free’ - Workshop by Jack Sim

This workshop by Ashoka Global Fellow Jack Sim gives all aspiring social entrepreneurs and laymen the demonstration of how you can achieve plenty of impact even though you do not have much resources or no resources. Believing in his motto of “Live A Useful Life,” Jack Sim is restructuring the field of sanitation worldwide to provide clean, safe toilets for the estimated 2.6 billion people who lack access. Jack founded the World Toilet Organization (WTO) in 2001 and the World Toilet College (WTC) in 2005 to create a world body that unites these individual initiatives. Today, WTO comprises of 59 members in 42 countries. He aligns citizen groups, budgets, and government agendas to underscore the urgency of proper sanitation, decouple sanitation and water for the purposes of funding, and direct earmarked funds to citizen sector and public-private partnerships.

‘The Strange World of the Wrong Wide Web‘ – Seminar with Massimo Marchiori

The Web is a beautiful place, full of web sites that contain lot of information. But, most of these web sites are also terribly wrong. This rather astounding situation usually comes from the bad assumption that the web is just another communication media, whereas it has its unique and often paradoxical features. In this session we will outline, time allowing, some of the surprising differences and lines of thought that distinguish a successful web site from the rest of the crowd. Professor Massimo Marchiori is an Italian mathematician and computer scientist and the creator of HyperSearch, a search engine where the results were based not only on single page ranks, but on the relationship between single pages and the rest of the Web. Afterwards, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cited HyperSearch when they introduced PageRank, Google’s magic formula that sorts Web pages by counting the number and quality of links to each from around the Internet.

Exclusive Workshop with the Curator of TEDxSalford

An exclusive session with the founder of the project for anybody who has questions about the project or is interested in being a TEDx speaker. Mishal Saeed is the founder, primary Licensee & Curator of the conference and in this session she aims to share what we look for in our speakers. She is a former President and Chair of the Trustee Board at the University of Salford Students’ Union and studies International Relations & Politics at the University of Salford. She has won several awards during her time at University of Salford including the prestigious ‘Heart of Salford’ Award for her services to the local community. She also received a Royal Seal of Approval when she met His Royal Highness, The Duke of Edinburgh at the official opening of the University’s MediaCityUK building for her achievements in entrepreneurship. She’s very passionate about inspiring communities through education and has worked for the BBC on the redevelopment of Bitesize, to make its educational content more appealing. Join this session for an insight on what our criteria for TEDx speakers is and how to be one yourself one day.

“The Force of Gravity” – Breakout Session with Mystery Speaker

Find out firsthand what it feels like to experience the ‘Force of Gravity’ in space – our Mystery Speaker will share visuals from space and his/her experience of EVA – also popularly known as spacewalk. Selected as a Mission Specialist by NASA, our guest has a truly extraordinary and inspirational story about his/her journey into NASA’s Astronaut Program and has also spent several months in space aboard the International Space Station logging over 20 hours of spacewalk (extra-vehicular activity) during this mission. He/she has been awarded  several awards and special honours for his/her services to NASA and the space programme. Those of you who have watched the newly released Hollywood flick ‘Gravity’ would definitely relish attending this session!

“Project Glass” – Interactive Seminar by Thad Starner

Thad Starner is the founder & director of the Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech and the Technical Lead/Manager on Google’s Project Glass. He is considered as one of the original pioneers of wearable computing as well as human-computer interaction, augmented environments, and pattern recognition. He is a strong advocate of continuous-access, everyday-use systems, and has worn his own customized wearable computer continuously since 1993. He will host an exclusive seminar on the latest from Google Glass in this breakout session.

Please note that due to the confidential nature of the work undertaken by Thad Starner for Project Glass, any audio or visual recording of this session is strictly prohibited. 

“Ending Ageing” – Breakout Session with Aubrey De Grey

A true maverick, Aubrey de Grey challenges the most basic assumption underlying the human condition — that aging is inevitable. He argues instead that aging is a disease — one that can be cured if it’s approached as “an engineering problem.” His plan calls for identifying all the components that cause human tissue to age, and designing remedies for each of them — forestalling disease and eventually pushing back death. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks the aging problem down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. Find out the latest and have the opportunity to question Aubrey about his controversial but groundbreaking research in this breakout session.

“Is Giving One Pound Enough?” – Breakout Session with Dave Erasmus

David Erasmus is a serial entrepreneur who has turned his sights to the third sector and is a leading advocator of marrying innovation, technology and social responsibility. He is a special advisor to Lord Wei of Shoreditch advising him on solving social problems through technology. He is currently the founder and CEO of social giving platform, Givey. Dave is passionate about the area of philanthropy and giving, serving as a founding member of the Ambassadors for Philanthropy and is part of The Big Society’s Nexters scheme. Having travelled the world following the sale of Broadplace, an online SEO firm, Dave set out to ask business leaders what could be done to help improve the world. Dave worked with local entrepreneurs in South Africa to help them form their own company before moving back to the UK and starting to work on mobile projects.

“Who Am I?” – Workshop by Hetain Patel

“What determines our identities anyway?” asks visual artist Hetain Patel. As a child, Patel wanted to be Bruce Lee; later, he wanted to be more like his father, with a different kind of bravery. From this question, his new show Be Like Water examines shifting identities of all kinds, using dance and bold imagery to power a story of self-examination and self-creation. Interestingly, in the piece, Patel collaborates with the Taiwanese dancer Yuyu Rau, who often stands in for him to tell his own story. Find out more about Hetain’s work and the lessons from his art in this exclusive workshop!

“7 Days & 7 Nights: What Are You Doing With What You Are Hearing” – Breakout Session by The Scary Guy

Today, anger, hate, and violence is prevalent in human communication and it’s impact is insidious. Increasingly, we are witnessing the detrimental effect on those involved from the perpetrator to the recipient, even extending to their families, workplace and community, displayed in a multitude of reactionary outcomes such as name-calling, bullying, depression, self-harm, and even suicide. In the last sixteen years, The Scary Guy – CEO and founder of VisionHeart Limited – has devised a highly effective cognitive application to the challenging situations that people face in the very instance that they feel that they have been assaulted, offended, upset or hurt by another person’s negative words or actions. In this session, The Scary Guy will talk about the very first step of his programme; the foundation for achieving a full solution for people to no longer live as a victim in any manner, based on what they see and hear from others around them.