On Wednesday, we at TEDxVilnius gathered 180 of closest friends at Paviljonas to watch the magic of TED unfold. This year’s event, TED2016: Dream, ends today in Vancouver, Canada. We watched two sessions live: Code Power and Imagine There’s No Countries.
In Code Power, we witnessed an interview with the eccentric founder of Linux and Git, Linus Torvalds, who said he created his world-changing operating system simply because he himself had need for it. He said he believes that open-source technology is the way to change the world.
We heard from Reshma Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code to train our girls to value bravery over perfection. Saujani says women have 600 percent more social media presence than men. “We own the Internet.” Her goal is to empower girls take more risks, especially in a trial-and-error fields like coding, where perfection isn’t what counts.
TED and IBM’s Watson Artificial Intelligence platform issued an electrifying challenge for TED2020. The organizers will give a US$5 million prize to the best AI “speaker” at TED2020. Read more details here or on the X Prize contest site.
Mary Norris, veteran copy editor for The New Yorker, gave us a different take on code, describing her endless (and often humorous) battle to uphold the weekly’s eccentric house writing style.
Next, we heard from artist, composer, and engineer R. Luke Dubois, who, among his many accomplishments, has been artist-in-residence in New York’s Times Square. Dubois revealed Times Square is the world’s hottest selfie location: a whopping 17,000 selfies are taken there daily, he has “access to all them.” In contrast with the mind-boggling data and footage that he compiles, Dubois strives to reduce the “anesthetizing” aspects of visual data presentation with projects like his recent New Orleans art exhibit, which fired blanks every time a gun crime was reported in the crime-ravaged city.
Next, Augmented Reality pioneer and founder and CEO of Meta, Meron Gribetz took the stage and did a live demonstration of his incredible AR glasses, the first to feature natural gestural hand recognition.
Code Power ended with Raffaello D’Andrea flying firefly-like drones into formation across the dimmed hall, as audience members looked up in awe. Magic!
If you weren’t able to join us, the TED2016 videos will be available online before you know it! You can follow read about Imagine There’s No Countries and follow live coverage of the last day of the event here.
See some pictures from the event here.