TEDxSB is proud to present you with this wonderful lineup of speakers for our April 17, 2010 event at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here are our speakers in alphabetical order:
Kurt Daradics is co-founder and Social Catalyst at FreedomSpeaks and CitiSourced. In that capacity, he has helped spearhead its growth from initial idea by focusing on talent acquisition and sales strategy. He is, as Benjamin Kuo, Founder of SocialTech LLC, noted, “a connector. someone who makes things happen, and knows everyone, and does his best to make the world a better place.” Kurt comes to Freedom Speaks with an extensive background in sales, marketing. He is a recognized leader in the Southern California digital media and technology space producing the Digital Family event series, along with the MOTM (Meeting of the Minds) Salon series. Kurt is a strategic activator that delivers.
Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and Founding Director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Estrin’s current work focuses on participatory sensing systems, leveraging the location, image, and user-contributed data streams increasingly available globally from mobile smartphones. Projects include Participatory Sensing campaigns for civic engagement, and privacy-aware self-monitoring applications for health and wellness. Estrin’s recognitions include: Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
Kip Fulbeck is an American artist, slam poet and filmmaker. He is the author of Permanence: Tattoo Portraits; Part Asian, 100% Hapa; Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography; and the recently released Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, as well as the director of a dozen short films including Banana Split and Lilo & Me.
Kip has been featured on CNN, MTV, and PBS, and has performed and exhibited in over 20 countries. He speaks nationwide on identity, multiraciality and pop culture — mixing together spoken word, stand-up comedy, political activism and personal stories.
A challenging and inspirational teacher, Kip is a professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is the recipient of the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He is also an avid surfer, guitar player, motorcycle rider, ocean lifeguard, and pug enthusiast. A complete overachiever despite being only half Chinese, he is also a world-ranked Masters swimmer.
Alec Loorz, a high school sophomore at El Camino High School in Ventura California, founded the non-profit organization, Kids-vs-Global-Warming when he was 12 years old. He is a filmmaker, a graphic designer, and a community activist passionately resolved to awaken youth to action on the most pressing issue of their lifetimes.
Inspired by Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Alec felt compelled to reach his peers by creating his own multi-media presentation. Over the past two years, he has reached over 12,000 youth and adults with his message, ”Our generation is the one who will be most affected if nothing is done about global warming, so we need to be the ones leading the movement to bring change. Our voices do matter.”
A powerful and inspirational speaker, Alec has led workshops, given presentations, been keynote speaker and served on panels with PhDs, experts and professionals. He has addressed diverse audiences from school children to college students, green builders and environmental activists to politicians and UN delegates, urging adult leaders to integrate the voices of youth into their climate change discussions and the youth, themselves, to raise their voices.
After giving his own youth-focused presentation over 30 times, Alec was invited by Al Gore to be trained to give the official Inconvenient Truth slide shows. He is currently the youngest trained presenter.
Seetha Raghupathy received her Bachelors in Architecture from Anna University, India and a Masters in Urban Design from Harvard University. She has worked for multinational firms including Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP and RTKL Associates Inc., in the United States and also has research and work experience in India and South Africa. Her interests include affordable housing, planning and design for low-income settlements and the dynamics of transformation of Asian cities to Global cities. She is deeply committed to local/regional community design and a socially conscious practice. Raghupathy is currently a designer-in-residence at UCSB and is developing a planning road map and community network through a participatory planning process in order to address the multiple challenges facing the University adjacent community of Isla Vista.
Wayne Rosing’s training has been in mathematics, physics and astronomy. He is a computer engineer by vocation, and has been programming, doing computer, electronics and optical design and telescope engineering since high-school.
Jeannie’s work is creating highly-adopted technology and practices through facilitating user-centered design research and development at the intersection of technical and field disciplines. Her biology research background inspires her successful unique approach to technological problems ranging from: disaster management (Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Disaster Management Initiative), interface/software design for outdoor environments and data processing (BioACT), Human Computer Interaction Group, InfoLab at the Stanford Computer Science Department) to facilitating cost-effective civil engineering designs for multi-million dollar infrastructure projects (Delta Risk Management Strategy, California Department of Water Resources). Recently, she organized CrisisCampSiliconValley March 26-28, 2010, NASA Ames Research Park, which generated requirements and grant-writing teams for improved disaster response in the Bay Area.
Jeannie is a Visiting Scientist in the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley CyMobility Lab Disaster Management Initiative (NASA Ames Research Park, Moffett Field, CA) and Senior Biologist at the civil engineering firm, URS Corporation, Oakland CA. Her awards cross computer science and biology disciplines and include Random Hacks of Kindness hack-a-thon (Tweak the Tweet – Twitter syntax modifying behavior to get increased and parsable data from the ground), IEEE-ACM Vannevar Bush Best Student Paper, and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Grant.
Jeannie received her PhD in Biological Sciences at Stanford University elucidating organism evolutionary and adaptive responses to frequencies of temperature change embedded in rising average global temperatures. During her 4-year undergraduate degree she took undergraduate and graduate courses at Illinois Wesleyan University, Pemberton College, Oxford University (England), University of Washington and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Jeannie grew up in Switzerland and the Midwest, and is a violinist.
David Starkey is the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. More than 400 of his poems have been published in literary journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Two full-length collections of his poetry are scheduled to be published in 2010: A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel (Biblioasis) and It Must Be Like the World (Pecan Grove Press).
Dr. Rich Wolski is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc., and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Having received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Davis (while a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Tennessee. He is currently also a strategic advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Rich has led several national scale research efforts in the area of high-performance distributed computing and grid computing, is the author of numerous research articles concerning the empirical study of distributed systems, and is the progenitor of the Eucalyptus project.
Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the system wide University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). For the past 5 years, Yasuda has activated university teaching with her public arts research, developing initiatives that forge partnerships between academic environs and the local/regional communities in which they are situated, exploring potential intersections between a creative practice and community development. Yasuda has collaborated with her students on off-site projects, including a public art plan for an affordable farm-worker housing complex in Oxnard, CA, the repurposing of shipping containers into mobile art studios and the recent public art project initiatives in the college community of Isla Vista, California.
Through these ‘open classroom’ field experiments, Yasuda established the Friday Academy, a temporary instructional environment within the university that maintains its own academic calendar and experimental curricula to conduct year-round, off-site and project-based learning within “an itinerant classroom setting”. Straying from studio arts training models, the Friday Academy encourages “flexible programming in response to immediate social and environmental concerns, drawing from students, academics and community scholars to work together in situated partnerships”. Yasuda identifies this alternative field practice as “civic aesthetics” – a response to what she believes is a critical need to retool existing institutional learning structures toward a model of “anticipatory education” — one that prepares the 21st century practitioner with the creative skill set and nimble capacity to navigate the dynamics of an uncertain future.”
Yasuda has commissioned public works throughout California and has exhibited her installation work internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Camerawork, London; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Connecticut and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston. She is the recipient of two visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
