TED: Ideas worth spreading TED Technology

TED Technology

TED: Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). This section contains talks generally related to technology.
English United States Technology
137 Episodes
52 – 72

Margaret Gould Stewart: How giant websites design for you (and a billion others,

Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, outlines three rules for design at such a massive scale—one so big that the tiniest of tweaks can cause global…
6 Aug 2014 13 min

Chris Domas: The 1s and 0s behind cyber warfare

Chris Domas is a cybersecurity researcher, operating on what’s become a new front of war, "cyber." In this engaging talk, he shows how researchers use pattern recognition and reverse engineering (and pull a few all-nighters) to understand a chunk of binary code whose purpose and contents they don't know.
10 Jul 2014 16 min

Nicholas Negroponte: A 30-year history of the future

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?)…
10 Jul 2014 19 min

Lorrie Faith Cranor: What's wrong with your pa$$w0rd?

Lorrie Faith Cranor studied thousands of real passwords to figure out the surprising, very common mistakes that users — and secured sites — make to compromise security. And how, you may ask, did she study thousands of real passwords without compromising the security of any users? That's a story in…
25 Jun 2014 17 min

Keren Elazari: Hackers: the Internet's immune system

The beauty of hackers, says cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari, is that they force us to evolve and improve. Yes, some hackers are bad guys, but many are working to fight government corruption and advocate for our rights. By exposing vulnerabilities, they push the Internet to become stronger and healthier, wielding…
11 Jun 2014 16 min

Ray Kurzweil: Get ready for hybrid thinking

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big…
6 Jun 2014 9 min

Andrew Bastawrous: Get your next eye exam on a smartphone

Thirty-nine million people in the world are blind, and the majority lost their sight due to curable and preventable diseases. But how do you test and treat people who live in remote areas, where expensive, bulky eye equipment is hard to come by? TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous demos a smartphone…
6 May 2014 6 min

Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance

Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature's own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab's Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology in a talk that's both technical…
1 Apr 2014 19 min

Del Harvey: The strangeness of scale at Twitter

When hundreds of thousands of Tweets are fired every second, a one-in-a-million chance — including unlikely sounding sounding scenarios that could harm users — happens about 500 times a day. For Del Harvey, who heads Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team, these odds aren’t good. The security maven spends her days…
31 Mar 2014 9 min

Ajit Narayanan: A word game to communicate in any language

While working with kids who have trouble speaking, Ajit Narayanan sketched out a way to think about language in pictures, to relate words and concepts in "maps." The idea now powers an app that helps nonverbal people communicate, and the big idea behind it, a language concept called FreeSpeech, has…
25 Mar 2014 15 min

Toby Shapshak: You don't need an app for that

Are the simplest phones the smartest? While the rest of the world is updating statuses and playing games on smartphones, Africa is developing useful SMS-based solutions to everyday needs, says journalist Toby Shapshak. In this eye-opening talk, Shapshak explores the frontiers of mobile invention in Africa as he asks us…
18 Mar 2014 7 min

Molly Stevens: A new way to grow bone

What does it take to regrow bone in mass quantities? Typical bone regeneration -- wherein bone is taken from a patient’s hip and grafted onto damaged bone elsewhere in the body -- is limited and can cause great pain just a few years after operation. In an informative talk, Molly…
24 Feb 2014 14 min

Rupal Patel: Synthetic voices, as unique as fingerprints

Many of those with severe speech disorders use a computerized device to communicate. Yet they choose between only a few voice options. That's why Stephen Hawking has an American accent, and why many people end up with the same voice, often to incongruous effect. Speech scientist Rupal Patel wanted to…
14 Feb 2014 11 min

David Lang: My underwater robot

David Lang is a maker who taught himself to become an amateur oceanographer -- or, he taught a robot to be one for him. In a charming talk Lang, a TED Fellow, shows how he and a network of ocean lovers teamed up to build open-sourced, low-cost underwater explorers.
9 Dec 2013 4 min

Henry Evans and Chad Jenkins: Meet the robots for humanity

Paralyzed by a stroke, Henry Evans uses a telepresence robot to take the stage -- and show how new robotics, tweaked and personalized by a group called Robots for Humanity, help him live his life. He shows off a nimble little quadrotor drone, created by a team led by Chad…
22 Nov 2013 10 min

Andreas Raptopoulos: No roads? There’s a drone for that

A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads. Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so. He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine, food, goods…
22 Nov 2013 9 min

Greg Asner: Ecology from the air

What are our forests really made of? From the air, ecologist Greg Asner uses a spectrometer and high-powered lasers to map nature in meticulous kaleidoscopic 3D detail -- what he calls “a very high-tech accounting system” of carbon. In this fascinating talk, Asner gives a clear message: To save our…
20 Nov 2013 13 min

Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world's trust -- time to act

Recent events have highlighted, underlined and bolded the fact that the United States is performing blanket surveillance on any foreigner whose data passes through an American entity -- whether they are suspected of wrongdoing or not. This means that, essentially, every international user of the internet is being watched, says…
12 Nov 2013 2 min
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