LONG BEACH, California -- Microsoft founder Bill
Gates and world wide web founder Tim Berners-Lee are among the luminaries gathering in Southern California this week with a host of other industry titans, celebrities, academics and alpha geeks to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Technology, Entertainment and
Design (TED) conference.
The four-day,
$6,000 a head, invitation-only event, dubbed by some as "Davos for the Digerati set," begins Wednesday, and launches a new project this year with a fellowship program that opens TED's elite doors to more than three dozen up-and-coming thinkers and doers from developing regions who attend for free. The fellows this year include Erik Hersman and Juliana Rotich, who created Ushahidi.com, a crowdsourcing site that was used to track civil unrest surrounding the election in Kenya last year. Forensic biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira, who combats poaching and illegal trafficking of wild animals in Brazil, is also a fellow.
About 1,500 people are expected to attend TED. This year's conference theme is "The
Great Unveiling," and speakers are tasked with presenting something new they haven't discussed before, though not all of the talks fill this mandate.
The speaker list includes Gates, who will discuss his new focus on philanthropy after resigning from day-to-day management of Microsoft last year. Peter
Singer, author of Wired for War, will talk about how robots have taken over the battlefield. Statistician
Nate Silver will reveal how he applied his baseball forecasting technique to predict the winner of last year's presidential primaries and general election. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the popular Eat, Pray, Love will talk about her new work on why geniuses are made rather than born. And neurological anthropologist and author Oliver Sacks will discuss perception and how the mind tricks us into seeing things.
Founded in 1984 by architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman as a kind of dream dinner party for all the people he wanted to meet, the conference was bought by publisher Chris Anderson in 2001, whose non-profit Sapling
Foundation has run it ever since, along with the TED Global conference held in Oxford, England, each year, and the satellite TED
Africa and TED India events.
Since taking over eight years ago, Anderson has moved the conference to focus more on philanthropy and social consciousness. The primary purpose, though, is still to mix up people from the various sciences and arts to learn about the latest developments in these areas and gain inspiration from ideas outside their primary fields of interest.
The conference attracts a wide range of attendees, whose accomplishments and notoriety often rival the speakers -– Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, musician Peter Gabriel and comedian Robin
Williams have appeared at past events. Past speakers have included former Vice President Al Gore, filmmaker JJ
Abrams, Sims creator Will Wright and physicist Stephen
Hawking.
Generally the talks that seem likely to produce the least response turn out to be the audience favorites, such as neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's tour of her stroke. A presentation by Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, made statistics sexy while changing perceptions of the developing world.
The TED prize continues this year, with three new recipients set to reveal their wishes to the conference on Thursday. The prize is an annual award launched in
2005 to recognize individuals whose work has had and will have a powerful and positive impact on society. It provides each recipient with $100,000 and the chance to ask for help from the TED community in achieving one grand wish to change the world.
Past winners have included U2 singer Bono and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
TED Prize 2009 winners are oceanographer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter and former economist and trained musician Jose Antonio Abreu.
Earle was chief scientist for the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere
Administration in the early 1990s, and is co-founder of Deep Ocean
Exploration and Research, a group that designs and builds deep ocean equipment for underwater exploration.
Tarter directs the SETI Institute's Center for SETI Research, which searches for sentient extra-terrestrials.
Abreu is founder of El
Sistema, the world-renowned music-education program that has brought classical music training to more than 200,000 impoverished Venezuelan children and teens. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who has been tapped to become the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was trained under El Sistema.
Those who aren't invited to TED can see the conference presentations once they're posted to the web several weeks after the conference ends. Since TED began posting videos of its talks in 2006, more than 15 million visitors have viewed them.
Wired.com will publish stories from the conference all week.
