Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
The TED2008 program was unveiled today, and the conference (27 February - 1 March) promises to be a blast.
The program is built around "The biggest questions" (who are we, what is our place in the universe, how do we create, what is life, is beauty truth, etc) and attempting to answer them will be a spectacular lineup of speakers including anthropologist Wade Davis, paleontologist Louise Leakey (she recently found bones that may redraw our evolutionary tree), particle physicists Patricia Burchat and Brian Cox (who works on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, my visit report here), mass extinction specialist Peter Ward (who just published "Under a green sky"), geneticist Craig Venter (who first sequenced the genome and is now working on creating synthetic lifeforms), authors Doris Kearns Goodwin (she wrote biographies of American presidents, including JFK, Lincoln, FDR and LBJ) and Walter Isaacson (biographies of Ben Franklin and of Albert Einstein), Nancy Etcoff ("Survival of the prettiest"), the director of the Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens, political scientist (and advisor to Barack Obama) Samantha Power, Stanford sociologist Phil Zimbardo (of the famous Stanford prison experiment), cosmologist Neil Turock, writers David Eggers, Amy Tan, Chris Abani and Richard Preston, religion scholar Karen Armstrong, designers Yves Béhar and Isaac Mizrahi, visual effects guru John Knoll ("Star Wars III" and "Pirates of the Caribbean", among others), ocean explorer Robert Ballard, "Black Swan" author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, futurist Peter Schwartz, the National Geographic's director of photography David Griffin, the director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra Ben Zander, development economist Paul Collier ("The Bottom Billion"), planet walker John Francis, and last year's Nobel prize for Peace Al Gore, plus performances by musicians Ravi Shankar, Vusi Mahlasela, Kaki King, Bob Geldof, Nellie McKay, and Jill Sobule and by comedians Zé Frank, Rives and Julia Sweeney. Apologies if it sounds like name-dropping: it's just a fabulous program: congrats to my colleagues Chris Anderson and Kelly Stoetzel and the TED whole team!
This year for the first time TED will take place in two locations: in addition to the traditional Monterey theatre, where 1000+ people will convene, the conference, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, will also be simulcast in a second location in Aspen, with 300 people attending -- and several speakers presenting from there. Both locations are sold out. While the conference is not webcast live, the speeches will be released in the weeks and months following it on TED.com, where hundreds of past speeches are already available for free. I will be there and blogging most of it, together with the TED blog team and my accomplice in liveblogging Ethan Zuckerman, and certainly many others.
For a backgrounder on TED, see this post from 2006 and this one from 2007 (somehow redundant but not completely).
Enjoy the conference, sounds like a lot of interesting fun.
(BTW: The link to your TED 2007 post is broken, missing an 'l'.)
Posted by: christian | January 08, 2008 at 10:48 PM
Link repaired, thank you! B-
Posted by: BrunoG | January 08, 2008 at 10:51 PM