Center for Social Innovation

Harvard trained physician-scientist Daniel Kraft went from Brown University, to medical school, to being a flight surgeon. He chats to us about the overlapping lessons between flying and medicine.

George Legrady is the director of the MAT Experimental Visualization Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Public artwork and pockets full of memories are the tags of George’s presentation. The museum project's goal is to compare how we describe objects to map differential representations of what people think about an object.

It made the museum participatory, something that a lot of us who suffer from “museum coma” after one hour, surely appreciate.

Sinan Aral, faculty member at the NYU Stern School of Business, shows the often-viewed YouTube hit of Colin, the crazy dancer at the Sasquatch music festival a few years back. The video demonstrates the contagiousness of a person’s behavior.

He also shows the mapping of the tweet ecosystem after the announcement of Bin Laden’s death.

Ron Gutman, founder and CEO of HealthTap, looked at old baseball cards and helped create a study, which found that players who were smiling in their picture lived longer.

Jonathan Atwood, entrepreneur and CEO of Zamzee, explains the problem we have with movement: kids in America are too sedentary and they are unhealthy as a result.

Director of licensing, Lara Stein comes to reach us about the essence of TEDx -- about creating a movement and keeping it personal while still telling the TEDx story.

Information technology pioneer Mitch Kapor takes time to remind us of where the American Dream is now. He reminds us that education fuels economies; education is an engine for opportunity. But there is a problem. In the U.S. the engine is sputtering.

Brian Krejcarek plays the cello for us. Then he drinks some water. All the while the screen behind him is registering points -- as if his actions are being recorded for a game. He has lived in an abandoned airshaft for the last several years working to create sensors . . .

Damon Horowitz, co-founder and CTO of the social search engine Aardvark, is animated. Damon leaves alone massive calculations and speaks to a static screen. He hits us with the softer side of numbers . . . or so it seems. The responsibility that comes with the power within all the data we have is actually pretty heavy.

Ruth Kaiser (@spontanesmiley) is smiling as she starts talking. Ruth speaks about her Spontaneous Smiley Project, a project to notice smiles -- or a 'smiley'-- that appear all around us.