In the age of Big Data, Christian Rudder stands out. Rudder is in personal possession of one of the richest data sets in the world, accumulated from the dating site he co-founded, OkCupid. He's spent the last three years adding to his collection, mining and analyzing the core datasets of our time: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook,...

Jer Thorp is a data artist and big data speaker whose work focuses on adding narrative meaning to huge amounts of data. In other words, he makes data more human. Through cutting edge data visualization techniques, Thorp helps people and corporations take control of the information that surrounds them, using technology and...

“Economics should not be accessible only to the experts. The ideas—especially now—are too important.” Enter Charles Wheelan: a speaker with a flair for turning the “dismal science” into talks that help us solve real world problems. In a new book, Naked Statistics, he makes sense...

Rahaf Harfoush is a Digital Innovation & Foresight Strategist who has a deep passion for exploring how technology is affecting the way we communicate, work and play. She connects business leaders to the latest global foresight trends and offers a unique approach to digital strategy, ideation and innovation.

John Maeda is a world-renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to integrate technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century synthesis of creativity and innovation. At RISD, in his books,...

TED Fellow Sean Gourley has three passions in life: physics (such as self-assembled quantum nanowires), politics (he once ran for a national elected office in New Zealand) and technology (he is the founder of one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley). A Rhodes scholar, Gourley's spent the past decade using...

All her life, Debbie Berebichez has fought to pursue her passion: science. Against many hurdles, she became the first Mexican woman to receive a PhD in Physics from Stanford. She has since invented a new wireless technology and starred on a popular science series. On stage, she talks about science as a way of seeing the...

Eric Berlow is an ecologist, complexity scientist, and speaker who specializes in not specializing. In an increasingly interconnected world, this TED Senior Fellow helps simplify things. Berlow untangles Nature's complexity—the web of species interacting with each other and their environment—to determine...

James Owen Weatherall transforms our understanding of financial markets—by turning to innovations in math and science. In his celebrated new book, The Physics of Wall Street, he explains how ideas have moved from physics into financial modeling over the last century, and how they might help us solve our thorniest...