See the talks:
TEDxLSU 2015 is scheduled for Feb. 28 at LSU’s Shaver Theater. Tickets went on sale in mid-January. tedxlsu.com
NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR, the TEDxLSU event returns this month with the theme of connections. Or, as organizer Rebecca Burdette says, “how people and things interact or fail to interact.”
TED talks, with a focus on technology, entertainment and design, began in 1984 as a way for experts and innovators to share the story of their work to a big audience. The catch is that the talks are brief, with most clocking in under 10 minutes. Promising creative minds giving the “talk of their lives,” TED events now happen all across the world, with videos of each talk being shared online by an international audience.
TED talks eventually spawned the TEDx program, which allows communities to develop their own series of talks geared toward local issues.
In 2013, LSU joined in, hosting its first TEDx event to a sold-out crowd and featuring local filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists and even a King Kong aficionado. Last year’s event followed a similar path, with talks from a prison reform activist, a chef, a bike repairman-turned-youth mentor and several others.
For these doers, the talks are a way to share their work or spotlight an issue to crowds that are craving inspiring ideas. “The TED platform is highly visible,” says Karen McKee, one of this year’s 12 speakers. “But I feel that the message I’m conveying is an important one for people to understand. It’s not something to take lightly.”
Read on for a look at what McKee and a few other speakers have in store this year.
Cole Wiley. Image courtesy TEDxLSU
COLE WILEY The sculptor who dreams—and builds—in digital
COLE WILEY BUILDS MOST OF his sculptures in a digital world … and that’s the only place where you can visit them.
While immersed in an art history class at LSU, the artist and software developer became fascinated by Antoni Gaudi’s architectural feats in Barcelona.
“I wanted to start doing things like that in a virtual environment where gravity and physics don’t matter,” Wiley says. “I was feeling frustrated because anytime I looked at a piece I made on the screen, it was two-dimensional. It got me thinking about ways to make an interface to experience a 3-D object on a 2-D surface [like a screen].”
Wiley started using Kinect, a software created by Windows, which allowed him to construct sculptures with depth and let viewers interact with them using bodytracking sensors.
So if you’re standing in an empty room, with one of Wiley’s sculptures projected onto a large screen in front of you, you can move to the left and the sculpture will shift, showing you its left side. If you walk forward, the sculpture will expand toward you, offering a better glimpse at its intricacies and depth.
This kind of technology, originally built for gaming, is reinventing how people interact with computers. Gesture-based controls have many potential uses. For example, a surgeon could browse through X-rays without having to wash up and touch unsterile equipment. Wiley is bringing it into the art realm, and it has helped him discover new ways to manipulate and use technology and art in his own work.
“Bringing [technology and art] together has made both of them stronger in my work than they would be separately,” he says.
Now based in New Orleans, Wiley has tapped into the creative potential of the Crescent City, launching a loose collective known as Makers of NO. In a city known for its revelry, the group formed out of a call to creative types to help construct floats for a robot parade. They worked on the robots in Wiley’s studio, and he now opens up his studio space once a week for members to work on projects together, troubleshoot and discuss ideas.
“We are just a group of people who like making stuff,” he says.
And while that collective is usually working on tangible objects, Wiley is currently working on more digital creations that will be the focus of his TEDx talk. If all goes well, his technical wizardry will find him demonstrating how to view and interact with his art, as he controls it all just by moving around the TEDx stage.
Karen McKee. Image courtesy TEDxLSU
KAREN McKEE The researcher who helps design more resilient coastlines
IT’S OFTEN A STRUGGLE FOR scientists to explain their work to the average person, or even to hang onto attention spans long enough to get the point across.
For botanist Karen McKee, who formerly specialized in wetland ecology and coastal resiliency for the U.S. Geological Survey, that struggle is all too real. After she retired, she took on the cause of training other scientists to better communicate their work to the public, with the use of visuals, video and other multimedia skills.
“You’re often dealing with a complex topic that can’t be boiled down to one or two sentences,” McKee says. “Even if you are talking about one aspect of it, in the back of your mind, you know that there are all these other studies and information you are not talking about that are part of the big picture. Scientists have a real problem feeling as if you are not telling the whole story if you aren’t providing all the gory details.”
McKee will get to put her own lessons to the test at TEDx, sharing her years of research on how ecosystems naturally respond to sea-level rise.
“I’ll be talking basically about what are the factors that go into determining how fast a coastal area becomes inundated by sea-level rise,” McKee says. “That leads into the differences between how naturally systems adapt versus how human communities respond to those same challenges.”
It’s probably not surprising to know that those responses don’t often work together. Natural ecosystems are capable of self-adjusting to harsh environmental changes, she says, but the human communities and infrastructure we build—to protect ourselves and the natural landscape—generally can’t do the same without excessive cost.
This is a huge topic of obvious local importance, but McKee’s talk will pull from other examples to illuminate the obstacles south Louisiana faces.
“This will definitely be relevant to the local audience, but it’s important to get the message out that this is a global issue,” she says.
Brian Wolshon. Image courtesy TEDxLSU
BRIAN WOLSHON Using accident data to figure out where a car wreck might happen next
WE ALL THINK WE KNOW the solutions to traffic problems in Baton Rouge. Just build a loop! Just add another lane! Just fix that intersection! Brian Wolshon has heard them
all before.
“The truth is, there are not a lot of easy solutions to these problems,” Wolshon says. As a professor at LSU, Wolshon focuses on transportation engineering—specifically, how to engineer safer roads. But the method for doing that has mostly stayed the same for years.
“The basic unit of measurement is crashes,” he says. “We look at the locations with a lot of crashes, and then we allocate our very limited highway resources where we have the most crashes.”
Wolshon and his team wanted to take a different approach. Instead of looking where crashes happened, they looked for the near-misses. Partnering with a group in San Luis Obispo, California (a city similar in size to Baton Rouge), they equipped 30 cars in each city with devices to track their movements.
“The stuff that caught my eye was the areas where you would see a lot of atypical movement,” he says. “You’d see abrupt stopping and acceleration and swerving. Once you pick the data apart, you’d find areas with a bunch of atypical maneuvers and no crashes at all.”
Traffic engineers call them “jerk movements,” and, as Wolshon says, if you look for the jerks, that’s where you’ll eventually find the crashes. “That’s also where you want to concentrate your improvement dollars.”
Wolshon’s TEDx talk will focus on how city planners can use that data to pinpoint problem areas that haven’t hit their radar yet. Just don’t expect him to offer a remedy to make your morning commute quicker.
