TED2015 Conference, "Truth and Dare," Opens in Vancouver, BC

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- TED, the nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, opens its annual conference today in Vancouver. Themed "Truth and Dare," TED2015 will host 1,300 attendees from 46 countries for a five-day program of 70+ speakers and performers.

The TED2015 program features speakers sharing ideas in quick, powerful talks – 18 minutes or less, TED's signature format – as well as short presentations from this year's TED Fellows. As part of this year's theme, talks will challenge widely perceived "truths" or share truly daring ideas across a wide range of disciplines.

"As we developed this year's program, we sought talks that could offer our audience a new lens on the world – and could potentially reshape some of our most common views," said TED Curator Chris Anderson. "But to challenge conventional beliefs takes courage, and it's this combination of truth and dare that makes this perhaps our most thrilling program yet." 

TED2015 speakers and performers include:

• Performance artist Marina Abramovic
• Philosopher Nick Bostrom
• Rev. Jeffrey Brown
• Sustainable designer Elora Hardy
• Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan
• Social activist Monica Lewinsky
• Computer scientist Abe Davis
• Entrepreneur and philanthropist Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley
• Nest founder and product designer Tony Fadell
• Urban sociologist Alice Goffman
• Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li
• Poet and teacher Clint Smith
• Palliative caregiver BJ Miller
• Journalist Steve Silberman
• Cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Relationship therapist Esther Perel
• Technology forecaster Stephen Petranek
• Animal rights lawyer Steven Wise
• Fire historian Stephen Pyne
• Plant geneticist Pamela Ronald
• Exoplanet expert Sara Seager
• International relations expert Kevin Rudd
• Children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi
• Neuroscientist, stand-up comic Sophie Scott
• Designer Neri Oxman
• Journalist and editor Alexis Madrigal
• Artist and community builder Theaster Gates
• Mathematician and philanthropist Jim Simons
• Journalist David Rothkopf

The full speaker list can be found here: https://conferences.ted.com/TED2015/program/speakers.php

The conference returns for the second year to Vancouver's award-winning Convention Centre. The talks themselves will take place in a custom, reusable wood theater designed and staged to maximize the connection between speaker and audience. Talks by TED Fellows will take place in the nearby Kay Meek Centre for the Performing Arts.

The TED2015 experience will extend well beyond the TED theater, with talks streamed live to several thousand people watching around the globe, including to TEDx event attendees, Fellows, Translators and to subscribing members of TED Live. The TEDActive Conference will convene this week in Whistler, BC, where attendees participate in an engaging onsite program and take in a live simulcast of TED2015. Vancouver secondary schools, universities, libraries, community centers and NGOs can apply to get free access to the full conference webstream here.

An online live video stream of Tuesday's TED Prize session, when winner David Isay of StoryCorps will announce his wish, will be streamed free to the worldwide public on Tuesday, March 17, from 5 pm – 6:45 pm PT.

The spirit of openness is foundational to TED's mission of spreading ideas. What was once simply a closed-door conference devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design has become a global platform for spreading ideas across a wide variety of disciplines. Founded in 1984, the first TED conferences were held in Monterey, California. In 2006, TED experimented with putting TED Talk videos online for free – a decision that opened the doors to a radically new model for sharing ideas: today there are nearly 2,000 TED Talks available for free on TED.com, which are viewed close to a million times a day, with more than two and a half billion views total. Thanks to the support of thousands of volunteer translators, there are nearly 70,000 published translations of TED Talks in 107 languages. TEDx, the licensing program that allows communities to produce independently organized TED events, has already seen nearly 12,000 such events held in 166 countries.

A number of exciting brands and companies have partnered with TED2015 and TEDActive 2015 to share ideas and foster an atmosphere of innovation.  This year's partners include: Abbott, The Boston Consulting Group, Centerplate Catering, Citi, Daimler, DAVID's TEA, Delta Air Lines, Disney, EverFi, GE, GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group), IBM, Google, IdeaPaint, Jawbone, LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, Michael Green Architecture, Microsoft, Moleskine, Nokia, N Square, RetailMeNot, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Skoll Foundation, Skype in the Classroom, State Street, Steelcase, S'well, Target, Toyota, UPS, Vivreau, Westfield and Workspring.

Live blog coverage of the conference will be updated throughout each day at blog.ted.com. The detailed TED2015 program and more information can be found online here: http://conferences.ted.com/TED2015/.

About TED

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or fewer) delivered by today's leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED's annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, and made available, free, on TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Sal Khan and Daniel Kahneman.

TED's open and free initiatives for spreading ideas include TED.com, where new TED Talk videos are posted daily; the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as translations from thousands of volunteers worldwide; the educational initiative TED-Ed; the annual million-dollar TED Prize, which funds exceptional individuals with a "wish," or idea, to create change in the world; TEDx, which provides licenses to thousands of individuals and groups who host local, self-organized TED-style events around the world; and the TED Fellows program, which selects innovators from around the globe to amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.

Follow TED on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TEDTalks, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/TED or Instagram at https://instagram.com/ted.

Contact: Margaret Sullivan, [email protected], +1 (646) 519-1350

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SOURCE TED