Though more than 1,000 people applied to attend, about 400 were invited to take part in Saturday’s second-annual TEDxUF, an independently organized event featuring local speakers from miscellaneous backgrounds working on the theme “Challenging the Unknown.”
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a global set of conferences dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.”
Speakers are asked to give the speech of their lives in no more than 20 minutes.
Videos of the talks can be viewed online at ted.com.
Saturday’s event, the largest TEDx event in the southeastern United States, was sponsored by the UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, CEI Ambassadors and the UF Honors Program and was held at UF’s Constans Theatre.
Underwater cave explorer Jill Heinerth spoke about the importance of overcoming fear to do incredible things, while UF undergraduate Dor Rubin noted success comes not from pigeon-holing yourself to one thing but by making connections and innovations.
James Oliverio, the founding director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute, said the time has come to update archaic classrooms to include modern technology.
Yvette Tran, a first-year graduate student studying electrical engineering at UF, said she enjoyed the opportunity to get out of her usual world of science and math and apply what she’s learned to other venues.
“[It was] a way to broaden my knowledge, to become exposed to other ideas,” she said.
Stefan Wolff, a first-year business major and one of the CEI ambassadors who helped organize the event, said such an exchange of ideas and cross-disciplinarian cooperation is the ultimate goal of TEDx events.
“It’s something that applies to everyone. That’s the beauty about TED,” he said. “Overall, it was a fantastic event. It couldn’t have gone better.”
