A tweet freestyle, flying robots and ‘complicated things’: our favorites from TEDxPenn

The creative team behind TEDxPenn 2015 had nine months to answer one question: “What Lies Ahead?” As the 850 in attendance at Sunday’s event quickly discovered, the answer to this seemingly simple question was anything but simple.
TEDxPenn was framed by a progression of themes: Retrospect, Discovery, Spark and Ripple Effect. Throughout the day, an eclectic group of engaging speakers took the stage at Penn’s Annenberg Center to share their unique views.
Here are some of the highlights from the day:

Retrospect

Penn engineering professor Dr. Lyle Ungar started off the day with a series of graphs showing the frequency of select words used in tweets within different populations. Among a population of women, for example, the most-used word was “shopping.” This brought about a round of laughter from the audience. A few minutes later, the audience erupted again when the graph for males highlighted startling profanities.
Additional graphs compared the diction of differing personalities, such as extraverts versus introverts. For example, unhappy people tended to associate money with words like “stress” and “work,” while the most satisfied people associated the word with “donation.”
“How we think modifies our brain,” Ungar said.
Happier people have a greater tendency to give and thus maintain better relationships. According to Ungar, these words carry retrospect. In addition, he accentuated the power of communication in emotion. Emotional intelligence becomes stronger with relationships in a community, which holds the key to a healthier mind.

Later, freestyler Jonathan Iwry continued the Retrospect theme with an unexpected performance. The host invited the audience to use their phones to tweet a single word to the event’s Twitter handle, @TEDxPenn. Suddenly, a beat erupted and Iwry took the stage, using all of the words from the tweets in a rapid-fire freestyle performance.
Iwry then compared planning to improvisation.
“Most things that seem novel and spontaneous actually require work and preparation,” he said.

Discovery

Danielle Bassett, neurologist and the youngest recipient of the 2014 MacArthur fellowship, began her speech, “I like complicated things.”
Her story revolved around the idea of a network — such as a highway, a puzzle, or in her studies, a brain — what she defined as “a way of looking at a system.”
Bassett’s talk considered how we, as learners, become smarter. Research expresses how the brain reconfigures upon learning. Similar evidence demonstrates that the best learners are the mentally flexible, the converse being those who are mentally rigid. Education is hindered by mental stringency, often mistaken with discipline, that locks itself into the brains of frustrated learners. Discovery occurs where art meets science, she said.

Spark

Spencer Penn reflected upon his experiences diving into the world of business. He, along with a few colleagues from the Wharton School, wanted to produce and sell cavity-preventative chewing gum to people in less developed countries, where tooth decay was the most common chronic illness. He wasn’t a dentist; his market seemed unreachable. The road ahead of him had never been paved before and thus, Penn had to embrace uncertainty.
Penn and his colleagues travelled to India, luggage bulging with their chewing gum, Sweet Bites. The group had a business plan in which they would distribute the gum to women vendors who would then sell it to children. To their dismay, the corner stores weren’t interested in the gum. Sweet Bites were unsellable.

That’s when Penn’s spark moment occurred. There was a void in the business model; the vendors didn’t want to buy the product because they assumed the children wouldn’t be interested. Penn’s team had to go to the children. They visited schools to present their product, they contacted dentists to establish support and they spent their days marketing their product until it soared to popularity in a matter of weeks. Months later,
Penn’s product was chosen as a global finalist for the Hult Prize. In the midst of uncertainty and dismay, all that’s necessary is a spark and the determined attitude to let it ignite.

Ripple Effect

Jack Park walked on to the stage, looking no older than a recent college graduate, and stirring the crowd to wonder what this man’s remarkable accomplishment or talent might be. He has saved lives, starting with the one most crucial — his own.
When Park was only in second semester of freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, he felt worse than he could conceive. Everything he did was useless, he thought, and he was worthless. Park compares the pain to the agony he felt rushing to the hospital after breaking his collarbone on a ski trip. When he started partying, doing drugs and making purchases his savings could no longer afford, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
As the next destination of teens desperate for identity, college is the scene of three suicides per day.
“There’s no simple solution for student suicide,” Park said.
The best way to save someone’s life is to show them love. Park’s ripple effect is to save lives one at a time through the only way he knows how. He shook a bottle of the lithium-carbonate drugs used to treat bipolar disorder in front of the audience.
“Drugs don’t heal people. Love heals people.”

To complete the day, the recently named dean of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, Vijay Kumar followed his flying robot onto the stage.
The machine was the size of a cooler. He explained that the robot could scan the interiors of buildings to understand their layouts before or instead of human involvement. The robots, however, were problematic due to their immense cost, size and weight. That’s when smaller robots flew onto the stage, and after those, even smaller robots joined. Now that Kumar’s advances have made robots more accessible, the question remains: what can we do with these robots?
Kumar’s ripple effect started in agriculture. His robots can use their scanning to evaluate individual crops on farm, reducing malnourishment, famine and the use of GMOs in farming. Later in his career, he started his project on creating robot first responders. The roboticist’s strides show in the progress of the academy as well as his projects to save lives where technology can improve our safety and living.
After his talk, Kumar spoke to Technical.ly Philly about his goals.
“Our technology can make a difference,” he said. “The bigger message that you need to think about is how technology can improve our collective lives.”
A fitting finale to a riveting day, Kumar’s speech demonstrated the balance between the academy and the field; that’s how ideas improve the world.
“At the end of the day, TEDxPenn2015 is not just a place to hear good talks and do nothing about them,” said director of PR and marketing, Penn student Osama Ahmed. “The balance between concepts and application, theory and practicality, experiences and research — these are criteria upon which we make decisions.”