TEDxUofT featuring PhD Candidate Clifton Van Der Linden

February 27, 2014

The second annual TEDxUofT is being held on March 1st in the beautiful Isabelle Bader Theatre.

An acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design, TED began in the early 1990s as an annual conference in California, with strong ties to Silicon Valley. TED events feature brief lectures on a variety of topics and place a strong emphasis on storytelling, hosting talks from presenters such as Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcom Gladwell and others.

As the lectures were made available for free online in 2006– with many “TED Talks” going viral—TED started granting licenses for independent organizations to host TED-like conferences, known as “TEDx” events. U of T has hosted a number of successful TEDx events, including the inaugural TEDxUofT last May where one of the speakers was Political Science Professor Aisha Ahmad, an expert with hands-on experience in the politics of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya and Somalia. (Read about the first TEDxUofT conference)

 

One of the speakers at this years TEDxUofT event is political science PhD candidate Clifton Van Der Linden.

Cliff is a serial innovator working at the nexus of new media, public policy, and data science. He is the founder and CEO of Vox Pop Labs as well as the creator of Vote Compass, an online democratic engagement platform commissioned by the CBC that has been used by millions of Canadians over the course of recent federal and provincial election campaigns. Vote Compass has also been commissioned by The Wall Street Journal and most recently by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for national elections in the United States and Australia, respectively.