Talking shop's Irish stall opens

A spin-off version of a well-known Californian speakers’ conference was held in Dublin last week

WHAT DO 3D photo collages, “augmented reality” virtual worlds and a murder committed to a Michael Bolton soundtrack have in common?

Last Friday evening in Dublin’s Science Gallery, the point of intersection was Ireland’s first official “TEDx” – an independently run spin-off of the famed Californian TED (technology, entertainment, design) speakers’ conference.

The “x” stands for an independently organised TED, loosely under the aegis of the TED organisation.

Held annually in Long Beach, California since 1984, the original TED event is an exclusive affair drawing a high-profile audience and speakers’ list.

Speakers must limit their talks – intended to intrigue, inspire and spark ideas – to 18 minutes.

Talks are videotaped and uploaded to the Ted.org website, where they are available to watch and utilise for free, under a Creative Commons license.

Past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Isabel Allende, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Stephen Hawking, Eddi Reader, Freeman Dyson and dozens more, on what must be the world’s most eclectic lecturer list.

Thanks to an idea posed on Twitter and some lightning quick organisation, TEDx came to Dublin last week just 18 days after the idea was first mooted, presenting a group of talks centred on the theme of the five senses.

“Each of the talks isn’t trying to sell something – they are just trying to pitch ideas and say you can be inspired, too,” says Aaron Quigley, the man behind it all.

Quigley is an academic staff member in the School of Computer Science and Informatics based in the Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) at University College Dublin.

Quigley found himself the organiser of TEDx after sending a brief “tweet”, an SMS-length message, on social media network Twitter, musing about whether a TEDx might work in Dublin.

“I’d had an interest in the TED series for many years and put out a tweet saying, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to have a TEDx here’,” he says. “A couple of hours later, someone from the Science Gallery [at Trinity College] called.”

A number of people on Twitter began to throw ideas around. Quigley e-mailed an application to TED via its website, proposing a Dublin TEDx and explaining that he was an academic and researcher with past experience of organising a conference.

Within 48 hours, the TED staff came back giving a thumbs up, and TEDx Dublin was officially under way.

Quigley says there are some limits to what can be done in a TEDx – for example, the venue cannot be larger than 100 people unless the organiser has attended an actual TED main event within the past two years.

There is also an expectation that there be a degree of professionalism around the organising of the event. Talks need to be video-taped and sent to TED, which may decide to post them to its site.

But other than that, speakers can focus on virtually any subject, and a TEDx can even simply be a formal gathering to watch TED videos on a big screen.

“But because of the Twitter discussions, there was an expectation of live speakers,” says Quigley.

He ended up with three speakers, alongside two videos to cover talks centred around the five senses theme. The event was streamed live over the internet.

Speakers included Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who was in Dublin last week for a conference on signalling at UCD (he is also a veteran of the main TED event in California, having presented a talk there before); Mark Billinghurst, a New Zealand researcher in augmented reality and wearable computing, who was in Paris for an event and agreed to drop into Dublin and give a talk; and Scott Rickard, an assistant professor in computer science at UCD who has done pioneering work in “unmixing” audio to separate out speakers talking at the same time, or musical instruments playing at the same time.

With perhaps the most unusual talk, Rickard showed how software developed by his research group was used by the FBI to filter out voices and solve a murder case where a woman was killed while Michael Bolton music was played loudly in a room – all captured on an audio recorder at the time.

Tickets for the event were free, but they were snapped up within 50 minutes of being made available by the Science Gallery.

Gallery director Michael John Gorman says he was delighted the facility was able to host the gathering, and is actively looking for future TEDx Dublin events.

He and others are already considering making a pitch to get the main TED event to Dublin in 2012, when Dublin will officially hold the role of international City of Science.

“It’s amazing that in 18 days, you can do a whole event, with a whole evening programme,” Quigley says.

“Dublin is a great city for doing these kinds of things. There’s also a great base of researchers across Ireland now, too, with excellent international connections. In just one or two hops, you can get out to so many people doing interesting things.”