TU Dawood

If you want to change the world, there was no more inspiring place to be this past Saturday than at the Changing the World Conference at University of Toronto.

Conference Speakers

Sponsored by IBM, Starbucks, Microsoft, and Queen’s University, the conference featured some of the world’s greatest visionaries, each given 18 minutes to motivate the audience to fulfil their own potential and better our world.

Organized by Justin Lee, Sylvia Cheng and their team of volunteers, there was a variety of speakers in many different areas including Environment, Design & Arts, Business, Biology, Philanthropy and Technology.

Eric Chivian

Melody Hossaini

Some speakers like Nobel Peace Prize winning Eric Chivian spoke of their life’s worth of achievement while others like 23-year-old youth leader of Al Gore’s Climate Project, Melody Hossaini, underscored how anyone at any age can change the world.

Particular highlights of the day included Giller prize winning Dr. Vincent Lam who charmingly spoke of his ability to be both a doctor and a writer and how we do not need to focus on just one of our talents but can give life to all our dreams; Hani Rashid who is currently designing Asia’s tallest building;

Cancer scientist Eva Vertes who made a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research at age 15; and Karim Rashid who has designed over 2500 products and spoke about the need for us to embrace change and particularly to connect between the digital and physical worlds.

Facebook VP of Growth, Mobile and International, Chamath Palihapitiya invited audience members to use the platform of Facebook to create change through movements for whatever cause or vision they had and Mike Beltzner, Head of User Interface design at Mozilla, spoke about the success of the Open Participatory Model and its role is providing products that customers had a genuine investment in and truly wanted.

Anand Agarawala, founder and creator of Bumptop, demonstrated his revolutionary 3D interface while Roel Vertegaal gave a taste of the future with his images of organic user interfaces.

Thanks to the generosity of sponsors, this event was free for students.

Images courtesy of event organizers