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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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IDEAS Boston

IDEAS Boston's mission is to promote innovation and contribute to the economic vitality and competitiveness of the region. Through a unique conference, dissemination of new ideas after the event, and connecting cutting-edge thinkers across sectors, IDEAS Boston serves as an important resource to individual innovators throughout the community, and from a civic perspective helps to build the region's brand as a hub of innovation attractive to businesses, college students, and workers. The core of IDEAS Boston is an annual conference where leading innovators present their latest (or sometimes their next) big ideas in a fast-paced format that combines succinct and lively presentations, artistic breaks, and time for networking and discussion. This cross-fertilization across sectors provides the ingredients for additional innovation and creative breakthroughs. IDEAS Boston was created by The Boston Globe in 2004. After successful events in 2004 and 2005, IDEAS Boston was reorganized as a non-profit organization in 2006. Beginning with the 2007 conference, IDEAS Boston has operated with MassINC (The Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth) as its fiscal agent. IDEAS Boston has a track record for attracting top quality speakers and a diverse audience. Whether the outcomes from IDEAS Boston conferences are new ideas individuals use in taking their own work in different directions, or enabling diverse thought leaders to forge new networks, this conference is providing the fertile ground so important for fostering innovation.

http://ideasboston.com

Meet the Composer: Tod Machover

Tue, Jun 08, 2004

Tod Machover discusses his work as a musician, composer and inventor. As a designer of new technology and the inventor of Hyperinstruments, which augment musical expression using smart computers, Machover has virtually re-invented music. He has designed and built Hyperinstruments for the most diverse musical performers and situations, such as Yo-Yo-Ma, Prince, Disney's Epcot Center, and the BBC Symphony. **Tod Machover** has been widely-recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of his generation. The Los Angeles Times names him "America's Most Wired Composer," and The New York Times recently called him "brilliantly gifted." Machover is Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, and is director of the Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future groups there. He was the Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM Institute in Paris and was educated at Juilliard where he studied composition with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions. Machover has received numerous awards and prizes for his work, including a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French government and, most recently, the first Ray Kurzweil Prize for music and technology. He has composed five operas, including the science fiction VALIS (based on Philip K. Dick's novel), Resurrection, and the audience-interactive Brain Opera, now permanently installed at Vienna's House of Music. His most recent project, Toy Symphony, uses specially designed hi-tech Music Toys to introduce children to musical creativity in radically new ways, enabling them to collaborate with world-class orchestras and soloists in high visibility concerts. Machover's latest CD, *Hyperstring Trilogy*, has just been released on the Oxingale label, and has already been called "a masterpiece" by the international press. He is currently working on several new operas, including one with former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, as well as composing new works for cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Ying Quartet, and the Boston Pops.

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Angela Belcher: Nature to Nanotechnology and Back

Tue, Jun 08, 2004

Angela Belcher discusses her work as a materials chemist with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces and solid state chemistry. Belcher's work focuses on interfaces, which includes the interfaces of scientific disciplines as well as those of materials. In her group at MIT, nature is used as a guide for making novel electronic and magnetic materials and to pattern materials on nano-length scales. Belcher and her students are integrating approaches from several scientific disciplines, including materials chemistry, inorganic synthesis, surface chemistry, molecular biology, biochemistry and electrical engineering. They are adapting the conditions and control mechanisms found in nature to non-biological inorganic materials such as magnetic and semiconductor materials. **Angela Belcher** received her BS in Creative Studies with an emphasis in biochemistry and molecular biology from The University of California Santa Barbara and earned a PhD in inorganic chemistry from that school in 1997. In 2003 Belcher was named among the "Top Ten Innovators Under 40" by Fortune Magazine, in 2002 Popular Science described her as among their "Brilliant Ten", and Technology Review noted her among the "Top 100 Inventors." In 2002, she was also named as one of 12 women expected to make the biggest impact in Chemistry in the next century by Chemical and Engineering.

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Adding Years to Your Life

Mon, Jun 07, 2004

Dr. Guarente discusses his research, which focuses on issues surrounding aging. **Leonard P. Guarente** has written numerous papers and books, the latest of which, Ageless Quest, was published in 2003. He served as associate editor of Nucleic Acids Research from 1983-1988 and associate editor of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 1986-1988, 1989-1991. Dr. Guarente has also served on the editorial boards of Developmental Cell,Science magazine, SAGE KE, and Experimental Gerontology. He founded Elixir Pharmaceuticals in 2000. Dr. Guarente has received many awards and lectureships, including the Academy of the American Society for Health Aging Investigator of 2001, Novartis Professor of Biology, 2000, Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar, 1999-2002, Ida Beam Distinguished Lecturer, 2001, Earle P. Charlton Lectureship, 1998, elected to the American Academy of Microbiology, 1998, Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, 1984-1989 and the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Professorship, 1989-1992.

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Stefane Barbeau and Duane Smith: Vessel

Thu, Oct 06, 2005

Stefane Barbeau and Duane Smith, product designers who founded Vessel, an innovative design and distribution company, discuss combining quality, unique design and simple solutions to reinvent everyday products. This lecture is part of the 2005 Boston IDEAS conference.

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Boston IDEAS 2005: Melinda Lopez

Thu, Oct 06, 2005

Award-winning playwright Melinda Lopez discusses her Cuban-American heritage, which she uses as a backdrop for dramas that address timeless and universal questions of humanity.

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Meet the Director: Julie Taymor

Tue, Jun 08, 2004

Julie Taymor describes her experience with such international hits as The Lion King and Frida.Theater, film and opera director Julie Taymor's most recent film, Frida, garnered six Oscar nominations and two Oscar Awards. **Julie Taymor** made her feature film directorial debut in 1999, with Titus, based on Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. She has received numerous awards for The Lion King, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in 1997, including two Tony Awards. Taymor's directorial projects of note have been The Green Bird, on Broadway in 2000; her original visual music-theater work, Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass, which received five Tony nominations including best director;The Flying Dutchman, in 1995 for the Los Angeles Music Center; Salome for the Kirov Opera in Russia, Germany and Israel, and in 1993, Mozart's The Magic Flute for the Maggio Musicale in Florence. While on a Watson Fellowship in Indonesia from 1975-79, Taymor developed a mask/dance company, Teatr Loh, which toured throughout Indonesia with two original productions, Way of Snow and Tirai, subsequently performed in the USA. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. She also has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, the first Annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theater and the 1990 Brandeis Creative Arts Award. An illustrated book on her career, Julie Traymor: Playing with Fire Theatre, Opera, Film

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Meet the Composer: Osvaldo Golijov

Tue, Jun 08, 2004

Osvaldo Golijov discusses his work as a composer. **Osvaldo Golijov** was born in 1960, raised in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. Golijov was raised surrounded in chamber classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. He studied piano at the local conservatory and studied composition privately, subsequently moving in 1983 to Israel, where he studied at the Rubin Academy of Jerusalem and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city. Upon moving to the United States in 1986, Golijov earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, Golijov received Tanglewood's Fromm Commission, resulting in "Yiddishbbuk", which was premiered by the St. Lawrence String Quartet during Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music in July 1992. In June 2002, EMI released Yiddishbbuk, a CD of Golijov's chamber music, celebrating ten years of collaboration with the SLSQ; the CD was nominated for two Grammy Awards. In 1997, Kronos recorded Golijov's Klezmer-accented The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, and this CD has become what constitutes a bestseller in the classical world. In 2000, the premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion took the music world by storm. The CD of the premiere of this work received a Grammy nomination in 2002. On commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Tanglewood Music Center, Mr. Golijov's first opera, Ainadamar premiered in August 2003. Upcoming projects include commissions from Carnegie Hall and the Kronos Quartet. In addition, he has begun work on a movie soundtrack, Megalopolis in collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Golijov has received numerous commissions, including those on behalf of the city of Munich; the Spoleto USA Festival; New York's Lincoln Center; the Schleswig Holstein Music and Oregon Bach festivals and the Boston Symphony. He is also the recipient of many awards, including a 2003 MacArthur Award and those given by New York's Lincoln Center, Washington's Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Golijov is Associate Professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 1991; is on the faculties of the Boston Conservatory and the Tanglewood Music Center; and has been Composer-in-Residence for Marlboro Music, Ravinia, and the Cape and Islands festivals.

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Using Reverse Engineering to Go Forward

Tue, Jun 08, 2004

James J. Collins discusses his research, which focuses on developing techniques and devices to characterize, improve and mimic biological function. Dr. Collins' specific research interests include: systems biology (reverse engineering naturally occurring gene regulatory networks); synthetic biology (modeling, designing and constructing synthetic gene networks); and developing noise-based sensory prosthetics. **James J. Collins** is professor of Biomedical Engineering and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics at Boston University. He has received a number of awards and honors, including the American Society of Biomechanics Young Scientist Award, the Thomas Stephen Group Prize from the Engineering in Medicine Group of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award, Boston University's Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and being selected for Technology Review's inaugural TR 100, a group of 100 young innovators who will shape the future of technology. Dr. Collins is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the Institute of Physics. In 2003, he was selected as a McArthur Fellow.

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