Last week, I participated at the Cornell annual TEDx conference which brings together a diverse array of speakers, performers, and audience members all hoping to learn and share knowledge. TEDxCornellUniversity is completely student-run, with team members hard at work all year planning for the conference.
The speakers come from across the country and from our own Cornell community in a one-of-a-kind event featuring talks and performances that entertain, inspire and inform. Among the ones of this year, I have been very well impressed by some speakers:
Michael Graziano, Princeton Professor of Neuroscience is a scientist, author, and ventriloquist, who has studied the brain for over thirty years. His TEDxCornellUniversity talk focuses on how a collection of neurons might perceive subjective consciousness in itself and other agents, how consciousness is a part of our social selves, and how we might build conscious machines in the future. 
Maryanna Saenko is a Venture Capitalist who is an early-stage venture capitalist with an interest in robotics, quantum computing, blockchain, aerospace, and the future of food. Previously she was at Khosla Ventures, and prior to that at DFJ, where she worked to focus on frontier technology investments. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures where she led a series of venture investments strategically aligned with Airbus’ future-of-aerospace initiatives. Before Airbus, Maryanna was a consultant at Lux Research and a research engineer at Cabot Corporation.
