Already a tireless advocate for positive and honest portrayals of LGBTQ people in media, Tiq Milan now evangelizes for the unifying power of love.

Charity Tillemann-Dick was a soprano who appeared on opera and concert stages around the world. Her roles included Titania in "A Midsummer's Night Dream," Gilda in "Rigoletto" and Violetta in "La Traviata."

Doug Roble has found a career combining the things he loves: math, computers, movies and imagination.

As head of Intel Studios, Diego Prilusky is ushering in the next revolution in visual storytelling: volumetric video, which aims to recreate reality as a cinematic experience.

Marcel Dicke wants us to reconsider our relationship with insects, promoting bugs as a tasty -- and ecologically sound -- alternative to meat in an increasingly hungry world.

The beloved Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek, George Takei is an activist for human rights (and a master of Facebook memes).

Haley Van Dyck is building a startup at the White House and recruiting world-class technology talent to change how government works for the American people.

DK Osseo-Asare creates architecture with and for the people that design overlooks.

Farida Nabourema is a key voice in Togo’s pro-democracy movement.

Dick M. Carpenter II studies cutting edge issues at the intersection of social science and constitutional law.

Wale Elegbede is a strategist who believes good, ethical leaders have a responsibility to bring positive change to their communities, organizations and families.

Scholar and artist Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin transforms historical material about black identity into theatrical performances.

Dr. Hawa Abdi and her daughters, Dr. Deqo Mohamed and Dr. Amina Mohamed, treat Somali refugee women and children, often for free.

Discarded plastic, too often, ends up buried or burned, not recycled (it's just too complicated). But Mike Biddle has found a way to close the loop.

Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.

An autonomous car may seem like a thing of the distant future, but mechanical engineer Chris Gerdes is racing to make it a reality today.

TED Fellow Ryan Gersava is social innovator and educator.

David McCandless draws beautiful conclusions from complex datasets -- thus revealing unexpected insights into our world.

In too many countries, it's still normal to torture prisoners for confessions and information. Karen Tse works to end that.

Travis Rieder wants to help find a solution to America’s opioid crisis -- and if that sounds a bit too lofty, he’d settle for making clear, incremental progress in a responsible, evidence-based way.

Water is the basis of life, and too many people around the world suffer from waterborne illnesses. Deepika Kurup is working to change that.

Robin Nagle is an anthropologist with a very particular focus... garbage.

Jonny Sun wears many hats, creating work across multiple fields and modes that speaks to the increasingly expansive society in which we live.

Marvin Minsky is one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence -- and using computing metaphors to understand the human mind. His contributions to mathematics, robotics and computational linguistics are legendary and far-reaching.

Leah Buechley is an MIT electronics designer who mixes high and low tech to create smart and playful results.

At Pixar, Danielle Feinberg delights in bending the rules of light to her every whim.

With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.

Stuart Russell wrote the standard text on AI; now he thinks deeply on AI's future -- and the future of us humans, too.

The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.

Through his new project, MuckWork, Derek Sivers wants to lessen the burdens (and boredom) of creative people.