Sebastien de Halleux is a technology entrepreneur with a lifelong passion for building impactful businesses.

Paul MacCready -- aircraft designer, environmentalist, and lifelong lover of flight -- talks about his long career.

Flight is about to get a lot more personal, says aviation entrepreneur Rodin Lyasoff. In this visionary talk, he imagines a new golden age of air travel in which small, autonomous air taxis allow us to bypass traffic jams and fundamentally transform how we get around our cities and towns. "In the past century, flight connected our planet," Lyaso...

Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues at Matternet are attempting to create a network of drones that operate like the internet, only for tangible objects. This company -- which sprung out of an idea surfaced at Singularity University in 2011 -- aims to deliver items wherever they are needed, even if no usable roads go there. In his TED T...

In his TED Talk, The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot, Daniel Suarez described the rise of drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools. Here, he goes further, describing no less than a coming “automation revolution.” Drones are in the news these days. More than any other technology, they capture the zeitgeis...

Marc Goodman of the Future Crimes Institute and Singularity University shares his thinking on the promise -- and threat -- of drones. For most people, drones are flying robots irrevocably associated with killing, warfare or even war crimes over the skies of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet what started out as a purely military technology is rapidly m...

TED Fellow Anab Jain imagines and builds future worlds we can experience in the present moment. By creating new ways of seeing, being and acting, she inspires and challenges us to look critically at the decisions and choices we make today.

Don't believe predictions that say the future is trending towards city living. Urbanization is actually reaching the end of its cycle, says logistics expert Julio Gil, and soon more people will be choosing to live (and work) in the countryside, thanks to rapid advances in augmented reality, autonomous delivery, off-the-grid energy and other tech...

Unmanned aerial vehicles -- that is, drones -- have a lot of people (and entire countries) hot under the collar. Every few days it seems a new report comes out about the death of another group of "faceless" people, whether it's suspected terrorist leaders or civilians. With little transparency from the governments launching drone strikes, th...

  Here's a deep dive into a provocative topic: drones. For all the rhetoric, you might think think that this is a zero sum game: Drones will either destroy the world, or they'll save it. The truth, of course, is that, well, they're set to do both. Sophisticated developments see extraordinary advances on the part of the military, while...

About this event: TEDxVilniusSalon events, unlike standard TEDx events, are smaller (up to 100 people), focused on one single topic (different each time) and very interactive. The third TEDxVilniusSalon focused on the topic of smart and flying unmanned aircraft systems - drones and their potential to change the world by its widely usage from film making, packa...

Drones are the sexy, mysterious tech craze that are often a butt of a joke, a vague solution or an ominous threat. But no matter how flashy, good technology should still solve concrete problems. Amid the hype of getting packages and pizzas delivered in half the time, what if drones could revolutionize transportation networks, connecting peop...

At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation. Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful -- and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to com...

In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready gave a live demo of his two-ounce unmanned surveillance drone on the TED stage in Monterey. "You see what it sees. Imagine you're a fly," he told the assembled audience, who watched the drone's footage projected onto the screen in front of them. (The moment is captured in the GIF below.) To the crowd...

Lots of happenings in the TED community this week. Below, some highlights. Autism awareness at the UN. April 1 is World Autism Awareness Day, and to formally commemorate it, Steve Silberman will give the keynote address at the United Nations Headquarters. Looking ahead to 2030, the UN Department of Public Information and Department of Eco...

It's a foggy day in Vancouver -- dense, white clouds hang over the North Shore Mountains, just barely visible through the high glass walls of Vancouver Convention Center. A light rain falls. But in Oahu, Hawaii, it's sunny, bright and clear. The connection? At TED2019, the Trident underwater drone patrols the water in Oahu, and attendees are...

This wow of a video premiered today in Berlin at the first TEDSalon in Germany. Filmmaker Christopher Kippenberger, a pioneer in using drones, asked artists and independent filmmakers to pick a Berlin landmark and use camera-equipped drones to capture it on video. Some of them flew the aircraft daringly over places that have never been filmed be...

About this event: This year’s theme is all about innovation. We will have great speakers from the US, Germany, the Emirates and some other great places that will share their ideas on Technology, Bitcoins, Drones, Aerospace, Design and the Digital World. Did somebody say burgers & music ?

At his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar and his team have created autonomous aerial robots inspired by honeybees. Their latest breakthrough: Precision Farming, in which swarms of robots map, reconstruct and analyze every plant and piece of fruit in an orchard, providing vital information to farmers that can help improve yields ...

In 2009, political scientist P.W. Singer gave a TED Talk in which he predicted that the growing use of robots in war would change the realities of combat. Four years, and thousands of US drone strikes later, he talks to journalist Matthew Power; an edited version of their conversation follows. Matthew Power: In a recent article you discussed ...

A flying device combined with some nifty software is serving up invaluable information about the health of whales -- and our oceans. Back in 2011, researcher Iain Kerr was having a frustrating day chasing sperm whales on the Gulf of Mexico. Kerr, CEO of the nonprofit Ocean Alliance and chief scientist of Parley SnotBot, would wait to spot a...

When it comes to drones, a lot of ideas float in the ether. Technologists see potential for flying machines to help us in all sorts of unexpected ways, governments take measures that seem hard and fixed, and meanwhile the media oversimplifies and dramatizes the issue. The conversation on drones is ever changing -- especially with President O...

If you're here from MetaFilter, hi! We're planning to post this talk in November. --eds Andreas Raptopoulos wants to serve the 1 billion people on Earth with no access to all-season roads -- the one-seventh of the world's population that is too often cut off from critical medicines, supplies and goods. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 85% of ...

Technology thriller author, most recently of the book Kill Decision, Daniel Suarez has been thinking about drones for some time. But as he says, as he stands onstage at TEDGlobal 2013, he's not here to talk fiction. "I'm here to talk about very real autonomous combat drones," he says, adding that he doesn't mean remotely piloted drones such ...

Um. Let's not shoot gay people “Hello! I’m one of those whatevers you’ve read about.” So starts an epic letter from Jon Drytay, written in response to a British council candidate’s musing aloud about the virtues of -- not kidding -- shooting gay people. New sexism. Same as the old sexism “We need to understand how the ‘new sexism’ combines ...

Forget aerial drones. Underwater drones are where the action's at, at least according to OpenROV founder and TED Fellow David Lang. Imagine climbing into the cockpit of your own personal submarine, zooming and diving through the depths of the ocean and exploring otherwise-unreachable underwater worlds -- all without needing to know how to swim....

“Our modern society has a special relationship to GPS. We’re almost blindly reliant on it,” Todd Humphreys says in his TEDxTalk. “It’s built deeply into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it the invisible utility.” As GPS becomes more and more pervasive, technology is being developed to counter it -- sometimes to restore privacy, b...

James Burchfield is a human beatbox. Using only his mouth, tongue, throat and vocal cords, he performs heavy, layered, club-style jams that seem to come from real drum machines and lusciously scratched turntables.

About this event: Today its hard to imagine that people were once concerned that the speed of a steam engine might be too fast for humans. Self Driving cars, the Hyperloop, water and air taxis, drones and flying bikes all seem to become part of our reality sooner or later. It’s time to talk about the impact of transportation on society once again. How will this n...