Nicolas Perony models the movement of animal groups to understand: what is the individual behavior that guides the behavior of the larger society?

We've heard a lot about robots at TED over the years. Demos of amazing specialized robots ... talk about what robots can and can't do ... and will they take jobs from humans and is that a good or a bad thing? What's missing is a concrete example of a multi-purpose robot that can indeed do many tasks. Well, it's time to meet a general robot t...

In Marco Tempest’s TED Talk, he introduces EDI the robot. EDI, one of Rodney Brooks’ Baxter robots, dances, makes jokes, does impressions of Woody Allen and even performs magic tricks. Though he was designed to aid in factory production, EDI also has a screen programmed with facial expressions, ostensibly to tell others with confused, surprised ...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Welcome to Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots i.e. flying robots that can move like anything. Vijay Kumar, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes robots related to unmanned airplanes. But those are big and heavy and aren't autonomous -- they need humans to pilot them. The robots he works with are tiny...

The race toward the Smart House of the future is barreling along, from Jibo the creepy home sidekick and Pepper the punny robot to near-military-grade vacuums. Yet between us and robotic domestic bliss, there remain some deceptively simple problems that take a large amount of computing. Friction is very hard to account for. To get a robot to...

Innovative and effective approaches for improving disaster relief efforts worldwide.

As a grad student, Cynthia Breazeal wondered why we were using robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms. The key, she realized: training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn -- and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids. (Recorded at TEDWomen, December 2010, in ...

Massimo Banzi helped invent the Arduino, a tiny, easy-to-use open-source microcontroller that's inspired thousands of people around the world to make the coolest things they can imagine -- from toys to satellite gear. Because, as he says, "You don't need anyone's permission to make something great."

While the mega-banks were toppling in early 2009, Juan Enriquez took the stage to say: The really big reboot is yet to come. But don't look for it on the stock exchange or the political ballot. It'll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be ... different.

Biologist Robert Full studies the amazing gecko, with its supersticky feet and tenacious climbing skill. But high-speed footage reveals that the gecko's tail harbors perhaps the most surprising talents of all.

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really...

Leila Takayama conducts research on human-robot interaction.

Charles Elachi is the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he oversees space exploration programs such as the Mars Rovers.

The founder of Sirius XM satellite radio, Martine Rothblatt now heads up a drug company that makes life-saving medicines for rare diseases (including one drug that saved her own daughter's life). Meanwhile she is working to preserve the consciousness of the woman she loves in a digital file ... and a companion robot. In an onstage conversation w...

These surprising, slightly psychedelic talks are better than staring at a blacklight poster.

Economist Robin Hanson thinks the era of ems -- robots with artificial copies of human brains -- could occur in the next century. Read his astonishing predictions … and prepare for your jaw to drop. The next big new-era-inducing change is likely to be the arrival of artificial intelligence, in the form of robots smart enough to substitute whole...

By Cynthia Betubiza, Ella Dawson and Kate Torgovnick May Session 2 of TEDYouth 2014 offered talks to rouse the spirit and a few to gross you out. Below, recaps of these fascinating talks. Robots with rhythm. Nothing adds to a musical crescendo more than a skillful improvisation. Gil Weinberg, an engineer and musician from Georgia Tech,...

Engineer and daredevil caver Bill Stone pushes the frontier -- through flooded tunnels, the remotest depths of the Earth and the limits of human endurance.

These insightful talks unearth the roots of violence and extremism while suggesting frameworks to combat them.

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 ...

Can we use our brains to directly control machines? Miguel Nicolelis suggests yes, showing how a clever monkey in the US learned to control a robot arm in Japan purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and in fact, it powered the exoskeleton that kicked off the 2014 World Cup.

As usual, the TED community has been very busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Seafaring robots. TED Fellow Cesar Harada’s startup, Scoutbots, was recently named one of Fast Company’s Top 10 Innovative Companies in China. Based in Hong Kong, Scoutbots uses open-source technology and highly bendable, durable materials to c...

Plants behave in some oddly intelligent ways: fighting predators, maximizing food opportunities ... But can we think of them as actually having a form of intelligence of their own? Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso presents intriguing evidence.

Cave diver Jill Heinerth explores the hidden underground waterways coursing through our planet. Working with biologists, climatologists and archaeologists, Heinerth unravels the mysteries of the life-forms that inhabit some of the earth's most remote places and helps researchers unlock the history of climate change. In this short talk, take a di...

Machine learning isn't just for simple tasks like assessing credit risk and sorting mail anymore -- today, it's capable of far more complex applications, like grading essays and diagnosing diseases. With these advances comes an uneasy question: Will a robot do your job in the future?

Enjoy these simply wow talks, which will have you thinking about the possibilities for hours.

Our photographer Duncan Davidson loves to shoot timelapses; before every TED, you can find him behind the scenes hiding cameras to snap away for hours and days. In his latest piece, he tracks the construction of a custom robot arena for Raffaello D'Andrea, whose TED Talk was posted just last night. The TED Blog asked Duncan for some of the ge...

About this event: More and more hospitals around the world are using robots not only to entertain children but also to palliate their feelings of sadness and to gather information about their frame of mind. In Barcelona, since the year 2010, there is a collaboration between the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and the university La Salle Campus Barcelona where different...

The path to skill around the globe has been the same for thousands of years: train under an expert and take on small, easy tasks before progressing to riskier, harder ones. But right now, we're handling AI in a way that blocks that path -- and sacrificing learning in our quest for productivity, says organizational ethnographer Matt Beane. What c...