Described as part chaos, part rocket fuel: Claire Burge is the CEO of This is Productivity. Part adventure seeker, part nerd, part psychologist, part technologist. She views the world curiously, questions relentlessly, and is driven by a purpose to change societies at fundamental levels. This purpose is driven by the belief that we have the creative capacity to design the future we want to inhabit, rather than an accepting a future we've been given by others.

The Πangea world music center was founded in just last January. Within a few months, Πangea had made a dynamic entrance into the art world, exceeding its founders’ initial goals and expectations regarding successful event planning and hosting.

More specifically, the Πangea world music center is a hub that drives diversity through combining civilizational and cultural elements as they arise from music, dancing, theater, cinema, painting and every kind of artistic expression regardless of its ethnic origin.

Its mission is to become a center for social interaction and cultural engagement for all of its members and especially the youth, to host artistic events beyond the bounds of isolation and exclusion, and to be accessible and affordable to everyone. In that way, Πangea aspires to be a point of everyday interaction of as many people as possible with music, art, culture and healthy entertainment by featuring and hosting artists from all around the world, thus promoting collaborations between Greek artists and artists of different origin.

Always faithful to his love for music and the Afro-Cuban culture, Stavros Dadoush is a co-founder of the “Πangea World Music Center” whose purpose is to create a center for civilizational and cultural exchange based on the musical fusion of sounds from different parts of the world, and open to the enthusiasts of music and rhythm. Stavros Dadoush is a Batá drums instructor and we’ll have the pleasure of hosting him live on stage at the TEDxAthens 2016: The music of Santeria by the Πangea World Music Center.

The Batá drums are the main ritual instruments of the Cuban religion “Santeria” that originates from the religion of the Yoruba people who live in West Africa, and mainly in Nigeria.

It is a direct call to the Orishas, the Gods of Santeria. The invocation is performed using 3 double-headed Batá drums of different sizes that simulate the hymns to the Orishas. Each Orisha has its own rhythm on the percussion instruments, its own song and its own kind of dance.

The Aegean Team is a non-profit civil partnership that runs purely on a volunteer basis, and has been active for more than 20 years providing social and medical services. Its mission covers exclusively public benefit, charity, humanitarian, ecological, nature loving and cultural purposes, which aim at improving the quality of life of the residents in the small remote islands of the Aegean Sea.

With more than 10 RIBs, a specialized sea ambulance and dozens of volunteers, from which more than 40 are doctors of more than 20 specialties, the Team has traveled more than 20,000 nautical miles and has visited most of the islands in the archipelago.

The Aegean Team’s contribution is manifold. Through its medical department, it has offered medical examinations to more than 20,000 residents. At the same time, it has equipped medical facilities, provided information and telemedicine equipment, and ambulances.

With regard to island infrastructures, it has undertaken the installation of rapid water filtration systems, reverse osmosis water filters, desalination units, the construction of water supply networks, multi-functional sports grounds, 5x5 soccer fields, children’s playgrounds, and indoor sports halls. Special care is given to providing schools with supervisory, educational and entertaining material, while more than 7 tons of materials have already been transported and distributed to our islands. In addition, it has helped organize speeches, shadow theater performances and music concerts.

The Team operates within a stable structural and institutional environment that has allowed it to run effectively for 22 years now. The residents of the islands and the team's sponsors/enablers support and honor the Aegean Team with their trust, giving it the drive to continue its vision and expand the scope of its activities.

George Prevelakis is Professor and Director of the Master’s Degree of Geopolitics at the Sorbonne (Paris 1). He specializes in European, Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Geopolitics, in the Geopolitics of Diasporas and in Physical Planning. He co-directs the academic journal Anatoli (Paris, CNRS Editions) and publishes bi-weekly op-eds in the Athens newspaper Kathimerini.

Born in Athens, he studied Architecture in Greece and Geography and Planning in France. After his departure from Greece in 1984, he has occupied teaching and research positions at the Sorbonne (Paris 4 and Paris 1), at the Sciences Po-Paris, at the INALCO, at the Johns Hopkins University, at Boston University and the London School of Economics (Hellenic Observatory). During the academic years 2003-2005 he served as the Constantine Karamanlis Chair in Hellenic and Southeastern European Studies at the Fletcher School and  during the period 2013-2015 as the Greek Ambassador at the OECD.

His publications include : Les Balkans, cultures et géopolitique, Paris, 1994, Les réseaux des diasporas, Paris, 1996, Athènes: urbanisme, culture et politique, Paris, 2000 , Géopolitique de la Grèce, Brussels, 2005, « Pour une nouvelle Entente balkanique », Anatoli no 1, Paris, 2010, « Géopolitique des civilisations. Huntington, 20 ans après », Anatoli no 4, Paris, 2013 and Who are we ? Geopolitics of the Greek identity (in Greek, upcoming).

Tasos Frantzolas grew up in Athens, Greece and began producing music at the age of thirteen. After attending SAE London for Audio Engineering, he enjoyed a brief stint in the UK’s music and post-production industries. His work during this time included collaborations with reggae legends Horace Andy and Michael Rose, as well as sound design work for the BBC. He then went on to obtain his MA in Music Production & Music Business from the University of Westminster.

In 2006, he returned to Greece to found Soundsnap.com, a sound effects and loop library that has since grown to encompass over one million users and become the most popular sound effects destination worldwide.

Soundsnap serves clients such as HBO, Apple, NASA, Konami, Microsoft and Pixar. Its professional content contributors include leading Hollywood sound professionals such as Coll Anderson (Black Swan, Melancholia) and Frank Serafine, the academy award-winning sound designer behind the sound of Star Trek, Tron and The Hunt for Red October.

Tasos’s business philosophy focuses on the harmony of art and hi-tech, using cutting edge software to enable creativity. He periodically visits New York University as a guest lecturer.

Mark Haidar has been heavily involved in the emerging technology scene, starting his first company at the age of 17. A serial entrepreneur who combines advanced technological skills with astute business knowledge, Haidar created over 42 notable products and led many other technology-based businesses through major growth from inception.

By the age of 21, he built the first fully integrated web-based university management system in Lebanon, the first 3D game engine built locally in the Middle East, the first wireless application protocol based Internet-to-home remote control system in Lebanon, and won a People’s Choice Award for Best Web Product in the Middle East for transforming municipality records from paper to digital.

In 2006, Haidar moved to the U.S. from Lebanon and led the development of a state of the art research and development project for the US Army Tank Automotive Research Development Engineering Center (TARDEC). Shortly after, Mark co-founded Dialexa, a global product-focused technology innovation and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. In September 2014, Dialexa Labs launched Vinli, the first connected car platform at TechCrunch Disrupt. Mark also serves on the board of directors for Dialexa Labs’ portfolio company Robin.

Mark has numerous journal publications, pending patents, and is a regular speaker at global technology conferences. Most recently Mark founded Peace.Report, an online news aggregator that focuses on current conflicts around the world. It collects news articles that promote peace. Mark also launched LISA (Levant International Startup Association), which helps startups in the Levant region to launch and scale their companies in international markets.

Mark is trilingual and holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He has been featured on numerous
national and international media outlets, including the New York Times, Dallas Business Journal and more.

Carl Miller co-founded, and is the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, the first UK think tank institute dedicated to studying the digital world. He is the author of over a dozen major reports on the affect of the digital world on society and politics, and how it can be studied. This includes the influence of the Internet on radicalisation, policing and counter-terrorism, hate crime and social media, digital situational awareness, digital democracy, and changing identities and beliefs in the digital world.

His work has been covered widely by national and international media, including the BBC, ITN & Sky News; The Financial Times, Prospect Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, Foreign Policy Magazine and Wired. He commentates regularly on the digital world for Sky News, and has regularly written for The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

He is an expert advisor on social media for the Care Quality Commission, the external social media expert for the UK Government Civil Contingencies Secretariat, is a member of the Independent Digital Ethics Panel for Policing, and an external advisor on the current cross-Governmental review on the use of data science within the public sector. He is also currently a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London.