Our first speaker for today is the dean of Steuart School of Business at Illinois Tech. He's an expert in institutional effectiveness and student success. A graduate of Harvard's education leadership programs and a US Army aviation veteran. He brings a unique perspective on leadership, technology, and education transformation.To kick off our program today, he asked a question that we all have been wondering. Can machines think. So, please give a big round of applause to Dean Rich Clay.Well, good morning and ...

Thanks for that wonderful introduction. But today I need to confess something else. I am also a thief.Don't worry, I'm not going to steal your purses. What I steal is something different. For now, just imagine you are a young girl, 18, 19, maybe 20, like many of you here today.As you leave this TEDex conference, you start walking downtown on State Street and suddenly a group of strangers or maybe even guys you know surround you. They grab you and they throw you into the car. People on the street see your st ...

Please welcome Michael Scorano. On the sixth day of January of 2024, I received a phone call from the younger brother of my dearest and closest friend of over 40 years. When I answered, he abruptly responded to tell me that he had just gotten off the phone with the coroner's office.My friend Fotus Manavlis shot himself. I didn't know what to do. I literally dropped to my knees, cried, and screamed.And over the next several months, all I could do was obsessively think about why on earth would this man do thi ...

Every sunrise brings a new chance to rewrite your story. You might be wondering what I just said and why I began with this line. Well, when I first heard the theme, the end is the beginning, something stuck deep within me.It felt as if my life was being spoken aloud. Starting out as an English teacher, growing into an entrepreneur, a professional numerologist and a published author was anything but easy. It took a lot of resilience to navigate those transitions.But numerology so beautifully paved the way tu ...

So, I'm going to have you close your eyes and I'm going to tell you about a patient. She has high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, high blood sugar, and she's on a growing list of medications to treat these conditions. She's tired during the day because of her sleep apnea at night.And she cannot even walk up a flight of stairs without stopping to rest. Now open your eyes. She's nine years old.For the first time in history, we are raising a generation of children that have a shorter life expectancy than ...

We have cast rats as villains for centuries, symbols of disease, filth, and decay. But what if in seeing them only as pests, we've missed what they reveal about us, our cities, and maybe even the ways that we're reshaping our planet. Could it be more productive to view them as ecological messengers instead.To explore this idea, let's play heroes and villains for a moment with two familiar characters. Both characters are rats, but depending on how you see them, one might be considered a medical hero and the ...

My power is I have a super cute dog. On hikes, people I barely know, they'll call out, "Oh, that's Luke. " And they'll stride right up to him. On Facebook, people will ask, "Oh, how's Luke doing. " But I don't do Facebook. It's my friend who posts pictures of them. But by now I know my role and I'm Luke's handler and my job is to escort him places so he can greet his public. But I became a handler of something else long before I became a handler of Luke. And that's a handler of worries, uncertainties, and d ...

By a show of hands, who here who here would consider themselves to be a creative person? And yet, the vast majority of you didn't put your hands up. It always amazes me when you walk into a room full of adults and ask people to put their hands up if they think they're creative. How few would of you would actually raise your hands? So, I tried an experiment at a university a couple of weeks ago. I had about 2,000 students and but all between the ages of 18 and 24. So I invited in one first grade class of 30 ...

Before I tell talk to you about my grandmother, I want to ask you a question. What do you think trauma looks like. Is it something obvious. Is it chaos. Is it something violent.Or do you think it can look like silence, like perfectionism, like trying to be in control. Because for me, trauma didn't arrive as one single moment. It arrived as a way of growing up.Here is a lovely picture of my parents. They don't know that I'm sharing this, so apologies. Um, my mom is an ainal woman with ties uh to the South Co ...

Oh, great. I can't see you. Thank you so much for having me.I'm so excited to be here today. Before we get started, I can't see you, but I do want you to raise your hand if you've ever made a mistake that made you want to just crawl in a hole and hide for the rest of your life. I certainly have made my fair share of mistakes.In fact, on my career journey, I have faced fear, failure, and embarrassment. But what if I told you that your mistakes can become really powerful learning opportunities. That's right.I ...