Articles tagged with: innovation

Kate Orff on How The Oyster is an Agent of Urban Change

kate-orff.jpgArchitect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in "oyster-tecture."

Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

Kate Orff asks us to rethink “landscape”—to use urban greenspaces and blue spaces in fresh ways to mediate between humankind and nature.

Kate Orff is a landscape architect who thinks deeply about sustainable development, biodiversity and community-based change—and suggests some surprising and wonderful ways to make change through landscape.

Tags architect community innovation learning

Heather Knight Introduces A Robotic Stand-up Comedian

heather-knight.jpgIn this first-of-its-kind demo, Heather Knight introduces Data, a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback (using software co-developed with Scott Satkin and Varun Ramakrishna at CMU) and tunes its act as the crowd responds. Is this thing on?

Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art. (and she helped build the amazing Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.")

Heather Knight is conducting her doctoral research at the intersection of robotics and entertainment at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

She runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York, where she and her cohort create “charismatic machine performances.”

Tags Fun humour innovation success technology TED Talks