Three SEAS affiliates to speak at TEDxBoston

Cambridge, Mass. - June 27, 2011 - Three affiliates of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have been selected to speak at this year's TEDxBoston event on Tuesday, June 28.

Their back-to-back talks will be broadcast live on the web, and archived, at http://tedxboston.org.

Alumni Erez Lieberman Aiden (Ph.D. '09) and Jean-Baptiste Michel (S.M. '06, Ph.D. '10) will give a presentation titled "A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words," describing their joint work in the newly created field of Culturomics.

Collaborating with Google and other researchers, Lieberman Aiden and Michel created a tool that can identify and analyze cultural trends across centuries' worth of digitized books. The work provides a quantitative method for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to study shifts in human thought through a vast repository of literature.

Lieberman Aiden is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and Michel holds appointments as both a Fellow in Harvard's Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology program and as Visiting Faculty at Google.

Their talk will be broadcast during Session 3, at approximately 4:30 p.m.

Michelle Borkin (A.B. '06), a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Physics, will give a talk on "Astronomical Medicine." Her research at SEAS involves creating new methods of analyzing and visualizing multidimensional data.

In the Multiscale Hemodynamics Group, led by Efthimios Kaxiras, Borkin collaborates with computer scientists, computational physicists, radiologists, and cardiologists to create complex models of human blood flow. By simulating the human arterial system, Borkin hopes to develop a safe, noninvasive way of diagnosing heart disease.

Borkin's talk will be broadcast immediately after the talk on Culturomics, at approximately 4:45 p.m.

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TEDxBoston, an offshoot of the original TED Talks, fosters a culture of innovation by sharing revolutionary ideas with citizens around the world. Invited speakers are selected for their drive to make the world a better place and their devotion to implementing their game-changing ideas at scale. This is the third year Boston has held a TEDx event.