Elena Panaritis, Economist, Author and Policy Innovator speaking at TEDx Athens Nov.26th

Nov. 20, 2010 - PRLog -- Athens, 3rd November 2010 – “Starting from scratch” is the message that TEDx Athens 2010 wants to put out.  With a series of spokespersons and speeches and by following the distinctive model of TED which is implied all over the world, the second annual TEDx Athens is trying to explore new ideas and to stimulate everyone wanting to start from scratch and to see things from a different, innovative and creative perspective.

The all day event will take place on 26th November, from 14:00 until 21:30 at the “Hellenic World” Theatre (Foundation of the Hellenic World), Pireaus 254, in Tavros.

This year’s event in total will include 15 speeches, plus performances of live music. Amongst the speakers of TEDx Athens 2010 are:

Elena Panaritis – Economist. Elena has worked in numerous countries identifying informality and developed the methodology “Reality Check Analysis” as a diagnostic tool that leads to the tailored solution of transforming informality to robust formal markets. She captures that experience in her book Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and affirms her belief of triple-bottom-line model of social entrepreneurship as a catalyst for positive change. Elena has developed a property rights reform method revolutionizing policy application in economics. She successfully transformed informal property rights into vibrant, growing formal economic and social entities. She bases her work on rebuilding trust among all constituencies. She is currently a deputy country representative.

Peter Aspden - Arts writer for the Financial Times, having previously been its arts editor for five years. He joined the paper in 1994, as deputy books and arts editor and a general feature writer on Weekend FT. He has written on numerous subjects, including travel, religion, politics, history, most art forms and sport: he covered the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, and the World Cup in France in 1998. He was born in London in 1958, but spent much of his childhood in Greece, where his mother was born. He was educated at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, before going into journalism. He joined the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1985.

Konstantinos Lazarakis – Master of Wine. Konstantinos is a wine educator, wine journalist, author and wine consultant based in Piraeus, Greece. He is the first and, so far, the only Greek to achieve the prestigious Master of Wine professional qualification, a highly regarded title that less than 300 people hold around the world. He is also the holder of three distinctions related to the Master of Wine exam or membership to the Institute of Masters of Wine: the Villa Maria Award for an outstanding paper on viticulture, the Madame Bollinger Medal for excellence in the wine tasting exam and the Quinta do Noval Award for being the MW communicator for the year 2006. Currently, he owns Wine and Spirit Professional Consultants Ltd, an educational organisation in Athens that runs the trade qualifications of the London based Wine & Spirit Education Trust.

Dr. Dimitris Protopsaltou - Dimitris is an associate partner of the Veria Public Library and responsible of its media and communication strategy that has led to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation award for promoting access to learning in 2010. He has contributed to the EU projects Europeana Local, PULMAN, CALIMERA, Untold Stories and ISTAR. He has developed the “Future Library”, the first social network in Greece for people in cultural institutions. He is also the Managing Director and one of the co-founders of Digital Humans, a start up of the University of Geneva to research and develop a Virtual Try-On application for fashion retail. He received his PhD in Information Systems from the University of Geneva in 2007.

Kostas Grammatis - Young Innovator. Kostas Grammatis is a visiting researcher at the MIT Media labs and the founder of ahumanright.org — an organization charged with bringing low cost internet access to the world. Kostas was the lead scientist for the video camera enabled prosthetic eye called the “eyeborg project” and was awarded with TIME Magazines’ best invention of 2009 for his work. He worked for Space Exploration Technologies and was the lead engineer of a satellite that is now currently in orbit.

Thodoris Georgakopoulos – Writer. Thodoris has worked on print and online media for more than a decade. Throughout this time he has developed a fascination with technology that borders on fanboyism. These days his main focus as Chief Internet Officer at IMAKO MEDIA SA, a leading media company in Greece, is to figure out how all these exciting new ways of consuming media will shape a market in turmoil. He still writes for lifestyle magazines and on the web, dabbles in painting and photography, and operates a small network of niche-targeted blogs.

The event is non-profitable and is organized by a group of volunteers. Those who wish to attend can subscribe at www.tedxathens.com. Limited places available.
The event is supported by the British Council and the Hilton Athens Hotel.

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani,Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. For more, visit www.ted.com.