Invited speakers at this year's TED include a voting system designer, a women's rights activist, a green chef and a physicist who runs a lab that aims to allow anyone to make almost anything.

BBC: 'Virtual human' Milo comes out to play at TED in Oxford

Scientists at NASA, as well as the designer of the federal weather satellite system, have expressed serious doubts.

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But he was working on similar systems several years before that: His first gig was in 2003 to develop an inventory control system for KCD Public Relations that would help track designer samples sent to magazines, stylists, models and celebrities.

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Kuo Chen-yuan, then the acting director of the university's computer center and the designer of its computerized examination grading and scoring system.

CNN: LEARNING BY (BAD) EXAMPLE

Paul Notzold, a designer based in Brooklyn, has rigged up a system to project blank speech bubbles on to public walls.

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The company pioneered the bike-sharing system adopted in New York but had parted ways with its original software designer.

WSJ: Bike Sharing Gets Into Gear

Ferdowsi had a designer spend hours tweaking the shade of Dropbox's button inside the file system on a Mac.

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