Rashik Parmar is IBM’s CTO for North East Europe, a Distinguished Engineer and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.
His leaderhsip of projects related to IBM’s Smarter Cities programme formed the basis of his closing talk for TEDxLeeds – underlying where culture, society, industry and infrastructure can benefit from a ‘smarter planet’, where cities are the fundamental building blocks.
Usman Haque – the director of Haque Design + Research, founder of Pachube.com and CEO of Connected Environments - closed the first half of TEDxLeeds2010 with Smart People, Dumb Objects, a discussion of where the infrastructure of cities may become instrumented as an “internet of things”.
I once joked that ‘when I grow up, I want to be Norman’!
My most valuable mentor and the person who’s most shaped my career and world-view in the last half decade, Dr. Norman Lewis was the first guest speaker at TEDxLeeds2009. Norman issued a provocative challenge to the prevailing culture of limits and risk-aversion, in order to foster innovation for future wealth creation.