Harker held its annual TEDx conference this past weekend, bringing some great speakers and booths to the campus.

Speakers included Priti Hegde, Ph.D., director and global franchise lead for cancer immunotherapy biomarkers at Genentech, whose talk was on “Our Immune System and Our Defense Against Cancer.” Dale Hitt, a Silicon Valley innovator who helped bring to market the Motorola Android phone and the first TiVo DVR, also spoke. His talk was titled “AI is Watching You … and it is a Good Thing,” a very hot topic at the moment.

Cynthia Zhai, voice coach, speaker and author, talked about “The Transformative Power of Your Voice.”  Zhai has helped business professionals from around the world to speak with impact and conviction. Finally, Simar Bajaj, grade 12, spoke on “Breaking the Locks: Why I cut My Hair After 17 Years.” Bajaj is studying history and medicine and has worked as a paid fellow in Stanford’s cardiothoracic surgery department.

One of the highlights of the day was a lunch with 20 mentors from a wide variety of businesses. They included Tony Wong, who has worked for Salesforce, Oracle and Siebel Systems; Ekta Sahasi, vice president of the North American Business Innovation Center and managing director of research for Konica Minolta; and Jeff Rothschild, an entrepreneur and engineer specializing in system architecture, storage software and infrastructure software.

Booth displays included Pomodoro Architects, which uses 3D modeling software and virtual reality to create designs; EyeCloud.ai, which specializes in AI smart vision embedded devices; and CloudMosa, which aims to empower the world’s phones through cloud computing to make them universally powerful and useful.