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Cesar Harada        

Inventor, Environmentalist & Entrepreneur

Cesar Harada is a French-Japanese inventor, environmentalist, entrepreneur, and TED Fellow. Harada is the founder and director of MakerBay, a community for makers of all ages to affect social and environmental impact through education & entrepreneurship.

As an inventor, Harada tries to create harness ocean currents, the wind, and other naturally occurring phenomena to solve mankind’s worst disasters, like oil spills and radioactive leaks.

Harada is the creator of Protei, a revolutionary sailing technology -- featuring a front rudder, flexible hull and open-source hardware -- that allows for efficient cleanup of both oil and plastics from the sea. As well, he created Scoutbots, an open hardware shape-shifting sailing robot for ocean sensing and cleaning.

Harada is the general coordinator of the International Ocean Station, an open-source hardware, and software mobile laboratory.

He teaches Masters in Design & Environment at the Goldsmiths University of London, Versailles architecture School in France

Harada is a former project leader at MIT, TED Senior Fellow, GOOD 100, IBM Figure of Progress, Unreasonable at Sea Fellow, and Shuttleworth foundation and Ocean Exchange grantee. He graduated from the Royal College of Arts Design Interactions in London and worked at the Southampton University Hydrodynamics laboratory on wave energy.

Speech Topics


Robots That Clean Our Oceans: How Low-Cost Design is Saving the Planet

Current oil spill-skimming technology is severely lacking. For instance, it can only collect 3% of the DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While cleaning the spill, workers are exposed to cancerous toxicants, the boats they use are expensive, and you can't operate them at night, or during bad weather, such as hurricane season. Cesar Harada’s Protei is the complete opposite. In this fascinating talk, based on its creation and use, Harada shows us how new technologies are changing the way we respond to environmental crises. He touches on bio-inspired design, activism, financial consequences, and technological advances to deliver an empowering and ingenious vision for the future of our planet—one that is clean, healthy, and sustainable.

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