Anna LaCroix, one of 14 speakers at TEDxURI on February 10.

Selected through auditions, the speakers were a mixture of community members, URI students and professors—from the likes of URI Ocean Engineering Professor Bob Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic, to LaCroix, an eighth grader at Chariho Middle School in southern Rhode Island. They spoke on subjects as various as legal responses to sea level rise, smart textiles for wearable telemedicine, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, and how to live like you’re dying. LaCroix urged that students as young as middle school be educated about preventing sexual assault. Find their presentations, which were organized around the theme A View to the Future, at uri.edu/tedx.