TEDxToronto has announced its second set of speakers for 2013, and Associate Professor Rodolphe el-Khoury is among those who will be presenting a talk this fall.

el-Khoury is the director of the Urban Design program at the Daniels Faculty and co-director of the Responsive Architecture at Daniels, a research laboratory that serializes in "responsive architecture"  (architecture equipped with computational power so that it can better handle emerging challenges in areas of healthcare, building technology and sustainability). el-Khoury is also a partner in the firm Khoury Levit Fong.

"Our latest round of speakers exemplifies how life-changing certain moments can be," reads TEDxToronto's website. "They illustrate how our individual and collective choices – both big and small – can set us on new paths."

A one and a half minute video profiling el-Khoury's upcoming talk provides a short biography of the architect and professor from birth to present day. el-Khoury shares the story behind his name and the experience of a critic tearing up his drawings during a presentation he made as a 22-year-old architecture student. He describes visiting the Arab World Institute in Paris in his late 20s, where he encountered a building with a facade tiled in sensor-controlled diaphragms. This provided him with a glimpse of the future.

"I'm convinced that building intelligence into objects and spaces is the way to go," says el-Khoury in the video. "I now imagine every object, building or landscape equipped with a microchip or IP address. With my partners I'm designing and building the prototypes for this not too distant future."

Click here to view el-Khoury's video, and others, and apply to attend the TEDxToronto Conference.

The image above is from the Globe and Mail article "From microchips to algae: Finding ways to make buildings that live, breathe and think."