Please consider submitting a presentation, paper, poster, or other proposal to the the T Summit 2016.

T Summit 2016 will be at the prestigious National Academies building in Washington DC March 21-22, over 300 attendees are expected.  More information is available at the T Summit website: http://tsummit.org

FAQ:

(1) What is a T-shaped person? A person who is an adaptive innovator and works well on multidisciplinary teams because of their boundary-spanning communication abilities.

The challenge for higher education – universities are good at producing I-shaped graduates – who know one thing deeply.  However, in a fast paced world and to work on teams better, people need communication breadth as well as problem solving depth.  In fact at IBM, people need breadth across business (management) and technology (engineering) at the very least.

References:
(1) Definition
(2) For design – IDEO
(3) For data science – INFORMS
(4) For management and leadership – Harvard
(5) For engineering – Olin
(6) For universities – MSU
(7) For global companies – IBM
(8) For entrepreneurs, engineers – ASEE/OSU

(2) Is it possible to propose speakers?

Yes, and they should submit a position statement for a possible talk here – T Summit 2016 submissions.

(3) what characteristics should the speakers have?

Most of the speakers will be either (a) government officials, (b) academics, including university presidents, dean, department chairs, faculty, and even some students, (c) and people from industry or professional associations – typically at director or above levels, but some others as well.

(4) soft skills

Yes, the top part of the T-shape – breadth – is very related to soft skills and liberal arts — here are some images and perspectives.