David Gray likes ice cream, won’t eat cauliflower and “tolerates” broccoli.

Gray, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon, got a laugh from the audience when he used broccoli to show that tolerance – by definition – means putting up with something even if you don’t like it or don’t agree with it. His lecture continued with a discussion of the philosophical roots of tolerance and its importance in today’s world.

Gray was speaking at April’s TEDxEducationCity conference, which featured nine professors from Education City’s branch campuses and attracted 500 participants to the Qatar National Convention Centre. The event was organized by Yasser Masood (CS’11), along with students from Carnegie Mellon and other Education City universities.

TED is a nonprofit organization that supports the spread of world-changing ideas through annual conferences held in California and Edinburgh. In the spirit of ideas with spreading, so-called ‘TEDx’ conferences are independent, self-organized events that bring people in other areas together for TED-like experiences.

Themed “Flash Forward,” Qatar’s first multi-university TEDx aimed to share Education City innovations with the community and weave the contributions of each of the branch campuses into a common thread.

Also representing Carnegie Mellon’s faculty was Matthew Szudzik, an assistant professor of mathematics, who shared the story of Wolfram|Alpha, a computational answer engine that helps power Microsoft’s Bing and Apple’s Siri.