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Black-Interest Talks at MIT

Algorithms, the Internet, STEAM, and the Continuing Struggle for Justice

This lecture will review just some of the extensive evidence from ancient civilisations – mainly China, Mesopotamia and Greece – that helps to throw light on four interrelated questions that form my principal agenda: (1) What items were the subjects of prediction? (2) How were predictions made: on what basis did people think they could foresee the future? (3) Why were they interested in doing so? (4) How is foresight related first to divination and prediction in general, and then to wisdom and prudence? The subjects on which predictions were attempted (Q 1) can be used to reveal the concerns and values of the groups in question. While hundreds of different techniques were tried out (Q 2) that will lead me to examine the ways ancient theorists evaluated them and to a discussion of the growth of scepticism. The aims and motives of ancient investigators (Q 3) include influencing policy and advising rulers as well as building up their own prestige (when they got it right). Most important is Q 4 . What were the resources available in antiquity to learn to make more prudent and wiser judgements about what to do, and to that end do we not still need all the resources available to us to do the same?

Biography

Geoffrey Lloyd is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy and Science at Cambridge, where he was Master of Darwin College from 1989 to 2000. He is now based at the Needham Research Institute, whose Trust he chaired from 1992 to 2002. He has held Visiting Professorships in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Germany) in the Far East (PRC, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore), Australasia, and North and South America. He has published 25 books, initially concentrating on ancient Greek philosophy and science and then embarking on detailed comparative studies with ancient Chinese thought. His three most recent books, which tackle the underlying philosophical problems of such comparisons and related issues in cognitive science, are: Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (2007: the subject of a special number of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews in 2010), Disciplines in the Making (2009) and Being, Humanity and Understanding (2012, all from Oxford University Press). He has been translated into12 different languages. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He was awarded the Sarton medal for History of Science in 1987, and the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies in 2007. He holds Honorary Fellowships at King’s, Darwin, and Tembusu College Singapore, and Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Athens and Oxford. He was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in 1997.

Foresight in Ancient Civilisations

Science fiction is often termed a literature of prediction, but is it really, and, if so, how does it accomplish that? Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer explores the speculative mindset, the role science fiction plays in the intellectual landscape, and how science-fictional thinking about the future can be applied to business and government. Along the way, he shows how 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired an entire generation of computer scientists, looks at why Star Trek sets so much of our research agenda, and examines the notion of the technological singularity. He points out some of science fiction’s greatest predictive successes, and he also spotlights where the science-fictional vision has come up short and explains the foresight lessons to be learned from those failures.

Biography

Robert J. Sawyer’s bestselling science-fiction novels are known for “marshaling a daunting quantity of fact and theory from across scientific disciplines” (National Post) to produce “page after page of bold scientific extrapolation” (The New York Times). New Scientist calls his work “scientifically plausible, fictionally intriguing, and ethically important,” and artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky says, “Lately, I’ve been inspired by the work of Robert J. Sawyer.” The TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name.

Rob is one of only eight people in history to have won all three of the science-fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for Mindscan). According to the American science-fiction trade journal Locus, he is the #1 all-time worldwide leader in number of award wins as a science-fiction or fantasy novelist. His latest novel is Triggers (published by Orion/Victor Gollancz).

Rob has published in both of the world’s leading scientific journals, Science (guest editorial) and Nature (fiction), and he is a frequent guest on science topics on BBC Radio and Monocle 24. He has done consulting for Canada’s Department of Justice (on what laws Canada should adopt related to the privacy of genetic information) and for major corporations including Motorola, Lockheed Martin, Sanofi-Aventis, and CA (Computer Associates), and he’s previously spoken all over the world, including at the Library of Congress and the Googleplex (the international headquarters of Google). In 2007, he participated in the invitation-only workshop The Future of Intelligence in the Cosmos at the NASA Ames Research Center. In 2010 and again in 2012, he was the only science-fiction writer invited to speak at the SETI Institute’s first two SET Icon conferences on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2011, he became an invited contributor to the 100 Year Starship initiative, sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Rob hosts the skeptical TV series Supernatural Investigator for Canada’s Vision TV. He is past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Toronto. Visit his website at http://sfwriter.com.

Foresight and Fiction

The idea of music as a harbinger of future social trends is associated with French banker, economist, and all-purpose intellectual Jacques Attali, but the idea that music gives access to a time that is different from that of the everyday world seems to be as old as music itself. The conception of musical works as abstract objects, located in time but not intrinsically temporal, reflects Platonic and medieval thinking yet remains fundamental to the still dominant orthodoxies of modernist music aesthetics and theory: just as in a recording, time is translated into space, with the past always present and the future always already known. Such rationalising models do little justice to the varieties of musical time as experienced, performed, and indeed composed. As practice rather than theory, music is highly unpredictable, both at the micro-level of individual musical experiences and the macro-level of changes in musical style and in patterns of consumption. Hence the conspicuous lack of foresight that has devastated the contemporary record industry, which attempted to perpetuate an outdated business model rather than embracing the technological and social changes that Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Aram Sinnreich respectively call convergence culture, remix culture, and configurable culture. Sinnreich provides the most fully developed version of Attali’s idea of music as harbinger of social trends: networked patterns of musical production and consumption are seen as a template for democratised patterns of social interaction. But the linkage of musical micro-level and social macro-level remains unconvincing, and many aspects of Sinnreich’s configurable culture can be found in earlier musical cultures (it is only modernist aesthetics and theory that blind us to them). I conclude that, rather than seeing music as providing special insight into the future, it is more productive to see it as a privileged arena within which to understand aspects of the present.

Biography

Nicholas Cook took up the 1684 Professorship in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.

His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (with Anthony Pople, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009). His latest book, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford, 2007), received the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory in 2010. A further collection is in press: Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines, coedited with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press). Also nearing publication is a book on performance analysis, integrating computational approaches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disciplinary performance theory, while he is currently working on a study of recordings of Webern’s Piano Variations funded by an AHRC Fellowship. Planned projects thereafter includes books on music as creative practice and on relational musicology.

A former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Higher Education Funding Councils’ 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Europe.

Foresight in Music

IBM Research and Memorial Sloan Kettering are investigating the use of cognitive computing-based visual analytics for skin cancer image analysis. IBM's technical coordinator for the collaboration, Dr. Noel Codella, discusses how the system "sees" cancer to help doctors better-identify cancers such as melanoma.
Read more here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45710.wss

Using Cognitive Computing to Visually Analyze Skin Cancer

(Co-sponsored with both MIT Global Studies and Languages and Women’s and Gender Studies.)

21st century popular culture, circulated by media, enables unusual affiliations of bodies in motion. When black social dances are practiced by American political leaders, as when First Lady Michelle Obama demonstrates “the Dougie” in her “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, or when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dances alongside others during her 2012 tour of Africa, black social dance moves toward a center of considerations of embodied knowledge.  This talk wonders at the intertwining of African American social dances and political leadership, conceived as the bodies of elected officials. In addition we will consider the commercial and socially-inscribed leaders of popular cultural, including Beyonce and Brittany Spears, as arbiters of African American social dance. Ultimately, the talk suggests a haunting presence of queers-of-color aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of black social dance, continually – and ironically – conceived as part and parcel of rhetorics of liberation and freedom of movement. As queer dances emerge in marginalized relationship to mainstream concerns of identity and gesture, and then migrate toward shifting centers of popular culture, they shimmer and switch, bringing to light – perhaps – possibilities of creative aesthetic social dissent.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (de la Torre Bueno Prize, Oxford University Press, 2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin and an outstanding group of artists and researchers, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. A director and writer, he is the outgoing President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. He taught at MIT for many years, in Music and Theater Arts and Comparative Media Studies.

Thomas DeFrantz: "Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture"

Dr. Noam Chomsky is a famed linguist, political activist, prolific author and recognized public speaker, who has spent the last 60 years living a double life – one as a political activist and another as a linguist. His activism allegedly made him the US government’s public enemy number one. As a linguist he is often credited for dethroning behaviorism and becoming the “father of modern linguistics” (and/or cognitive science). Put together his accomplishments are the reasons why he is often listed as one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. And so I was very much looking forward to interviewing him on Singularity 1 on 1.

Unfortunately our time together was delayed, then rushed and a bit shorter than anticipated. So I was pretty nervous throughout and messed up some of my questions and timing. Never-the-less, I believe that we still had a worthy conversation with Dr. Chomsky and I appreciate the generous though limited time that he was able to grant me.

During our 30 minute conversation with Noam Chomsky we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: the balance between his academic and his political life; artificial intelligence and reverse engineering the human brain; why in his view both Deep Blue and Watson are little more than PR; the slow but substantial progress of our civilization; the technological singularity…

My favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with Dr. Chomsky is:

“What’s a program? A program is a theory; it’s a theory written in an arcane, complex notation designed to be executed by the machine. What about the program, you ask? The same questions you ask about any other theory: Does it give insight and understanding? These theories don’t. So what we’re asking here is: Can we design a theory of being smart? We’re eons away from doing that.”

Noam Chomsky: The Singularity is Science Fiction!

Human-level (“general”) AI is more difficult to achieve than most people think. One key obstacle is relevance, a conceptual version of the frame problem. Another is lack of the semantic web. Yet another is the difficulty of computer vision. So artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn’t on the horizon. Possibly, it may never be achieved. No AGI means no Singularity.

Even so, there’s already plenty to worry about—and future AI advances will add more. Areas of concern include unemployment, computer companions, and autonomous robots (some, military). Worries about the (illusory) Singularity have had the good effect of waking up the AI community (and others) to these dangers. At last, they are being taken seriously.

Professor Margaret Boden is a world-leading academic in the study of intelligence, both artificial and otherwise. She is is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. She was the founding-Dean of Sussex University’s School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, a pioneering centre for research into intelligence and the mechanisms underlying it — in humans, other animals, or machines. The School’s teaching and research involves an unusual combination of the humanities, science, and technology.

Professor Boden has also been an important participant in the recent international discussions over the long-term impacts of AI. She was a member of the AAAI’s 08/09 Presidential Panel on long-term AI futures (http://www.aaai.org/Organization/presidential-panel.php), and also took part in the recent Puerto Rico conference on the Future of AI, co-organised by CSER (http://futureoflife.org/misc/ai_conference); she is therefore uniquely well-placed to discuss near- and long-term prospects in AI. 

Human - Level AI- Is It Looming Or Illusory?

What if you could bring the best version of yourself to everything you do everyday? What if you could get the most out of your mind and brain -- or more scientifically, your "cognitive performance" -- without going to those old addictive standbys like coffee or RedBulls?

The promise of nootropics or cognitive enhancers is to help us work better and more productively (for example, through more stamina and working memory); stay more awake and alert (without the sudden jolt of coffee); sleep better; and even protect our brains against cognitive impairments or neuro diseases like Alzheimer's.

Geoffrey Woo and Michael Brandt, the founders of Nootrobox, believe that nootropics are possible for everyone -- not just for a select or hobbyist fringe of society -- and that part of that mainstreaming will involve a lot of hard science, hard data, and frankly, good user experience and better packaging of raw components ... the same things, in fact, that helped mainstream personal computers from the days of the early hacking at the Homebrew Club to Apple and the world of mass computing today. But how does nootropics move beyond a community movement ... and how does it fit into the context of other trends such as biohacking, quantified self, and more? Is the human body really the next 'platform'? All this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast.

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The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
 
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a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself

Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.

Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"

We are entering a new age in our relationship with technology, an age where our devices understand us as we communicate in human language. An age where machines know what we need before even we do. And an age where computers not only understand trends, but set them. At least, that's the pitch. So what is cognitive computing, why does it matter, how will it change the digital landscape, and what is the role of the digital strategist within it?

Episode 46: The Digital Strategist In The Age Of Cognitive Computing

Sometimes when we say an algorithm discriminates, we mean it can tell the difference between two types of items.  But in this episode, we'll talk about another, more troublesome side to discrimination: algorithms can be... racist?  Sexist?  Ageist?  Yes to all of the above.  It's an important thing to be aware of, especially when doing people-centered data science.  We'll discuss how and why this happens, and what solutions are out there (or not).

Relevant Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/upshot/when-algorithms-discriminate.html
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human-bias-an-uneasy-pair/
http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/why-machines-discriminate-and-how-to-fix-them/
https://medium.com/@geomblog/when-an-algorithm-isn-t-2b9fe01b9bb5#.auxqi5srz




Discriminatory Algorithms

 Man Falls "In Love" with Computer OS, Deceitfully Drains of All He Is, it Dumps Him, and Others only in its quest for more of the knowledge of God: How He Created Humans beings to "be". Are Computers Taking Over? Are you turning to Computers for Relationship? Don't Miss the powerful and shocking program!

What is it that is within each of us to desire a connected relationship with one another? Regardless of who we are, each of us seeks it. What if businesses understood this and then created a product that was capable of interacting with us as another human being would? Meet IBM’s ‘Watson’. Built on the design of “cognitive computing”, this ‘super computer’ is literally able to audibly communicate and interact with human beings.

For some of us, we may find ourselves having to adapt to these changing environments of technology that seemed to never be possible. But for us who are growing up amidst this technology, it is an everyday part of our lives. For example, when Annabelle has a casual conversation about her upcoming 7th birthday and the fact that she likes pink frosting, most would think it would be normal. That is, until you understand that she is talking to ‘Watson’, a computer. 
Read More
http://tinyurl.com/gvl3dmb

Cognitive Computing How Computers Are Thinking Faster And Smarter Than Humans Ever Have

When you go to Harvard Business School and then to McKinsey company to work in private equity, there’s really only one thing left to do - go to Silicon Valley and start an AI startup. At least, this is exactly what CEO Praful Krishna did when he moved to San Francisco to start Coseer, an AI company focused on understanding natural language and unstructured data. In this week’s episode, we speak about where unstructured data lives in a business, and how a business can be changed if the right data is unlocked. Krishna also discusses his experience in how executives are making decisions around how or how not to leverage AI in their companies.

How Cognitive Computing Can Change the Nature of Business Operations


Algorithms have become a powerful force in the world, but for all the impressive good they do, they sometimes show some worrying tendencies. Algorithms that discriminate are a problem that nobody's found a solution for yet. This week, we discuss why some algorithms appear to be racist, and whether there's anything that can be done about it.

The Techdirt Podcast

Is Your Algorithm Racist?

In this week's podcast InfoQ’s editor-in-chief Charles Humble talks to Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil. O'Neil is the author of the blog mathbabe.org. She was the former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tow Center and was employed as Data Science Consultant at Johnson Research Labs. O'Neil earned a mathematics Ph.D. from Harvard University. Topics discussed include her book “Weapons of Math Destruction,” predictive policing models, the teacher value added model, approaches to auditing algorithms and whether government regulation of the field is needed.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is a class of pernicious big data algorithms that are increasingly controlling society but are not open to scrutiny.
 - Flawed data can result in an algorithm that is, for instance, racist and sexist.  For example, the data used in predictive policing models is racist. But people tend to be overly trusting of algorithms because they are mathematical.
 - Data scientists have to make ethical decisions even if they don’t acknowledge it. Often problems stem from an abdication of responsibility.
 - Auditing for algorithms is still a very young field with ongoing academic research exploring approaches.
 - Government regulation of the industry may well be required.

Notes and links can be found on http://bit.ly/2eYVb9q

Weapons of math destruction

0m:43s - The central thesis of the book is that whilst not all algorithms are bad, there is a class of pernicious big data algorithms that are increasingly controlling society.
1m:32s - The classes of algorithm that O'Neil is concerned about - the weapons of math destruction - have three characteristics: they are widespread and impact on important decisions like whether someone can go to college or get a job, they are somehow secret so that the people who are being targeted don’t know they are being scored or don’t understand how their score is computed; and the third characteristic is they are destructive - they ruin lives.
2m:51s - These characteristics undermine the original intention of the algorithm, which is often trying to solve big society problems with the help of data.

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2eYVb9q

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Cathy O'Neil on Pernicious Machine Learning Algorithms and How to Audit Them

Chris Sacca, activist investor, recently argued that Black Twitter IS Twitter. For example, African American usage of the service often dominates user metrics in the United States, despite their minority demographic numbers as computer users. This talk by André Brock unpacks Black Twitter use from two perspectives: analysis of the interface and associated practice alongside discourse analysis of Twitter’s utility and audience. Using examples of Black Twitter practice, Brock offers that Twitter’s feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity. Thus, Twitter’s outsized function as mechanism for cultural critique and political activism can be understood as the awakening of Black digital practice and an abridging of a digital divide.

André Brock is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges Science and Technology Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. Through December 2016, he is a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

André Brock: "Black + Twitter: A Cultural Informatics Approach"

Women of color have a variety of responses when employing digital technologies for empowerment. New communication technologies have expanded the opportunities and potential for marginalized communities to mobilize in this context counter to the dominant, mainstream media. This growth reflects the mobilization of marginalized communities within virtual and real spaces reflecting a systematic change in who controls the narrative. No longer are mainstream media the only disseminators of messages or producers of content. Women, in particular, are employing social media to highlight issues that are often ignored in dominant discourse. However, access itself neither ensures power nor guarantees a shift in the dominant ideology (as the use of #Misogynoir by Katy Perry reveals among other examples). Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities. Yet the conceptual frameworks intended to capture the digital lives of women cannot deconstruct the structural inequalities of these spaces.

Kishonna L. Gray (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is currently a MLK Visiting Scholar in Women & Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She is also the Founder of the Critical Gaming Lab at Eastern Kentucky University. She is expanding on the work created here to develop new initiatives surrounding Equity in Gaming (www.equityingaming.com). Her work broadly intersects identity and new media although she has a particular focus on gaming. Her most recent book, Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within that virtual gaming community.

Kishonna Gray, "#Misogynoir, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and other forms of Black Digital Feminisms"

When we covered the Word2Vec algorithm for embedding words, we mentioned parenthetically that the word embeddings it produces can sometimes be a little bit less than ideal--in particular, gender bias from our society can creep into the embeddings and give results that are sexist. For example, occupational words like "doctor" and "nurse" are more highly aligned with "man" or "woman," which can create problems because these word embeddings are used in algorithms that help people find information or make decisions. However, a group of researchers has released a new paper detailing ways to de-bias the embeddings, so we retain gender info that's not particularly problematic (for example, "king" vs. "queen") while correcting bias.

Debiasing Word Embeddings

Writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher explains how racial and sexual bias finds its way from society into digital products (and back into society) as a result of the tech industry's unwillingness to examine its own values, and they way their work engages with and shapes society beyond the mostly white, male corporate campuses of Silicon Valley.

Sara is author of "Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech" from W.W. Norton: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-63463-1/

Social inequality is coded deep within the devices of Silicon Valley.

Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” systems.

In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the “Living Liberia Fabric,” an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, “Generative Visual Renku,” an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects.

Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Fox Harrell, "The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab"

S. Craig Watkins studies young people’s social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.

He is the author of three books, including The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s research network on Connected Learning.
Among other things his work in the network will include leading a team of researchers in an ethnographic study of teens and their participation in diverse digital media cultures and communities.

Working with an Austin-based game studio Craig is also developing a game design workshop for young teens. The workshop will explore the connections between digital media, game authorship, literacy, and civic engagement.

Craig blogs for dmlcentral, the online presence for the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub hosted at the UC Irvine campus, and the HuffingtonPost. For updates on Craig’s research visit his website, theyoungandthedigital.com.

S. Craig Watkins, "The Digital Edge: Exploring the Digital Practices of Black and Latino Youth"

Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.

You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.