Data Citizens is a series of in-depth talks by experts in the field of data science on a wide variety of topics including data visualization, big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics.  Join us on March 11 as we welcome Sheldon Brown for a talk on AI.

TALK TITLE: The Fiction Science of AI | REGISTER NOW 

“AI is a cultural conception formed at the intersection of the arts, engineering, philosophy, and science. The interplay of these different areas of human cultural activity push and pull our expectations and directions for the development of AI and its deployment in society at large. As we venture forward with these deployments, AI also encounters business, ethics, politics, and the law. We are moving into a new phase of feedback loops between the imagination of AI and its reification. Designers and artists working with AI face the challenge to integrate it positively into real life, informing ideas around what AI means for our human selves and for the profound transformation of our broader social systems.

How can we develop an aesthetic of AI that is accessible and open, moving from obscure and technical black boxes? This talk explores the application of AI in art and design while also raising the complex issues of who we are becoming in the process of inventing it. In this lecture, Sheldon Brown will look at how some of the factors have gotten us to this point and posit some productive provocations for the near-term future of the field.”

“I’m an artist—I work across a lots of forms and mediums but underlying that there’s always been computation.”

Sheldon Brown is an academic, entrepreneur, computer scientist, and artist. He is currently Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Design and Innovation at Virbela, a virtual world company spun out of his lab at UC San Diego where he was Professor and MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in Digitial Media and Learning. He was the founding Director of the Arthur C. Clarke for Human Imagination, Director of the UCSD branch of the Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, and co-founder of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Calit 2). He went on to help launch the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts in London as Professor and Research Leader. He has also been Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai and Honorary Professor at Shanghai University. His multi-media artworks have been commissioned and exhibited at museums around the world.

Quote above taken from this lecture: “Agencies of Art and Audience” . . .

The next speaker in the Data Citizens: A Distinguished Lecture Series will be Danica Marinac Dabic on April 8, 2021