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Artificial intelligence expands human cognitive power and is even expected to surpass human intelligence. However, AI is also invented by the same human mind that it is expected to surpass. How are engineers mapping something they can’t conjure given that the thousands of dimensions of AI are beyond the limits of our imagination? Who is making the AI and how are they imagining it?
1014 and Media ArtXploration discussed these questions with Dr. Naila Murray, Computer Vision expert and Senior Researcher in Facebook AI, 2020 MAXmachina artist Philipp Schmitt and Dr. Carl Schoonover, postdoctoral research scientist in the Axel Laboratory at Columbia University.
1014 partners with Media Art Xploration for MAXforum: 3 live conversations with artists and scientists to better understand the future of human, non-human, and artificial intelligence. Explore creative advances to be made at the intersection of diverse intelligences.
Join us in February, March and April to discover how intelligence flourishes in systems, animals, and humans. This line-up will feature McArthur Grant-winning artist, a world-renowned curator, and some of the most brilliant minds in the tech and science world.
MAXforum is produced by Media Art Xploration and presented in partnership with 1014.
Naila Murray obtained a BSE in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2007. In 2012, she received her Ph.D. from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in affiliation with the Computer Vision Center.
She joined Xerox Research Centre Europe in 2013 as a research scientist in the computer vision team, working on topics including fine-grained visual categorization, image retrieval and visual attention. From 2015 to 2019 she led the computer vision team at Xerox Research Centre Europe, and continued to serve in this role after its acquisition and transition to becoming NAVER LABS Europe. In 2019, she became the director of science at NAVER LABS Europe.
In 2020, she joined Facebook AI Research where she is a senior research engineering manager for EMEA. In this role, she supports and participates in open research and development that contributes to the artificial intelligence community, while helping to create the future of Facebook’s family of products and services. She has served as area chair for ICLR 2018, ICCV 2019, ICLR 2019, CVPR 2020, ECCV 2020, and program chair for ICLR 2021. Her current research interests include representation learning and multi-modal search.
Philipp Schmitt is an artist, designer, and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice engages with the philosophical, poetic, and political dimensions of computation. His current work addresses opacity and imagination in artificial intelligence research. Philipp’s work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the MoMA Library; and has been exhibited in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Dr. Carl Schoonover is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Axel Laboratory at Columbia University where he studies the neural mechanisms that underlie olfactory learning. His doctoral work in the Bruno Laboratory at Columbia University focused on microanatomy and electrophysiology of rodent somatosensory cortex. He is the author of Portraits of the Mind (2010), has written for The New York Times, Le Figaro, and Scientific American, and in 2008 co-founded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between. He hosts a radio program on WKCR 89.9FM, which focuses on opera, postwar classical music, and occasionally their relationship to the brain