I’ve had a piece accepted to the NeurIPS Workshop on Creativity in ML in Art and Design 2021!
Workshop schedule: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2021/ScheduleMultitrack?event=21876
Workshop webpage: https://neuripscreativityworkshop.github.io/2021/

I’ve had a piece accepted to the NeurIPS Workshop on Creativity in ML in Art and Design 2021!
Workshop schedule: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2021/ScheduleMultitrack?event=21876
Workshop webpage: https://neuripscreativityworkshop.github.io/2021/


For the FLYOVER Summit at UNL (Ash Smith and Stephanie Sherman), we produced a speculative machine narrative of the event. We had 11 humans, 1 neural net, and billions of anonymous textual tokens to produce a machine narrative to accompany the talks throughout the day. An AI writer’s room.
The Rural AI took over the Carson Center feed for 9 hours on 10/21. Find our micro-narratives and speculative vignettes between:
Start of event: https://twitter.com/carsoncenterunl/status/1451175473308790784
End of event: https://twitter.com/carsoncenterunl/status/1451302007403266060

I’ve written a book chapter on GANs, surrealism, and computational tools for imagination for Welcome a New Neighbor, Creative Machine ed. Eunsu Kang, forthcoming 2021.
You can read the essay—”Communion and Cohabitation”—here: (pdf download)

Joel Ong, Eunsu Kang and I presented an an intervention for Politics of the Machines 2021 in Berlin. With three human and non-human pairs—Joel with his Euglena Gracilis (Emotional Sentiment/Light,Text), Eunsu with her Violet (Viola/Speech), and me with my text and image agent (GPT3 and CLIP/BigGAN/CMA-ES)—we discussed the machinic sublime in a performative roundtable.

I look forward to further development of these projects and ideas with the group.
From the POM website:


A workshop for ICER 2021, the ACM International Computing Education Research conference.
Date: Saturday, August 14, 11:00AM – 1PM PDT
Description: The increasing sophistication and availability of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies wield the potential to transform how we teach and learn computational concepts and coding. This workshop examines how AR/VR can be leveraged in computer science (CS) education within the context of embodied learning. It has been theorized that abstract computational concepts, such as data, operators, and loops, are grounded in embodied representations that arise from our sensorimotor experience of the physical world. For instance, researchers have shown that when CS students describe algorithms, conditionals, and other computational structures, they frequently gesture in ways that suggest they are conceptualizing interactions with tangible objects. Can learning to code become a more intuitive process if lessons take into account these types of embodied conceptual phenomena? This two-hour workshop explores 1) theories of embodiment and 2) new and existing tools and practices that support embodied CS learning — ranging from Papert’s LOGO turtles to a preview of an innovative 3D spatial coding platform for AR/VR under development by our group. Other open-source and commercially available resources will also be examined through streamed video demos and a hands-on break-out session for participants.
Organizers:
Details: See our workshop page at xrdesign.github.io

Together with Megan Elliott (director), Jesse Fleming, and Ash Smith we have won a ~$500k grant to establish a Design Innovation Core as one of the Research Core Facilities in the Nebraska University system. This will allow us to scale up internal and external research collaborations with the unique capabilities at the Johnny Carson Center.
More details soon!
https://research.unl.edu/blog/carson-center-earns-core-research-facility-designation/

I chaired a a workshop on Measurable Creative AI as part of SIGGRAPH Frontiers, including moderating a live Q&A during the conference. We have an amazing lineup of presenters:
Pre-Recorded Panel – available On Demand, August 1 to registered SIGGRAPH attendees.
Live Discussion – Wednesday, August 11. 9am – 10am PDT/ noon-1pm EDT. https://s2021.siggraph.org/presentation/?id=fwkp_105&sess=sess243
Post-Conference – We will publish all materials on our mCreativeAI website after the event: mcreativeai.org.

I’m pleased to present a new artwork (Three Stage Drawing Transfer) at the RSS 2021 Workshop on Robotics x Arts!
I’ll also be a panelist for the discussion with Ken Goldberg, Kim Baraka, Patricia Alves-Oliveira, and Eunsu Kang. After years working with mechatronics and various kinds of automation, I’m really looking forward to this discussion with this brilliant group of panelists!
Together with Prof. Karcher Morris and Postdoctoral scholar Jon Paden, we have been awarded a $45,000 grant from the UC San Diego Course Development and Instructional Improvement Program (CDIIP) to develop and pilot imagination for engineers within STEM curricula. This builds on work I have done as a lecturer in Data Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering/ML for the Arts, bridging cultivate of human imagination within STEM education, and focused on imagination as a driver of engagement, retention, and broadening the scope of STEM disciplines. The modules and resources we develop (and publish) will be shaped with an eye towards broad applicability across diverse educational fields.