I gave a talk, “Embedded Computing in the Intimate Everyday” at Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). It was great to share my work with the researchers at Nokia Bell, and spend time brainstorming on art and empathy.

The Clarke Center team had a two day visit at Nokia Bell Labs Murray Hill, NJ headqaruters. What an awesome experience! I got to play the voder, one of the original speech synthesis technologies developed at Bell. Many amazing projects came out of E.A.T.’s arts and engineering collaboration in the 60s. I’m excited to develop new work with the Nokia Bell engineers.

I’ll be showing Rover and A Machine for Living In as part of the Ecologies of Transformation exhibition at ACM Designing Interactive Systems/Cognition and Creativity conferences in San Diego in June.

Read more about the exhibition and works here: https://ecologiesoftransformation.ucsd.edu/

This Week @ UC San Diego had a nice article about my Machine Learning for the Arts Course. This interdisciplinary course is the first ML and Arts course offered at UCSD.

Read more here: https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/making-art-with-ai

My collaborator Ying Wu (from the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience) and I are thrilled to have received a grant from the California Arts Council to study empathy and attention in the experience of art. I can’t wait to start work on the project this summer!

With support of the California Arts Council, the Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD will combine state-of-the-art wearable biosensors and machine perception to study individual and culturally-mediated variation in aesthetic engagement during real-world exploration of visual art at the San Diego Museum of Art. This work will examine neurocognitive and physiological correlates of empathy, attention, and emotion in order to explore how art museums can cultivate empathic understanding.

Full announcement: https://www.cac.ca.gov/programs/program_files/1819/CurrentGrantees/FY18-19_Project_Descriptions_RIA.pdf

I’m very excited to offer a new Machine Learning for the Arts course this Spring at UCSD through the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Course website and registration is here: ml.roberttwomey.com

I’m a postdoc at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I look forward to many fruitful collaborations and research projects!

I was a panelist with Asta Roseway, Mira Lane, Afroditi Psarra, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas in Seattle last week.  We had a stimulating discussion of issues at the nexus of AI and creative work. Thanks Microsoft and Design in Public for inviting me to participate.

https://designinpublic.org/event/on-artificial-intelligence-creativity-and-trust-an-interactive-discussion-and-gallery-event/

I’m thrilled to have been awarded a YSU University Research Council Grant sponsoring a new version of A Machine for Living In, engaging with the lived conditions of abandoned housing in the city. Stay tuned!

I’m thrilled that we have been awarded a FY2018 Strategic Investment Funding grant from the YSU Budget Advisory Council  for Immersive Visualization and Collaborative Digital Work ($90k). This money will fund a 20-seat AR/VR lab on YSU campus for use by multiple departments to support new and existing curricula, including the nascent gaming program, and enable a vital new area of instruction and research on campus.

Co-authored with John Martin.