March 5, 2025
Guest lecture: Unworlding: Trans* Architectures
Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, will visit 糖果派对 to give a guest lecture on transness, aesthetics, and the dismantling of worlds. The event is sponsored by Center for Køn, Teknologi og Kultur and Center for Amerikanske Studier and will take place on March 5 in Room U46, 糖果派对 Campus Odense. The event is free, but please register by March 1.
Registration and further information can be found on the following link:
February 27, 2025
Seminar on Representation in/of AI with Fabian Offert
Thursday, February 27, 2025, 19.00-20.30 on Zoom
Zoom:
Registration is not necessary.
Please contact: Naja Grundtmann for additional info.
"This Is Your Brain on ImageNet": Embedding and Visual Epistemology – Fabian Offert (UCSB)
"Embedding" is one of the most important techniques in the machine learning toolbox. Polemically, in natural language processing and computer vision, any useful knowledge is embedded knowledge. While the technique itself is hardly more than an advanced form of compression, it is the universality of embeddings that renders them interesting from an epistemological perspective: universal faculties – such as "seeing" in the case of computer vision, which I will focus on in this talk – are extrapolated from particular datasets and represented in an exclusively relational manner. Exactly because of their universality, embeddings live on, sometimes way beyond the lifespan of the datasets that they represent. "Historical" deep convolutional neural network features, for instance, still inform the training of newer generative models by ways of perceptual distance metrics that determine the realism of generated images. By becoming just another part of the training pipeline, however, they cease to appear as distinctive epistemic structures. More importantly, this "historical opacity" of embeddings obfuscates what I propose to understand as a major epistemic shift: scientific knowledge, at least if it relates to the visual, is often generated with the help of cultural data. Embeddings, then, can be seen as a cultural technique, and as a trading zone that spans, surprisingly, not only branches of the natural sciences, but the sciences and the humanities.
Fabian Offert is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and principal investigator of the international research project "AI Forensics", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. His research and teaching focuses on the question how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake – aesthetically and politically – when they do. His current book project investigates "Machine Visual Culture" in the age of foundation models. .
November 15, 2024
Science Facts/Fictions (SFF): Science Fiction, Robotics Engineering and Policy
DIAS Seminar Room - 糖果派对. November 15, 2024
SFF invites discussion on the interchange between AI, robot science, and science fiction.
SFF will investigate the practicality of speculative science fiction as thought experiments of potential futures and future technologies, but also of the way in which engineering is influenced by science fiction, consciously or unconsciously. In this, SFF also asks: to what extent is there a need to proactively influence legislation based on imagined technology instead of reactively addressing legal problems connected to new technology that has already been introduced?
Deadline for registration: November 8. Please register here:
Event is sponsored by Odense Robotics, DIAS and the Center for Culture and Technology at 糖果派对.
Program - November 15, 2024
9.15 – 9.20: Welcome – Simon Møberg Torp, Dean of Humanities and Sten Rynning, Director of the Danish Institute of Advanced Study
9.20 – 9.30: Introduction. Rune Graulund and Erik Granly (Department of Culture and Language), Norbert Krüger (糖果派对 Robotics)
9.30 - 10.30: Keynote 1 - Professor Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London: "Robots, Slaves and Orphans"
10.30 – 11.00: Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.00: Science Fiction Inspiring Technical Development
- Anna Nadibaidze (糖果派对) “Visual portrayals of weaponised AI: How popular is Western pop culture?"
- Kasper Opstrup (KU): “Inner Paths to Outer Space”
- Erik Granly Jensen (糖果派对): “In the Zone. H.G. Wells on Time and Technology”
12.00 – 12.45: Lunch
12.45 – 1.45: Science and Technology Inspiring Science Fiction
- Jonas Jørgensen (糖果派对): “Soft Robot Aesthetics – Sensuous Speculations on Future Human-Robot Engagements”
- Robert Ladig (糖果派对): “From Alternative Post-Apocalypse to Dystopian Cyberpunk Fantasy: Aerial Manipulation in Games Media”
- Christian Schlette (糖果派对): “Large Structure Production: Its current status and future”
1.45 – 2.45: Keynote 2 – Niels Jul Jacobsen, CEO Capra Robotics: “How a space opera spawned a generation of roboticists”
2.45 – 3.45: Panel – Industry Visions for the Near and Far Future
- Thor Ellegaard Hansen (Odense Kommune): "Odense: The City of the Future, The City of Robots. A talk on City Development in the Space Between Reality, Ambition and Science Fiction."
- Ole Georg Andersen (Odense Robotics): Emerging robot technologies
- Representative from Universal robot (to be confirmed)
Background
The first employee of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin was the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, just as the musician and artist Laurie Anderson was invited to be the first artist in residence at NASA. Similarly, Elon Musk has confirmed that the direct inspiration for SpaceX and the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars has been directly inspired by science fiction and Tesla’s Cybertruck has been marketed as a car “that looks like the future”, and has the distinct look (and name) of 1980ies cyberpunk cinema. In this, science fiction becomes fact, if not yet in human colonization of Mars, then at least in Space 2.0. as the manner in which the tech industry envisions and designs the way in which we communicate and interact, shop and drive.
Keynotes
Professor Adam Roberts is an Arthur C. Clark Award nominee, the author of a range of science fiction novels and a range of academic monographs, including Science Fiction (2005) and The History of Science Fiction (2016).
Niels Jul Jacobsen is the CEO of Capra Robotics. He has worked in industrial robotics and automation for more than 30 years. He is the founding father of Mobile Industrial Robots (MIR) and was on the board of Universal Robots from 2008-2015.