Tag Archives: Heather Knight

Public science outreach in New York

1 Reply

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw the title, Being Human in the 21st Century (a New York Academy of Sciences outreach series) in an article about social robotics at physorg.com. I’ve been thinking about that very issue since I wrote my paper, Whose electric brain? Sadly, I wouldn’t have been able to attend the series (I don’t live in New York and four of the five talks have already been given).

Here’s a brief description of the series,

One of the signature traits of being human is our quest to define what it means to “be human.” But that definition is always changing—now perhaps more than ever. From virtual reality to mundane reality, science and technology continue to push the boundaries of human existence. In this series, Science & the City will examine what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Here are the titles in the series,

System Overload: The Limits of Human Memory, September 6, 2011
Celluloid Science: Humanizing Life in the Lab, October 20, 2011
Virtual Humanity: The Anthropology of Online Worlds, November 9, 2011
Familiar but Strange: Exploring our Relationships with Robots, December 5, 2011
Matchmaking in the Digital Age, February 15, 2012

I was especially interested in the talk about robots since I have written on that topic quite regularly (my March 10, 2011 posting on Geminoid robots and the uncanny valley is one example). Here’s a description of the two speakers,

Chris Bregler

New York University

Chris Bregler’s primary research interests are in the areas of motion capture, animation, computer vision, graphics, statistical learning, gaming, and applications in the bio/medical field, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. Currently he focuses on human movement research, including projects in human face, speech, and full-body motion analysis and animation, movement style, expressions, body language, and Massive Multiplayer Mocap games. Most of these projects are interdisciplinary collaborations with other (computer) scientists, engineers, dancers, animators, bio/medical experts, game designers, and producers.

Heather Knight

Carnegie Mellon University

Heather Knight is currently conducting her doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. She is also founder of Marilyn Monrobot Labs in New York City, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art. Her previous work includes robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs, field applications and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics, and she is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Knight earned her bachelor and master’s degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and has a minor in mechanical engineering.

I drilled down for more detail and was quite interested to find out that Knight’s Marilyn Monrobot is a robot theatre company while Bregler has been active in theatre and movies,

He was the chair for the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater and Animation Festival. He has been active in the Visual Effects industry, for example, as the lead developer of ILM’s Multitrack system that has been used in many feature film productions.

I hope to see this talk available on a podcast one of these days. In the meantime, the New York Academy of Sciences runs a large outreach programme titled, Science & the City where you can find podcasts and listings for the various public series and events that it produces.

If you do live in New York City or will be there around Valentine’s Day, the last scheduled talk in this particular series (Being Human in the 21st Century), Matchmaking in the Digital Age will be held Feb. 15, 2012, 7 pm – 8:30 pm (from the event page),

In the not-too-distant past people found love through real-world social networks: family, friends, jobs, and social groups. But online dating has completely changed the way we find love and shifted matchmaking to a mathematical science. Now millions of singles turn over large amounts of personal data to computers, hoping an algorithm will find them the perfect mate. One leading online dating site is using that data to uncover the anthropology of human mating.

Founded by a mathematician, OKCupid analyzes dating data to draw funny, revealing, and downright strange conclusions about the sex lives of humans. OKCupid’s resident blogger, Christian Rudder, will give a behind-the-scenes look into human mating in the 21st century, just in time for Valentine’s Day. You’ll never look at your love life the same way again.

Join us for a reception afterward, where you may just meet someone the old-fashioned way.

Pricing for the event is as follows,

Member:                                                                   $15

Student / Postdoc / Fellow Member:           $15

Nonmember:                                                           $25

Student / Postdoc / Fellow Nonmember:   $20

The address and contact details:

The New York Academy of Sciences

7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600
nyas@nyas.org

You can register for the event here.

2011 World Science Festival and a couple of Canucks

2 Replies

Baba Brinkman and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara will be appearing at the 2011 World Science Festival (WSF), June 1 – 5, 2011, in New York City. Brinkman, a Vancouver-based rapper (he has a performance tonight, May 5, 2011, in Vancouver and more about that later), will be part of the ‘Cool Jobs’ presentation (from the presentation webpage),

Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. They include ecologist and explorer Mark Moffett, aka “Dr. Bugs,” roboticist Heather Knight, mechanical engineer and daredevil Nathan Ball, and evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro. Find out what they do, how they do it, and how they got the coolest and weirdest jobs on the planet. Together, we’ll step into a world that will feed your imagination.

I’m not sure why Baba’s not mentioned in the description but he does get this biographical note on the same page,

Canadian rap artist, writer, and former tree-planter Baba Brinkman has worked in the Rocky Mountains every summer for over ten years, personally planting more than one million trees. A scholar with a M.A. in comparative literature, he began his career as a rap troubadour after graduating in 2003.

To date, Brinkman has released seven solo albums and written or co-written five hip-hop theatre shows—winning three awards and entertaining thousands of people during his six seasons at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

His lyrical masterpiece, The Rap Guide to Evolution, won the prestigious Scotsman Fringe First Award in Edinburgh in 2009. It has been performed on tour in the USA, Australia, and the UK, as well as showcased in two appearances at regional TEDx conferences and on The Rachel Maddow Show on U.S. national television. When he is not touring, Baba Brinkman resides in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

As I mentioned earlier, Baba will be retelling Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale in a performance spiced with music tonight in Vancouver at the Rio Theatre (1660 East Broadway, nr. Commercial Drive) at 9:30 pm. Tickets for $8 can be purchased here.

(Baba was supposed to be opening an off Broadway show featuring his ‘Rap Guide to Evolution’ in New York around this time but had a snowboarding accident [a broken bone or two] and has had to recuperate in Vancouver. Thankfully, he’s been able to fit it in this show before he leaves. You can check Baba’s website for more information about his work and performances.)

I may have exaggerated by calling Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara a Canuck. A founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, where she has worked for some years, I don’t think she’d mind the designation too much. She will be participating in the ‘Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?’ presentation. From the presentation webpage,

As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? “Digital physicists” have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality, but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms. But is this a viable approach? Is the universe the ultimate computer running some grand cosmic code? Join a discussion among the brightest minds in digital physics to explore math, computer science, theories of consciousness, the origin of life, and free will—and delve into a world of information that may underlie everything.

Here’s the biographical note for Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara,

A founding member and faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, a research institute devoted to foundational issues in theoretical physics, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara is a leading researcher in the problem of quantum gravity. Her investigations include the microscopic structure of space-time and the role of causality at very high energies.

Born in Athens, Greece, she received her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from London’s Imperial College, and has held postdoctoral positions at Pennsylvania State University, Imperial College, and the Albert Einstein/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Berlin.

This is the third year for the World Science Festival.