Public Events Archives | Page 4 of 13 | National Humanities Center

Public Events

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2021 Stowe Prize Ceremony and Talk

The National Humanities Center is cosponsoring the 2021 Stowe Prize celebration honoring Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020). Dr. Glaude is the seventh recipient of the Stowe Prize, which recognizes the author of a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

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Concluding Panel: Where Do We Go from Here? The Future of Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities

Artificial intelligence allows us to experience and compare many different methods of making sense of the world. How can universities support this kind of multiplication and polyvalence in relation to the humanities and AI? Is the “human” we in the humanities defend against the machine actually defensible? And is the image of the machine we uphold as the non-human actually reflecting the kinds of machines AI engineers are building today?

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Panel Discussion: How Do We Address Privacy in the World of Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence has transformed what we can learn and decipher from the brain. Are we mistaken to refer to our personal information as “ours” or to claim individual privacy rights to those multifarious details being scooped up by data miners and aggregators? Might there be better, more apt ways to think about individual privacy and personal information—perhaps as collective or public goods?

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Panel Discussion: Can Morality Be Built into Computers?

Do we believe digital employees will become indistinguishable from human employees this decade? As democratization of AI leads to proliferation of such digital agents, how should we prepare for humans to continue to be in command? When questioning if morality can be built into computers, we must simultaneously ask: whose morality? Could there be a successful deep learning AI that answers moral dilemmas? Or is there reason to think that matters are different in the case of morality?

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Demonstration of Ipsoft’s Amelia, “The Most Human Artificial Intelligence Platform on the Market”

Chetan Dube envisions a world where humans and machines work closely together to build a radically more efficient planet. His research has focused on deep AI, and he pioneered the use of AI-enabled digital labor across industries. Amelia’s brain uses episodic memory, process memory, intent recognition, and emotional intelligence to respond to complex queries, process transactions, and deliver personalized customer service. Amelia stores facts, concepts, and the associations between them in her semantic memory. From standard operating procedures (SOPs) to policy documents, she can be trained to apply them to conversations.

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Panel Discussion: How Has Artificial Intelligence Challenged the Boundaries of Humanistic Thinking and How Might the Humanities Provide New Models for Artificial Intelligence?

Can AI have emotions, can machine learning models truly learn? Can AI systems be used to improve human moral judgments? How might collaboration between humanists and technologists produce more rigorous forms of learning and verification? These and other questions are the subject of a lively exchange between panelists Wendy Chun, Sebastian Liao, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

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Keynote Address: “Regressing to Eugenics? Technologies and Histories of Recognition”

In her keynote address, Wendy Chun discusses how artificial intelligence reproduces and exacerbates ideologies about identity and contributes to the increasingly fractious politics of the twenty-first century. A leading thinker on the influence of new technologies, Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. She also leads the university’s Digital Democracies Institute, whose purpose is to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation.

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Panel Discussion: Can Artificial Intelligence Create, and What Is the Role of the Artist?

With the prevalence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, it’s natural to ask, “What will be the future of art in an AI-driven society?” This question becomes even more relevant as AI increasingly appears in the creative domain. Across human history, artists have always integrated new technologies into their practice—from oil paint and printmaking in the Renaissance to photography, motion pictures, and computer animation in the modern era. In this panel discussion, artists Ahmed Elgammal and Carla Gannis talk about their work, created with AI technologies, and how their relationships with AI inform their creative processes.