Presentations on Digital Body, Digital Mind, and Emotional AI

Join us for a night of deep thoughts organized by the Volumetric Society. The evening will feature a collection of speakers sharing their work, tying together observations related to how humanity is represented in the digital world, and the implications of how that representation is translated upon being re-introduced to the physical world via technology (such as 3D printed wearable tech).

Speakers:

Patrick Levy Rosenthal - Emoshape
Noah Hutton - The Case Against Neural Normality
Aaron Trocola - The Digital Body - Giving Technology an Awareness of Form.

Presentation Abstracts:

EMOSHAPE - Patrick Levy Rosenthal
Emoshape Inc. is dedicated to providing a technology that teaches intelligent objects how to interact with humans to yield a favourable, positive result. Emoshape emotion synthesis microchip (EPU) technology represents a massive leap for Artificial Intelligence, especially in the realm of self-driving cars, personal robotics, sentient virtual reality, affective toys, IoT, pervasive computing, and other major consumer electronic devices. Applications including human-machine interaction, emotion speech synthesis, emotional awareness, machine emotional intimacy, AI’s personalities, machine learning and affective computing. Fields as diverse as medicine, advertising, and gaming will significantly benefit from the Emotion Processing Unit (EPU II). The growing presence of AI, robotics and virtual reality in society as a whole dictates that meaningful emotional interaction is core to removing the barrier to widespread adoption. https://emoshape.com/

Emoshape Inc. is owned and run by entrepreneur Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, who currently lives between London and New York. He grew up in Paris. In 2006 Patrick won the European Information Society Technology (IST) prize for his work on a 3D interactive screen. He moved to London in 2009 to work on his passion and ideas surrounding bio inspired emotion synthesis. He studied the relationship between cognition and emotion, the root of the cognitive processes underlying each emotional responses, emotions synthesis and the influence of emotion on decision making. Patrick has developed a new generation of microchip named EPU (Emotion Processing Unit) for Ai and Robots and the world's first Al that can feel the 12 primary human emotion.

THE CASE AGAINST NEURAL NORMALITY - Noah Hutton
As contemporary neuroscience embraces Big Data, routing its operations through massive, disembodied models housed on supercomputers, a question of identity lingers over all of today’s major pursuits: whose brain are we modeling, and how will the conditions and assumptions under which brains are studied and reconstructed today affect the outcomes of these massive research endeavors? I will draw from my experience directing a long term, ten-year film-in-the-making, of which I'm currently in year 8, about neuroscience research around the world, focusing on Henry Markram and the Blue Brain/Human Brain Project. As I work on the film, I am facing the issue of nonlocal identities: most of the neuroscientists I interview are less and less involved in "traditional" lab research, and increasingly focus on emerging digital models housed on server farms that can be accessed from anywhere.

This transition raises two questions. On one hand, the issue of the science itself: an error-free model of the brain is the much sought-after prize of current neuroscientific pursuits around the world, which aim to slice, map, and otherwise analyze an unknown quantity of brains in hopes that universal, normative rules will rise up out of the muck of divergence. But how will massive datasets squeezed into genericised models capture the stochastic chaos that forms the core of biological life? On the other hand, these issues present a cinematic challenge: how to capture the disembodied subject, the emerging simulated reality? I will show clips and discuss some techniques I am developing to capture the virtuality of this new world on film, and discuss the wider social and political implications of the disappearing neuroscientific subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgzWNowzthw

Noah Hutton - Bio
Noah Hutton is a film director and founder of the website The Beautiful Brain. He has presented on art and neuroscience at the Impakt Festival, Venice Biennale, Wellcome Collection, Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. In 2015 he was named a Salzburg Global Fellow in Neuroscience and Art, and created Brain City, a multi-platform installation commissioned by NYC’s Times Square Arts Alliance. He is in the seventh year of work on his film Bluebrain, a 10-year documentary-in-the-making about the Human Brain Project, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Previously he directed the award-winning documentary features Deep Time (SXSW 2015) and Crude Independence (SXSW 2009). Noah graduated from Wesleyan University, where he studied art history and neuroscience.

THE DIGITAL BODY - GIVING TECHNOLOGY AN AWARENESS OF FORM
Aaron Trocola

Technology has become intimately entwined with our lives, and yet is always held at a distance. We spend much of our time peering at this artificial world through a tiny rectangular porthole. To bridge this gap, I see a future where we bring ourselves into the virtual space as well as make our ideas, which were once abstractions of text and images, into a tangible part of our reality. This unification is facilitated by two technologies in particular: 3D scanning and 3D printing. These are windows into and out of the digital world. My work as an artist expresses ideas that flow from this new paradigm, and as a designer I build products and systems that respect the body, leveraging an awareness of it to make technology more human-compatible. I will describe the aspects of solving these problems related to software, materials, and manufacturing processes. The successes and challenges of making design universally accessible, and automation of measurement and customization procedures. We'll see some recent examples of technology integration on the body, some work in progress, and some predictions based on current research. http://threeformfashion.com/

Aaron Trocola - Bio
Aaron Trocola is an industrial designer, artist and educator specializing in 3D design for wearable technologies, product design, sculpture, and fashion. He has organized and presented live performances and fashion shows at Rapid conference, 3D Print Show, Inside 3D Printing, World Maker Faire and many others. Drawing on his early work in creating 3D surgical simulation tools for a DARPA funded 3D display company, his work leverage 3D body scanning and additive manufacturing technologies to create a bridge between the digital and physical worlds. His more recent efforts integrate bio-measurement electronics and computing in adaptable platforms for research and experimental product development. He also teaches Additive Manufacturing in the Mechanical Engineering graduate program at the University of Bridgeport.