Digital Cultures Webinar Series 2021 at NCAD

NCAD | The Digital Hub co-hosted Digital Cultures Webinar Series 2021 focuses on the transformative nature of emerging technologies, attending to artistic practice, academic research and industry. The next webinar is titled ‘AI and Ethics. Moral Machines – Model Behaviour’ and takes place on Thursday 1st April 2021, 7pm-8pm.
 

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning technologies are in a constant state of flux and like all technology can be used for both good and bad purposes. The same algorithm that can be used to improve spatial navigation for people with disabilities can also be used to produce fake news videos. Today’s AI can be an enormous benefit to society and also a threat to democracy, depending on how it is used. This raises a number of ethical questions and concerns around how AI will be used in the future. How can we ensure the AI systems we build are responsible and safe? Whose values and outcomes are we encoding into these systems? Can technology ever be truly neutral?

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based as well as paradisciplinary and as much postcolonial as post-digital. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and was the first artist-in-residence at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL) and its Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) in 2020. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting, non-human agency and transcendence. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures. Her work was featured at The New York Times, BBC, The Times, Artnet, Wired, Le Monde Afrique, Financial Times, Arte TV, The Independent, New Statesman, Hyperallergic, Smithsonian, Al Ahram, Egypt Today, Vice, Hürriyet, Dezeen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Spiegel Online, Heise, The Boston Globe, Dezeen, Archdaily, Polska, La informacion, De Volkskrant, Gizmodo, New Scientist, Popular Science and The Verge amongst others.

Prof Barry O’Sullivan holds the Chair in Constraint Programming at University College Cork in Ireland. He is the founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at UCC, founding Director of the Science Foundation Ireland’s Centre for Research Training in AI, and a Principal Investigator at the Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing. He is an Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia. Professor O’Sullivan served as vice chair of the European Commission High-Level Expert Group on AI and a scientific advisor to AI Watch, an initiative of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre tasked with monitoring the uptake of AI in Europe. He is an award-winning academic working in the fields of artificial intelligence, constraint programming, and operations research. He also works in AI and data ethics, as well as public policy-making related to AI.  He has a keen interest in the commercialisation of AI and is involved in a number of startup companies. Professor O’Sullivan is a Fellow and a past President of the European AI Association, Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Irish Computer Society, and Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

The NCAD & The Digital Hub co-hosted Digital Cultures Webinar Series 2021 will be broadcast on >>> YouTube <<< All Events are open for public viewing, no registration required.