EVENT | Monopolies of Intelligence: Questioning the Political Economy of AI 29.05.19

[three_fourths]

 

A panel discussion with Mercedes Bunz, Nick Srnicek, and Leif Weatherby in collaboration with the Digital Theory Lab, New York University (NYU).

Artificial Intelligence systems are being applied to many areas of human life. While AI is heavily debated – hyped as our future saviour, pilloried for their biases – the political economy of AI is rarely discussed. Together with the Digital Theory Lab (NYU), the Department of Digital Humanities (KCL) warmly invites all interested guests to this panel discussion, which will be framed by short position papers. We are also proud to announce that Professor McCarty (Emeritus Professor of Humanities Computing, KCL) will be a guest of honour at the reception following the event. Please join us.

In the Clouds – Nick Srnicek (Digital Humanities, KCL)

We live in an age dominated by tech giants. Yet for all the attention paid to them, discussions of artificial intelligence have focused on ethical issues around bias and political issues around surveillance. The properly political economic questions have been left aside, or reduced to a simple ‘robots taking our jobs’ narrative. This talk will aim to uncover the political economy of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on how the technological conditions of AI either facilitate or delineate possibilities for the greater concentration of capital and power.

Data as Capital – Leif Weatherby (German, NYU and KCL’s Willard McCarty Fellow)

A recent report from MIT announces the arrival of a new metaphysical player in the game of business: data capital. This form of wealth represents a shift in the relationship between capital and society. Data capital has now driven the market capitalization of the largest platform companies above the “unicorn” value of 1 trillion USD, creating something like intelligent monopolies. But capital as data has to be interpreted to be useful, an operation most often carried out by algorithms called “neural nets.” The data is exascale, beyond any human imagination – yet parsed, categorized, interpreted. I propose to call this activity at the heart of modern enterprise “artificial semiotics” in order to analyse how data has altered the structure of capital in the present.

On Distributed Intelligence – Mercedes Bunz (Digital Humanities, KCL)

Recent advances of AI have resulted in a fundamental shift in programming. However, the conditions of algorithmic production as well as the interfaces to use those programs and new capabilities have largely stayed the same. AI applications are currently mostly black box systems in which systems trained on data are making decisions for users and not with users. By analysing examples of image recognition regarding medical images, this talk will show that this constellation is dangerous and difficult. Automated decision-making in the medical sector transfers medical knowledge and agency from our medical institutions to technology companies without the necessary checks and balances. At the same time, machine learning has great potential to assist with medical decision making. In her talk, Mercedes will discuss two aspects of machine learning –data sets and interfaces – as entry points that could be used to make machine intelligence more accessible, collaborative, and distributed – against monopolies of intelligence.

Biographies

Mercedes Bunz is Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research explores how digital technology transforms knowledge and with it power; a question she explores currently specifically regarding medical knowledge with a Wellcome Trust Seed grant. Recent publications: The Internet of Things (Polity 2017) co-published with Professor Graham Meikle, and the small Open Access publication Communication with Finn Brunton (University of Minnesota Press 2019), on how contemporary communication puts us humans not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery.

Nick Srnicek is Lecturer in Digital Economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and Inventing the Future (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams). With Helen Hester, he is currently writing After Work (Verso, 2020).

Leif Weatherby is Associate Professor of German at NYU, co-founder of the Digital Theory Lab, and Willard McCarty fellow of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. His research focuses on philosophies of technology – especially the digital – Romanticism and Idealism, and political economy. His book, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx, tracks an early techno-philosophy in the doctrine he calls “Romantic organology.” His ongoing work on the relationship between cybernetics and German Idealism has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt association. His writing has appeared in venues like SubStance, Grey Room, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[Image: Tatiana Plakhova]

 

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Thu, 29 May 2019
16:30 – 18:00 BST

Location

King’s College London
Strand – Bush House South Wing
Room: BH(S)4.04
London WC2R 1ES

 

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/monopolies-of-intelligence-questioning-the-political-economy-of-ai-tickets-60069347034″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition and Computational Knowledge 22.05.19

[three_fourths]

How did automatic speech recognition lay the ground for contemporary computational knowledge practices Join us for a public talk with Xiaochang Li (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin).  
 
How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition and Computational Knowledge – Xiaochang Li (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)  
 
Beginning in the 1970s, a team of researchers at IBM began to reorient the field of automatic speech recognition from the scientific study of human perception and language towards a startling new mandate: to find “the natural way for the machine to do it.” In what is recognizable today as a data-driven, “black box” approach to language processing, IBM’s Continuous Speech Recognition group set out to meticulously uncouple computational modelling from the demands of explanation and interpretability. Automatic speech recognition was refashioned as a problem of large-scale data acquisition, storage, and classification, one that was distinct from—if not antithetical to—human perception, expertise, and understanding. These efforts were pivotal in bringing language under the purview of data processing, and in doing so helped draw a narrow form of data-driven computational modelling across diverse domains and into the sphere of everyday life, spurring the development of algorithmic techniques that now appear in applications for everything from machine translation to protein sequencing. The history of automatic speech recognition invites a glimpse into how making language into data made data into an imperative, and thus shaped the conceptual and technical groundwork for what is now one of our most wide-reaching modes of computational knowledge.  
 
Bio: Xiaochang Li is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. This coming fall, she will be joining the faculty at Stanford University as Assistant Professor in the department of Communication. Her current book project examines the history of predictive text and how the problem of making language computationally tractable was laid into the foundations of data- driven computational culture. It traces developments in automatic speech recognition and natural language processing through the twentieth century, highlighting their influence on the cultural, technical, and institutional practices that gave rise to so-called “big data” and machine learning as privileged and pervasive forms of knowledge work.  
 
This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.
 

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Wed, 22 May 2019
16:30 – 18:00 BST

Location

BH(S)4.04, Bush House Lecture Theatre 2
Bush House, South Wing, King’s College London
30 Aldwych
London
WC2B 4BG

 

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-language-became-data-speech-recognition-and-computational-knowledge-tickets-55157807487″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Simondon and the Concept of Information: A One Day Interdisciplinary Symposium 13.05.19

[three_fourths]

This event explores the concept of information in the work of the post-war French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989). Today, Simondon is best remembered for his holistic account of technological objects and their perceptual-cognitive role in the evolution of human beings and social systems. However, his project also aimed at providing a unified foundation for the human sciences – one that would be compatible with, but not reducible to, the natural sciences. To achieve this, he developed an ontological perspective foregrounding notions of information and individuation adapted from the then-emerging fields of cybernetics and information theory, as well as psychology, biology, and quantum physics, while also building on more traditional philosophical approaches such as phenomenology. The symposium will examine these intellectual sources and contexts, and discuss the wider legacy of Simondon’s concept of information for contemporary thinking across the humanities.
The event is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, the Department of French, and the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London.
 
For more information or if you would like to attend, please contact: giovanni.menegalle@kcl.ac.uk  

 

Programme

10:00-10:30 – WELCOME

10:30-12:30 – SESSION 1 (Chair: Mercedes Bunz, KCL, Digital Humanities)

Andrea Bardin, Oxford Brookes, Social Sciences, ‘Simondon on Macy: Cybernetics, Metastability and the ‘Quality’ of Information’

Pablo Rodriguez, Buenos Aires, Social Sciences /CONICET, ‘Information Theory and Living Individuation: Simondon’s Take on Molecular Biology’

Mark Coté, KCL, Digital Humanities, ‘Seeing Possible States? Does Simondon’s Critique of Information Theory Apply to Reinforcement Learning?’

12:30-13:30 – LUNCH  

13:30-15:30 – SESSION 2 (Chair: Patrick ffrench, KCL, French)

Cecile Malaspina, CNRS Lab SPHERE / Paris 7, ‘Pure Information’

Ashley Woodward, Dundee, Philosophy, ‘Information and Signification’

Giovanni Menegalle, KCL, French, ‘Information or Sense? Simondon in the Shadow of French Philosophy’

Gus Hewlett, Kingston, CRMEP, ‘Physical Information in L’Individuation: If not Singularity, then What?’

15:30-16:00 – BREAK

16:00-18:00 – SESSION 3 (Chair: Cecile Malaspina, CNRS Lab SPHERE / Paris 7)

Simon Mills, De Montfort, Media, ‘Information, Mediation, Causality’

Madeleine Chalmers, Oxford, French, ‘Chance Encounter: When Simondon’s Information Meets the Surrealist Object’

Ludovic Duhem, ESAD, Philosophy, ‘After Language: Image as Information in the New Reticulation of the World’

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Mon, 13 May 2019
10:00 – 18:00 BST

Location

King’s College London
River Room
Strand Campus
London
WC2R 2LS

[/one_fourth_last]  

EVENT | “Good Data” – London book launch + workshop 09.05.19

[three_fourths]

Join us for the London launch of the open access Good Data book (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2019) with editors and authors associated with the book, hosted at the Department for Digital Humanities, King’s College London.
 
In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the collection and automated analysis of information by government and private actors. In response to the totalizing datafication of society, there has been a significant critique regarding ‘bad data’ practices. The book ‘Good Data’, that will be launched at this event, proposes a move from critique to imagining and articulating a more optimistic vision of the datafied future.
 
With the datafication of society and the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation, issues of data ethics and data justice are only to increase in importance. The book ‘Good Data’, edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann, examines and proposes ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this edited collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds of futures we want to see. The book presents concrete steps on how we can start realizing good data in practice, and move towards a fair and just digital economy and society.
 
The book can be found here for free download (in various formats): http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod-29-good-data/
 
The Institute of Network Cultures has published a series of blogposts from Good Data authors summarising their Good Data interventions, which can be found here: http://networkcultures.org/blog/
 
A provisional schedule is as follows:
  • Welcome – Jonathan Gray
  • Introduction to the Good Data Project & Overview of the Book: Angela Daly & Kayleigh Murphy
  • Presentations (moderated by Angela):
    • Sefa Ozalp
    • Chiara Poletti/Daniel Gray
    • Colin Porlezza
    • Jonathan Gray
  • Q&A/panel discussion
  • Informal discussion
 

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Thu, 9 May 2019
16:00 – 18:00 BST

Location

Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

 

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/good-data-london-book-launch-workshop-tickets-57870910451″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Language and Space in Public Imagination | Willard McCarty Fellowship Lecture Series 11.06.19

[three_fourths]

 

This event introduces two 2018-19 Willard McCarty’s Fellowship holders Antonina Puchkovskaia ((Associate Professor, ITMO University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia) and Anguelina Popova (Director, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technologies, American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan). Their lectures will explore the intersections of language, tradition, and space in the historical and cultural contexts. Chaired by Stuart Dunn, the event will also feature two short talks on the intersecting ideas.

This event is free to attend, please register your interest on Eventbrite:

Prof WILLARD MCCARTY (Professor of Humanities Computing Emeritus, King’s College London)

Computing  | Humanities: What’s the Relationship? (10 min)

 

STUART DUNN (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities & Deputy Head of the Department of Digital Humanities, KCL)

Territoriality in cyberspace: dealing with contested geographies in the age of Google Maps (20 min)

This talk will offer a brief overview of how conflict and competing claims on physical land are represented in the digital world. Drawing on examples from Cyprus and Greece, it will ask the question of how “the digital” is driving us to reconsider the idea of what a border is. How are digital “borders” formed, defined and policed?

 

GABRIELE SALCIUTE CIVILIENE (Lecturer in Digital Humanities Education)

Thinking and Modelling Spatio-Temporality across Languages (20 min)

Language helps us talk about mental representations of time and space. The metaphors of spatializing time and temporalizing space differ, revealing how we reason across cultures. Language use and text making, on the other hand, are situated in and enmeshed with our being in and experience of time and space whose intimacy, specificity, and multiplicity are hidden underneath the conventionalized surface of texts. In this talk, I will consider how the computing of translations by repetemes (i.e. strings of repetitions) opens up, among other things, a possibility for modelling spatio-temporal patterns that instantiate Gadamer’s being-in-the-world-through-being-in-language.


ANTONINA PUCHKOVSKAIA (Associate Professor, ITMO University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia)

Inaugural Lecture on Visualizing St Petersburg Based on Russian Corpus Analysis (45 min)

What is/are Digital Humanities? How to rise a research question challenging enough for both Humanities and Computer Science fields? What are the challenges of doing DH at the predominantly STEM-based University? This lecture will revolve around interdisciplinary research in progress situated at the intersection of history, librarian studies, cultural studies, and information technologies. The aim of this research is to create an open-source-software-based web application by using historical and cultural heritage data on the key landmarks of St. Petersburg. Our deliverables are an educational database and web/mobile applications into which users will be able to tap by means of retrospective visualization and an interactive city map that would track nearby objects via user’s geolocation. To that end, we are analyzing both sources and records. In our case, sources are manuscripts that range from a single paragraph to a multi-volume book. Records are source fragments that can range from a single record to hundreds of sections, pages, or paragraphs in a book. Our database schema links people, occasions, and dates based on primary sources. Finally, all objects are being mapped onto an interactive city map of St. Petersburg, the interface of which will facilitate easy navigation and allow filtering by different categories such as restaurants, music salons, and apartments.

 

ANGUELINA POPOVA (Director, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technologies, American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan)

Tracking the Nomads: How Digital Humanities Can Assist the Preservation and Deeper Understanding of an Ancient and Living Oral Tradition (35 min)

This talk will revolve around three major threads as follows:

  • The nomadic culture of the Kyrgyz and why we find it interesting to study;
  • The Manas epos and the studies of the epos;
  • The contribution of the American University of Central Asia, in particular of James Plumtree, and the AKYN project, to a fresh look at the Manas epos.

I will introduce the digital aspect in working with this vast oral tradition. While the epos constitutes a significant part of the cultural heritage of the Kyrgyz, and has been used as a nation- building block after the collapse of the Soviet Union (including being part of a higher education state exam), the tradition has been considered as a fixed one. This significantly mutilates the oral tradition as a rich and evolving one. We are working on studying and demonstrating how the tradition has evolved over time, and our project has been significantly facilitated by the digital humanities tools. The talk will present the venues which have been used, and those that can be used, to map historical events, migrations, and languages within and beyond the Manas epos and other oral traditions of the region.

Q&A session

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Tues, 11 June 2019
16:00 – 18:00 BST

Location

King’s College London
30 Aldwych
Bush House Room(SE) 2.10
South-East Wing
London WC2B 4BG

 

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/language-and-space-in-public-imagination-willard-mccarty-fellowship-lecture-series-tickets-60621177574″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Hacking the museum? Collections makerspaces in London cultural institutions 08.05.19

[three_fourths]

How are experimental spaces institutionalised within cultural organisations? Where do spaces for making and hacking come from? Join us for a public talk with Kat Braybrooke (University of Sussex). Hacking the museum? Collections makerspaces in London cultural institutions – Kat Braybrooke (University of Sussex) What kinds of spaces are produced when the radical practices of once-rebellious digital subcultures, like those of hackers and makers, are institutionalised? This talk examines the recent phenomenon of ‘collections makerspaces’, or public sites in cultural institutions that offer free suites of creative tools aimed at inspiring new interactions with artefacts and collections through hands-on making practices. We will begin by locating these sites within a wider history of sociotechnical transformation amongst museums and shared machine shops (from hackspaces to media labs) in Britain since the 1970s, a negotiation that has become increasingly dominated by institutional and corporate collaborations. We will then explore findings from a year-long ethnography of three different kinds of collections makerspaces at Tate, British Museum and Wellcome Collection in London, taking a look at how the ‘space’ of each site is continually produced by its social relations and imaginaries. In conclusion, it will be argued that the collections makerspace is emerging (but at the same time, also dissolving) as a key locus of critical institutional inquiry, where the hegemonic traditions of museums in Britain can be examined, contested and possibly even transformed.

 

Bio: Kat Braybrooke (@codekat) is a sociotechnical researcher and critical maker whose work explores the politics of creative digital practices, institutions and communities. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis with the University of Sussex Humanities Lab, and received a MSc Digital Anthropology from University College London in 2013 for an ethnography of gender and identity concerns amongst 30 young hackers in Europe. Before her current research, Kat spent a decade working with cause-based organisations like Mozilla, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue to help digital consumers become producers through implementations of open technologies, and she serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Peer Production.
 
This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.
 
 

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Wed 8th May 2019 16:30-18:00 BST

Location

S-2.18, Strand Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hacking-the-museum-collections-makerspaces-in-london-cultural-institutions-tickets-53858445059″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

Project | Reframing Art: Opening up Art Dealers’ Archives to Multi-Disciplinary Research

“Reframing Art: Opening up Art Dealers’ Archives to Multi-Disciplinary Research” is centred on a collaboration between the Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab at King’s College London and the National Gallery, London, funded by the Cultural Institute at King’s.

King’s lead researcher: Stuart Dunn

Associated organisations: National Gallery, London, the Getty Foundation, King’s Digital Lab

The focus of this research is the relationship between the circulation of works of art and their archival information, and how scholars can explore and enhance those relationships by investigating the archives as multivariate networks of information. The team is led by Stuart Dunn, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, with support from King’s PhD candidate Valentina Vavassori and in association with Alan Crookham and Barbara Pezzini from the National Gallery.

This multi-disciplinary research project has been chosen to participate in the two-year Network Analysis + Digital Art History Workshop, funded by the Getty Foundation through its Digital Art History initiative.

For more information about the workshop and the Reframing Art project, visit the Network Analysis + Digital Art History website

EVENT | Taking Stock: Researching Generic Images Across Representation, Circulation And Recontextualization 01.05.19

[three_fourths]

How can we study the meanings and circulation of generic images online? Join us for a public talk with Giorgia Aiello (University of Leeds).

Taking Stock: Researching Generic Images Across Representation, Circulation And Recontextualization – Giorgia Aiello (University of Leeds)

The bulk of images that we encounter in everyday life are generic images from global image banks like Getty Images and Shutterstock. Nevertheless, pre-produced, ready-to-use stock images are most often overlooked rather than looked at. Whether it is because of its poor quality, extreme blandness, lack of veracity, or exploitative cheapness, stock imagery is frequently discounted as insignificant and rarely taken seriously. Yet, in spite of all current emphasis on user-generated imagery as a dominant mode of communication in contemporary visual culture, we quite literally swim in an ocean of images that were made for and are distributed by a handful of corporations.

Following Paul Frosh’s groundbreaking work on pre-digital stock photography, I argue that stock images are not just the ‘wallpaper’ of consumer culture, but are also central to the ambient image environment that defines our visual world. Key challenges in researching stock images are linked to their very essence in this regard, that is, their genericity. In this talk, I will outline some of the ways in which my collaborative work attempts to tackle some of these challenges in order to examine the meanings and implications of stock imagery. Through a combination of digital methods, visual analysis and interviews, this work links considerations about representation, circulation and recontextualization together with aspects of production to develop an empirical, critical understanding of generic images and image banks. To illustrate this approach, I will draw from three recent collaborative projects on feminist stock photography, generic visuals in the news, and representations of teens and technology in news media.

Bio: Giorgia Aiello (@giorgishka) is Associate Professor and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Giorgia’s work focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. Her book Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (with Katy Parry) will be published by SAGE at the end of 2019.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

 

[/three_fourths]
[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Wed 1 May 2019
16:00 – 18:00 BST

Location

The Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre, K6.29
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taking-stock-researching-generic-images-across-representation-circulation-and-recontextualization-tickets-53902313270″ text=”Register” color_override=””]

[/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Neurons spike back. The invention of inductive machine and the Artificial intelligence controversy 24.04.19

[three_fourths]

Where do the predictive techniques of machine learning come from? How do they draw on previous “connectionist” and “symbolic” approaches in the history of artificial intelligence research? Join us for a public talk with Dominique Cardon (Sciences Po Médialab) at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

Neurons spike back. The invention of inductive machine and the Artificial intelligence controversy – Dominique Cardon (Sciences Po Médialab)

Since 2010, machine learning based predictive techniques, and more specifically deep learning neural networks, have achieved spectacular performances in the fields of image recognition or automatic translation, under the umbrella term of “Artificial Intelligence”. But their relation to this field of research is not straightforward. In the tumultuous history of AI, learning techniques using so-called “connectionist” neural networks have long been mocked and ostracized by the “symbolic” movement. This talk retraces the history of artificial intelligence through the lens of the tension between symbolic and connectionist approaches. From a social history of science and technology perspective, it seeks to highlight how researchers, relying on the availability of massive data and the multiplication of computing power have undertaken to reformulate the symbolic AI project by reviving the spirit of adaptive and inductive machines dating back from the era of cybernetics.

The hypothesis behind this communication is that the new computational techniques used in machine learning provide a new way of representing society, no longer based on categories but on individual traces of behaviour. The new algorithms of machine learning replace the regularity of constant causes with the “probability of causes”. It is therefore another way of representing society and the uncertainties of action that is emerging. To defend this argument, this communication will propose two parallel investigations. The first, from a science and technology history perspective, traces the emergence of the connexionist paradigm within artificial intelligence techniques. The second, based on the sociology of statistical categorization, focuses on how the calculation techniques used by major web services produce predictive recommendations.

This talk will be partly based on the article (in French): Cardon (Dominique), Cointet (Jean-Philippe), Mazières (Antoine), « La revanche des neurones. L’invention des machines inductives et la controverse de l’intelligence artificielle », Réseaux, n°211, 2018, pp. 173-220.

Bio: Dominique Cardon (@karmacoma) is Professor of sociology and director of the Sciences Po Médialab. He is working on the transformation of the public space and the uses of new technologies. He published different articles on the place of new technologies in the no-global movement, alternative media and on the process of bottom-up innovations in the digital world. His recent research focuses on the analysis of the power of algorithms in the classification of digital information. His work seeks to articulate the sociology of science and technology with a sensitive approach to the transformations of contemporary social worlds. He is currently working on the social effects of the generalization of machine learning techniques in an ever-increasing number of situations of everyday life.

His publications include La démocratie Internet (Paris, Seuil/République des idées, 2010), (with Fabien Granjon), Médiactivistes, Paris, Presses de Science po, 2010, (with Antonio Casilli), Qu’est-ce que le digital labor ?, Paris, Ina Éditions, 2015, A quoi rêvent les algorithmes, Paris, Seuil, 2015. In english : “Deconstructing the algorithm: four types of digital information calculations”, in Seyfert (Robert), Roberge (Jonathan), eds, Algorithmic Cultures. Essays on meaning, performance and new technologies, New York, Routledge, 2016, pp. 95-110.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

[/three_fourths]
[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Wed 24 April 2019
17:00 – 18:30 BST

Location

Safra Lecture Theatre,
King’s Building
Strand Campus,
King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/neurons-spike-back-the-invention-of-inductive-machine-and-the-artificial-intelligence-controversy-tickets-55268625948″ text=”Register” color_override=””]

[/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music 10.04.19

[three_fourths]

This event has been cancelled.
 
How do music streaming services such as Spotify work? What is their product? What is involved in their recommendation engines? How can they be studied? Join us for a talk with Patrick Vonderau (Martin Luther University in Halle). Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music – Patrick Vonderau The talk introduces a 4-year collaborative research project (2014-2018) investigating Spotify, the Swedish music streaming service. Borrowing the notion of teardown from reverse engineering processes, the project aimed to disassemble the way Spotify’s product is commonly conceptualized. While long seen as pioneering solutions to issues of concern to the music industry, Spotify recently has prompted such critical scrutiny. What is the substance of the service that the company claims to offer? What distinguishes Spotify and other platforms from traditional media companies? In taking up these and other questions, the project performed “teardowns“ in an imaginative rather than purely technical sense: publicly, through interventions and experimental methods. The talk presents the project’s general background and approach, some of the research and its methods, as well as reflections about the ethics of doing this line of critical research on digital media companies. Bio: Patrick Vonderau is Professor at the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. Recent book publications include the co-authored Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (MIT Press, 2019) and Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Patrick currently holds a three-year grant for the project Shadow Economies of the Internet (Swedish Research Council, together with Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University). He is a co-founder of NECS-European Network of Cinema and Media Studies (necs.org). This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

 

[/three_fourths]

[one_fourth_last]

Date and time

Wed 10th April 2019
16:00-17:30 BST

Location

Bush House, Lecture Theatre 1 BH(S)1.01
Bush House South Wing,
King’s College London
London WC2R 1ES    

 

 

[button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/spotify-teardown-inside-the-black-box-of-streaming-music-tickets-53859931505″ text=”Register” color_override=””]

[/one_fourth_last]