The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
ALWAY M112 in Medical Center, 300 Pasteur Dr
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Stanford events page
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Changan Chen (Stanford/AI) on "4D Audio-Visual Learning: A Visual Perspective of Sound Propagation and Production"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Alberto Salleo (Stanford/ Material Science) on "Soft Polymers for Bioelectronics"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Karolina Karlic (UC Santa Cruz/ Photography) on "Unseen California: Photography, Place and Environment "
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
- Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Changan Chen (Stanford) is a postdoc researcher at Stanford University working with Dr. Fei-Fei LI and Dr. Ehsan Adeli. He received his PhD in CS from UT Austin. His work focuses on multimodal learning and embodied AI. He led the development of audio-visual simulation platforms SoundSpaces 1.0 and 2.0. He has previously been a visiting researcher at FAIR for two years. He was a recipient of Adobe Research Fellowship 2022. His research has also been featured in media such as MIT Technology Review, VentureBeat, Yahoo News, etc. He was the leading organizer of AV4D Workshop, ECCV 2022, ICCV 2023 and Multimodalities for 3D Scenes (M3DS) CVPR 2024. He also co-organized the Embodied AI workshop, CVPR 2023, CVPR 2024.
- Karolina Karlic is a visual artist whose work explores the intersection of photography and documentary practices, focusing on themes of labor, industry, globalization and their effect on social and environmental systems. She has received recognition, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as multiple residencies and prestigious awards. Her research seeks to amplify the stories of people and ecosystems impacted by industrialization in the modern world. In Rubberlands, a photographic project mapping the social, ecological, and systemic dynamics of natural rubber production, Karlic examines how rubber and photography shaped the second industrial revolution. She argues that both were essential in building today's global, mobile, consumer society. Karlic is the founding director of Unseen California, a research initiative at UC Santa Cruz that transforms the University of California Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) into a creative space for artists to explore themes of climate action, belonging and land stewardship. Through its Artist in Residence (AIR) program, the initiative supports mid-career, underrepresented artists by offering two-year residencies that foster deep connections to California’s diverse ecosystems. Participating artists collaborate with scientists, access UCNRS resources, and create new works that challenge traditional narratives of landscape photography and its colonial history. The program emphasizes inclusivity, transdisciplinarity and the essential role of art in addressing ecological and social justice issues. Karolina is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program and the Faculty Director of Art + Science initiatives at the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz.
- Alberto Salleo (Stanford University) is Professor of Materials Science and Chair of the Department of Materials Science at Stanford University. Salleo has a Laurea in Chemistry from the University of Rome and subsequently received a PhD in Materials Science from UC Berkeley in 2001. He was a post-doctoral fellow and research staff at Xerox PARC until 2005. In 2005 he joined the Department of Materials Science at Stanford rising through the ranks until becoming Professor and Department Chair in 2019. Salleo is a recognized leader in the field of materials science: he was elected Fellow of the Materials Research Society (0.2% of total membership) in 2022 and was successively elected to its Board of Directors. Salleo is active in connecting the Italian scientist community in the US to that in Italy as board member of the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation. For his exceptional engagement with the Italian scientific community he was named Cavaliere Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2020). His current research centers on structure-property relationships of organic semiconductors and their applications in (bio)electronics. Salleo is a leader in developing x-ray and electron microscopy characterization techniques to study the structure of conjugated polymers with unprecedented precision both ex-situ and operando. He recently invented a new organic-based artificial synapse for neuromorphic computing. Finally, he has also developed several polymer-based biosensing technologies and the device physics needed to understand their operational principles. Salleo is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, the 3M untenured faculty award, SPIE Early Career Award.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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