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.
For this LASER we'll experiment a different format than the traditional 20-minute talks. We'll try the "A.T.O.M.I.C." format: A for Anthropology, T for Technology, O for "Omega Point", "M" for Music, "I" for Images, "C" for Cognitive Science.
Six discussions on six topics.
"I" will be led by Jennifer Parker, founding director of OpenLab at UC Santa Cruz and will be the only extended talk.
The order will be more or less this:
- "I": Jennifer Parker on "Collaborating with a Living Organisms, the Algae Society: BioArt & Design Lab"
- "O": Krishnan Thyagarajan on "What does Human Obsolescence mean for the future of intelligence?"
- "T": Arun Rao on "The Banach Tarski theorem - The Pea and the Sun"
- "C": Anirudh Sankar on "What the Evolution of Stone Tool Technology says about Cognition"
- "A": Jinxia Niu on "Disinformation and Free Speech"
- "M": Sofia Lozano on "Sound as a Therapy and a Practice"
Each will lead a conversation with a brief introduction and then will invite the others and the audience to join the conversation.
(A .. T .. O .. M .. I .. C)
Where:
Stanford University, LiKaShing building - Room LK120
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way. (Stanford map)
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Stanford events page
Bios:
- Jennifer Parker is a Professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz and the founding Director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center. Her work moves through the shifting relationships between art, ecology, and technology, drawing from both scientific and creative practices to explore how humans and other life forms sense and respond to the world. She follows unexpected connections that emerge across species, materials, and environments through interdisciplinary collaborations, opening new ways of seeing and making.
- Sofia Lozano Pallares is Community Organizer and Mediator. Born and raised in Mexico City, Sofía has experienced first hand the contradiction of being part of communities with vibrant activism pushing their issues and sometimes drowning through the many broken systems or ripped apart by internal conflict. Sofia brings 15 years of experience working at the intersection of civic engagement, restorative justice and movement building. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Philosophy from Notre Dame de Namur University and a M.A. in Ethics and Social Theory from the Graduate Theological Union and Santa Clara University.
- Jinxia Niu is a former Chinese journalist who conducted research at the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab and co-wrote the Chinese books "Human 2.0" (that was voted most inspirational book of the year by a major Chinese website) and "Peace Tech". She is now working on methods to combat disinformation, a project for which she has been invited as a speaker at major international conferences and has been interviewed by several major media outlets. She holds a Master in Communications and is studying towards one in Computational Social Science.
- Anirudh Sankar is a PhD student in Economics at Stanford, with a focus on Development Economics. His research examines the instrumental gains from learning conceptually, as opposed to in a black box, and his main project explores this question in the context of small-scale farmers in Uganda learning about agricultural technologies. Prior to starting his PhD, he was a research assistant at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, and before that he worked as a data scientist in the bay area. He holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a MMath from the University of Waterloo.
- Krishnan Thyagarajan is a Physicist by training and has worked on highly interdisciplinary projects in the domains of optical sensors and advanced materials, healthcare, renewable and clean energy, climate tech, quantum technologies, and neurotechnologies. In addition to peer-reviewed publications and conference talks, he also keenly engages as a thought leader in policy and ethics-relevant discussions in these sectors. Through his work, he aims to channel his efforts to translate deep blue-sky research to applications, for the betterment of society.
- Arun Rao works on generative AI at Meta and previously worked on a machine-learning system for Amazon Music, started a virtual assistant company and worked in the financial world. He has degrees from UCLA Anderson, University of Arizona College of Law, Wharton and UPenn. He coauthored "A History of Silicon Valley".
- 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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