SameerKDESMA9: sameerkDesma9

Event 1

The event I chose to attend is Ian Cheng’s talk about his work with artificial intelligence in animations. Cheng displayed examples of his work in the field, such as the virtual world he created and the animated creature, Bob. From what I observed, the created dimension had characters interacting with the world around them as well as each other in a functioning society that civilized the area into their village. Bob was a creature with a body that resembled roots from a plant, and a face that looked like a meerkat. The particularly interesting feature Bob had was an array of emotions and thoughts displayed on his face and body movements due to artificial intelligence.

When attending this event, I hadn’t yet gone over the lectures in this class under the “Robotics + Art” section. Once I studied the topic, I thought back to this event and made the connection between the artificial intelligence aspect of robotics and Cheng’s animated creations. However, the art differs from the design of a mechanical robot and an animation. For example, in David Hanson’s TEDTalk, he talked about the technology he and his team were developing: robots with the ability to express emotion. The similarity between Hanson and Cheng’s projects can be seen in the way they programmed their work to be able to use artificial intelligence to show feeling. The difference in their work is that Hanson created a physical robot, while Cheng focused on software animation. Showing the sentiment of robots or animations is a form of “Robotics + Art” as it takes something so complex, like emotions, and incorporates them into being displayed by a robot or an animation that actually has feelings.

Another TEDTalk by Hod Lipson demonstrates his robot’s skill to learn and understand itself and its abilities. When I watched this video, the correlation to Cheng’s creature, Bob, came to mind. Cheng talked about how Bob increased his knowledge about himself over time through experiences. Bob, as an animated creature, and Lipson’s robot, both have the ability to study themselves and use that intelligence to carry out tasks they felt like doing. I find the ability for these non-living creatures to be somewhat living due to artificial intelligence to be extraordinary. It can easily be seen that science and art both converge in Cheng’s project of animations with artificial intelligence.

From these examples, I believe that anyone can identify the connection between Cheng’s work with the field of “Robotics + Art” through the creation of technology that has artificial intelligence to feel, learn, and evolve. Furthermore, in Victoria Vesna’s, “Toward a Third Culture: Being in between,” the “third culture” is described as the culture in which there is the crossroads of science and art. I would definitely consider Ian Cheng to be a leading figure of this movement. I also would recommend this event to my classmates as it is a clearcut example of how art and science complement each other.