6:30 for 7:00pm Tuesday 2 March 2010

London Knowledge Lab
23-29 Emerald St
London
WC1N 3QS

Nearest tubes: Holborn (Central & Piccadilly Line), Russell Square (Piccadilly Line) and Chancery Lane (Central Line).

Buses: 19, 38, 55, 243.

The BCS Computer Arts Society Specialist Group invite you to our March meeting at the London Knowledge Lab. This meeting is open to the public and is free.

Ron Chrisley and Joel Parthemore

The SEER-3 project is an attempt to explore new ways of specifying the non-conceptual content of experience, using an off-the-shelf robotic dog from Sony. Much of experience is not conceptually structured or, at least, not easily expressible in words. Alternate means of expressing the content of that experience are needed. We will offer our own perspective on that research, and relate it briefly to our own research interests in philosophy of mind.

Most importantly for this audience, we will talk about our conclusion that the program output had independent aesthetic merit, leading us to suggest that some samples of it be submitted to the CAS-sponsored art exhibition in Shrewsbury in 2007. After presenting samples of what was exhibited we will also discuss our experiences interacting with the audience there, interacting with the exhibit.

Lastly, we will talk about the coding process as an aesthetic experience and present examples of the program output from each stage in the program's development. If possible, the talk will conclude with output of some recent work on a light-avoidance routine.

Ron Chrisley is the Director of COGS, the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where he holds a Readership in Philosophy in the Department of Informatics. He has held various research positions in Artificial Intelligence, including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and a Fulbright Fellowship at the Helsinki University of Technology. He was awarded his doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1997.

Joel Parthemore is writing up his doctoral thesis on the intersection between enactive philosophy and theories of concepts. The former stresses the continuity between an agent and that agent's environment; the latter concerns the ways our thoughts are systematically and productively structured. He is a student in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex and is spending the current year at the University of Lund in Sweden as a guest of Peter Gärdenfors, whose work on 'conceptual spaces' he is basing much of his own thesis on. In his spare time, he is interested in ways of bridging the art/science divide and in the occasional aesthetically pleasing products his work has quite unexpectedly produced.