Session Three: MACHINE Interdisciplinary Forum

Ian Potter Museum of Art

SESSION THREE | Thursday 17 September | 2pm start | The link to the zoom webinar will be given to you when you register.

MACHINE: Interdisciplinary ForumSession Three co-presented with the Melbourne Centre for Data Science2–2.10pm Potter introduction and welcome2.10–2.30pm Listening to  the diagnostic ear | Sean Dockray What can a cough tell us? What can a cough tell about us? More than a few projects, which are collecting and analysing coughs in order to diagnose COVID-19, have appeared over the past few months. These projects appeared suddenly, all at once, like symptoms of an underlying condition. When a project such as this is finally realised as an AI Doctor, it will confront us as a diagnostic ear, listening to the noises we make to recognise what can&#x27;t be heard, what we don&#x27;t even know about ourselves. In this presentation, we will listen back, by listening to one dataset of coughs that the machine is learning from. What is this ear learning from these coughs? What can a cough tell us?The Ian Potter Museum of Art commissioned Sean Dockray to develop an online artwork for the MACHINE Interdisciplinary Forum. The work, Listening to the Diagnostic Ear, will be launched during the week of the forum on the Ian Potter Museum of Art&#x27;s website.Sean Dockray is an artist and writer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG. Sean is a Lecturer in Sculpture &amp; Spatial Practice at the Australian National University in Canberra, currently researching the rise of listening machines.2.30–2.50pm Generating beautiful intricacy via self-evolving mathematical functions | Kate Smith-MilesProfessorships in three disciplines (mathematics, engineering, and information technology) have given Kate Smith-Miles an interdisciplinary breadth reflected in much of her research. Negentropy Triptych is an unexpected outcome of a mathematics research project, titled “Stress-testing algorithms: generating new test instances to elicit insights&quot;, funded by an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. In this talk, Kate will describe how her research quest to generate mathematical functions that are challenging and “stress-test” optimisation algorithms has led to a large collection of intricate and beautiful 2D images, contour plots of mathematical functions that have been mathematically generated to create challenging landscapes. Unable to choose which images were most beautiful, she and her co-author decided to arrange many images in an array, but noticed the presence of background structure as localised connections between the images formed depending on the arrangement.  Surveying friends about their aesthetic preferences for various arrangements revealed great diversity of taste, and interesting relationships between personality traits and aesthetic preferences for structure or randomness. Representing this spectrum of preferences as a triptych of images, from random to stronger global structure, thus depicts the emergence of global structure from randomness, and hence the negative of entropy known as “negentropy”. The mathematics used to generate the 306 intricate functions underpinning Negentropy Triptych will be lightly explained, and the resulting beautiful landscapes will be explored.Kate Smith-Miles is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BSc (Hons) in mathematics, and a PhD in electrical engineering, before commencing her academic career in 1996 at Monash University. Returning to the University of Melbourne in 2017, she is currently Associate Dean (Enterprise and Innovation) for the Faculty of Science, and Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Optimisation Technologies, Integrated Methodologies and Applications (OPTIMA). Passionate about interdisciplinary applications of mathematics, Negentropy Triptych represents her first foray into the visual arts.2.50pm–3.20pm Response | Q and ANiels Wouters, Research Fellow, Interaction Design Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne; Head, Research and Emerging Practice for Science Gallery Melbourne__________________________________________________________________________________________________The Potter&#x27;s annual interdisciplinary forum program series is developed in collaboration with Dr Danny Butt, Associate Director (Research) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Art and Music, University of Melbourne.__________________________________________________________________________________________________Image: Kate Smith-Miles, Negentropy Triptych (detail)

Session Three: MACHINE Interdisciplinary Forum

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Session Three: MACHINE Interdisciplinary Forum

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