COMPUTER SCIENCE, UCL

Lourdes holds the position of Professor of 3D Vision in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

Their research in Computer Vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from the video acquired from a single moving camera. While their early research focused on static scenes, their attention soon turned to the much more challenging problem of estimating the 3D shape of non-rigid objects (Non-Rigid Structure from Motion, NR-SFM) or complex dynamic scenes where an unknown number of objects might be moving, possibly deforming, independently. Lourdes’s research group investigates all theoretical and practical aspects of NRSFM: deformable tracking; dense optical flow estimation and non-rigid video registration; 3D reconstruction of deformable and articulated structure and dense 3D modelling of non-rigid dynamic scenes.

Lourdes has held an ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council from 2008-2014. They are a member of the Vision and Imaging Science group and the Centre for Inverse Problems.

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

Pita is the Curator of Digital Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the co-founder of Off Site Project. Previously, she has held positions with Furtherfield Gallery and had a career in Cultural PR & Communications. Her research work on online art ecologies has been presented at the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts conference and has been invited to speak at Centro de Cultura Digital, Future Everything + the Whitworth Gallery, the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, New Contemporaries and Tate Exchange. Teaching credits include the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University of London. In her curatorial practice, she has addressed issues of populism, AI automation, tourism in the Global South and robotics shows for the Austrian Cultural Forum London, anonymous Gallery, Electric Artefacts and INDUSTRA.

GAZELLI CEO AND FOUNDER

Mila was born and raised in Azerbaijan before settling in London in 2002. She graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she studied International Relations BSc. Having worked in the Client Development department at Sotheby’s, Mila pursued her further studies at Central Saint Martins and Christie’s Education, gaining a theoretical insight into Collecting Contemporary Art, Independent Curating and Art Business.

In 2010, Mila founded Gazelli Art House in London as an additional space to its Baku gallery, which was founded in 2003. After hosting conceptually interlinked off-site exhibitions across London, the gallery’s permanent space on Dover Street was opened. Gazelli Art House grew to support a wide range of international artists and in 2017, the redesigned gallery space in Baku reopened with an ambitious annual program showcasing both local and international artists including to date El Anatsui, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franz Ackermann and Richard Wilson.

COMPUTER SCIENCE, UCL

Gabriel Brostow is a professor in Computer Science at UCL. My group explores research problems relating to Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. The students and colleagues here have diverse interests, but Gabriel’s focus is on "Human in the Loop Computer Vision," for analysis and synthesis applications. To Gabriel, this means having or finding satisfying answers to these questions about a system, whether interactive or fully automated:

I) Does the system know the intended purpose of the data being captured?

II) Can the system assess its own accuracy?

III) Does the system ask questions of users, when it's uncertain?

Gabriel loves this field because it allows us to apply our expertise to a variety of tough problems, including film and photo special effects (computational photography), action analysis (of people, animals, and cells), and authoring systems (for architecture, animation, presentations) that make the most of user effort. 

Previously, Gabriel had a visiting researcher appointment at ETH Zurich's CVG Group, and a Marshall Sherfield Fellowship in the Computer Vision & Robotics Group at Cambridge University. Gabriel did his PhD with Irfan Essa at Georgia Tech, and his undergraduate degree at UT Austin.

CURATOR OF MODAL GALLERY AT SODA, MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Valentino Catricalà (Ph.D) is a scholar and contemporary art curator. He is currently the curator of MODAL Gallery of SODA in Manchester and lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is co-curator, along with Barbara London (founder of the Video Art Department at MoMA), of the D’ORO D’ART Project, in collaboration with Marian Goodman Gallery. He is also the curator of the Digital Art department of La Quadriennale. Valentino has been the founder and the artistic director of the Rome Media Art Festival (MAXXI Museum), Art Project coordinator at Fondazione Mondo Digitale. 
Valentino has curated exhibitions in important museum and private Galleries such as Hermitage (San Petersburg), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), New York Media Center, Stelline (Milano), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), Ca’ Foscari (Venice), New Delhi Italian Cultural Institute (India), among others.

He is the author of several essays (see Academia.edu) and books such as “Art and Technology in the Third Millennium” (Electa, 2020) and the book “The Artist as Inventor” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). Valentino is also curating Art and Innovation section on WIRED Italia, along with Luigi Maccallini (Next Innovation Manager BNL).

THE FACTORY MANCHESTER

Creative Producer – Lucy commissions and programmes performances, exhibitions and installations for theatre, gallery, specialist events and public spaces.

Cultural Strategist – Lucy strategically develops existing assets for future success, from partnerships, digital spaces, strategic thinking and programme.

CYLAND USA

Anna Frants is an internationally renowned New Media artist and curator who co-founded both CYLAND Media Art Lab and the St. Petersburg Art Project. CYLAND is one of the most active New Media art nonprofit organizations, and houses the largest archive of Eastern European video art online. As Co-Founder of Cyland, Frants organizes exhibitions at top art and technology institutions around the world; as a curator and artist, Frants is an important voice in the cultural dialogue surrounding experimental and new media art. Frants has served as a contributing writer to NYArts Magazine as Art and Antiques Magazines and contributed to symposiums and panels for universities, festivals, and exhibitions worldwide.

BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, UCL

Ruairi Glynn is Director of the Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the founder and director of the Barlett's Masters in Design for Performance and Interaction. Alongside his teaching and research he practices as an Installation Artist recently exhibiting at the Centre Pompidou Paris, National Art Museum of China Beijing and Tate Modern London. His interactive installations reflect on rapid developments in robotics, material science and computational technologies examining the emerging aesthetics of behaviour permeating across art, architecture and design. 

RESEARCH LEADER, UAL INSTITUTE FOR CREATIVE COMPUTING

Professor Mick Grierson is Research Leader at UAL Creative Computing Institute. His research explores new approaches to the creation of sounds, images, video and interactions through signal processing, machine learning and information retrieval techniques. Hardware and software based on his research has been widely used by world leading production companies, tech start-ups and artists including the BBC, Channel 4, Massive Attack, Sigur Ros, Christian Marclay, Martin Creed, Jai Paul and many others.

INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, UCL

Dr Hamilton is a Professor in Social Neuroscience and leader of the Social Neuroscience group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL). She completed a PhD on the impact of neuronal noise for the optimal control of human arm movements (UCL), and postdoctoral work on imitation in autism and brain systems for action understanding. She was awarded the Experimental Psychology Society prize lectureship for 2013. Her current research interests include how and why people imitate each other, how social skills differ in autism, and the neural mechanisms of social interaction.

INDEPENDENT CONTEMPORARY CURATOR

As an independent contemporary art curator, Hannah specialises in emerging artistic practice within the fields of art and science and technology, with an interest in participatory process. They develop projects for museums, galleries, corporate contexts, digital space and the public realm. They enjoy projects that redraw boundaries between different disciplines. Current research is around addiction, open data, networked culture and new forms of programming beyond the gallery.

As Head of Arts Programme at the London Science Museum, Hannah commissioned and collected over 100 emerging, mid-career and blue-chip artists, led internal and external teams and held budget responsibility for projects up to £2M.

Since setting up as an independent curator Hannah has developed projects with the Open Data Institute, Institute of Physics, Tate Modern, The Lowry, Natural History Museum, FACT Liverpool, the Digital Catapult and Science Gallery London, and provided specialist consultancy services to the Wellcome Collection, Discover South Kensington and the Horniman Museum. They regularly speak and write on art and science, new media, new institutionalism and digital creative industries, and enjoy teaching and lecturing to art, photography and curating students.

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW/NOKIA BELL LABS

Fahim Kawsar leads Pervasive Systems research at Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge and holds a Mobile Systems Professorship in Computing Science at Glasgow. At his Cambridge lab, he studies forms and intelligence of multi-sensory devices to learn, infer and augment human behaviour in three application areas - Digital Health, Quantified Lifestyle and Smart Built Environment. At Glasgow, he is building up a new group to study system and algorithmic challenges for Mobile Systems. Fahim's research has led to developing multiple artefacts for Nokia (e.g., Consumer Wearables, Sensing-as-a-Service, and Camera Analytics). He has (co-)authored 170+ research papers (Six Best Paper Awards) and granted 40+ patents (Two Top Nokia Innovator Awards). Fahim is a frequent keynote speaker across academic and industrial forums, is an AEIC of IEEE Pervasive Computing, sits at the editorial board of ACM IMWUT, serves (d) as a committee member of leading mobile computing conferences, received multiple million-scale research funds, and has a career accumulation of over €5 Million.

PROJECT MANGER, EMOTECH

Szu Hung Lee is the project manager at Emotech. Emotech builds world-class multimodal and multilingual speech AI solutions for various industries including smart cities, travel, education and smart homes, helping companies reduce operation costs, optimise the interactive user experience and expand their businesses globally.

LEAD AFFECT ENGINEER, EMTEQ LABS, UK

Dr. Ifi Mavridou is Lead Affect Scientist and Research Consultancy Manager at Emteq Labs, specialising in wearable affective computing, machine learning, signal processing, Extended/Virtual Reality systems and experimental design for health care and wellbeing interventions. Her team explores the relationship between stimulus and response, whilst focusing on creating smart computing systems for automatic detection of emotional, behavioural and mental states, using novel multimodal sensing systems. She was part of the development team for the emteqPRO system, by Emteq ltd. As part of her current role, Ifi is collaborating and consulting academic researchers, tech companies and XR content creators for the augmentation and objective evaluation of one’s experience. 

Her PhD, awarded by the EPSRC and CDE Bournemouth University, was on efficiently detecting arousal and valence states through physiological signals using novel wearable sensors for Virtual Reality settings. Before then, she successfully graduated from both MFA in Virtual Reality and Multiuser Systems (Paris 8 & Athens School of Fine Arts) and the MFA in Visual and Applied Arts (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). Her thesis was focused on the creative human-computer interaction through the user's emotional states, using the Emotiv Epoc headset (EEG based). Back in 2005, she was given the chance to study at the age of 15 Fine and Applied Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, rendering her one the youngest students attending the University.

DEEPMIND

Dr. Piotr Mirowski is a Staff Research Scientist working at DeepMind. As a member of Dr. Raia Hadsell's and Dr. Shakir Mohamed's teams, Piotr focused on reinforcement learning for navigation-related research, in scaling up and adapting deep learning systems for use in real world data, in weather and climate forecasting, in a socio-technical systems approach to human-machine collaboration and in computational creativity. He is the author of over 60 papers that have been published in Nature, Genome Biology, Clinical Neurophysiology or at ICLR, AAAI and NeurIPS. Piotr studied computer science in France (ENSEEIHT, Toulouse) and obtained his PhD in computer science in 2011 at New York University, with a thesis supervised by Prof. Yann LeCun (Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2011).

Piotr is also a theatre actor and director who co-founded HumanMachine and Improbotics, world’s first AI-enabled improv companies. Experimenting with AI for artistic human and machine-based co-creation, Piotr created shows featuring robots and chatbots that have toured internationally, from comedy pubs to international theatre and improv festivals (Edinburgh Fringe, Brighton Fringe, Leicester Comedy Festival, Paris Fringe, festivals in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Göteborg, Iasi, Uppsala, Würzburg, as well as ArtAI in Leicester, Zürich Kunsthalle and NRW Forum in Düsseldorf). His award winning shows were covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Time Magazine, Sunday Times, ABC News, Bloomberg and RTE One. Piotr also obtained a Diploma in Acting at London School of Dramatic Art (2015-2017) and acted in fringe theatre plays.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST, DESIGNER AND DEVELOPER

Yasmin is a human making sense of our world of pixels and soft-ware, rebuilding and unknowing AI/ML with experiments and interactive experiences.

Yasmin was recently a UI designer for SERVICE, an app-based research project building a social support platform for older adults.

Yasmin is currently the Design lead for AIxDesign, a community that is working to make AI accessible and playful as well as interrogate the mythologies surrounding this emerging field here.

Yasmin’s artistic practice is concerned with the fabrication of culture, the corpus of collective ‘data’ we hold as a society, and the possible imagined futures afforded by the latent space of machine learning algorithms. Yasmin explores ‘artificial intimacy’ and our willingness for virtual companionship and connection in today’s networked world.

LEADER OF FOVOLAB, CARDIFF METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Robert Pepperell is an artist, professor at Cardiff Metropolitan University and Director of Research at Fovotec, a UK-based start-up that has developed a new form of 3D graphics based on the structure of human vision. Robert works across art and science and has published over 150 academic articles and books in a variety of disciplinary fields and has jointly authored 13 granted patents. He has also exhibited widely. 

SIDEFX

Experienced Software Developer with a passion for Computer Graphics and a demonstrated history of working in the VFX industry.

Alexander Reben’s work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. Using tools such as artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology, perceptual manipulation and technological magic, he brings to light our inseparable evolutionary entanglement to invention which has unarguably shaped our way of being.

Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies, guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues including The Vitra Design Museum, The MAK Museum Vienna, The Design Museum Ghent, The Vienna Biennale, ARS Electronica, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, WIRED, and more. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, and MIT. Reben has built robots for NASA, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab. He is a Stochastic Labs Resident, and a recent visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.

ARTIST AND RESEARCHER

Ridler holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art and a BA in English Literature and Language from Oxford University along with fellowships at the Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL). Her work has been exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Sheffield Documentary Festival and the Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence. She was a European Union EMAP fellow and the winner of the 2018-2019 DARE Art Prize. Ridler has received commissions by Salford University, the Photographers Gallery, Opera North, and Impakt Festival. She was listed as one of the nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential by Artnet and received an honorary mention in the 2019 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the category AI & Life Art. She was nominated for a “Beazley Designs of the Year” award in 2019 by the Design Museum for her work on datasets and categorisation.

MICROSOFT

Marta leads the Avatar Lab within Microsoft Mesh. Her team brings together experience in AI, social sciences, art, VFX and gaming to enable our digital representation in the metaverse as avatars that reflect who we are - and who we want to be.

Avatar Lab scientists deliver AI that casts human appearance on artist-created characters. To capture one's unique self under digital stylisation, Avatar Lab collaborates with artists and social scientists to understand the key factors and boundaries in the perception of one's identity and expressiveness.

Marta holds a PhD in Computer Vision from Grenoble Institute of Technology and INRIA and an MSc in Computer Science and Maths from Warsaw University of Technology. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2016 she led a team of Application Engineers at MathWorks, working with early industry adopters of machine learning, cloud computing and data analytics to enable effective prototyping, technology transfer and scalable deployment.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

Larisa joined Goldsmiths in November 2017 as director of the online Masters in Data Science programme.

Larisa is an internationally recognized expert in AI, particularly in discovery science, reasoning, knowledge representation and semantic technologies. She leads in Goldsmiths the EPSRC-funded project ACTION on cancer aiming to develop an AI system to assist in recommending personalized cancer treatments.

Larisa is also working on the Robot Scientists project, which investigates what processes of scientific discovery can be automated and how robotic and human scientists can work together.

The Robot Scientist Adam was the first system that made an autonomous scientific discovery.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

William Latham is well known for his pioneering Organic Computer Art created in the late eighties and early nineties whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester. His book “Evolutionary Art and Computers” on interactive evolutionary art covering the period at IBM is cited as a leading
publication in this domain.

In 2007 he became a Professor in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. From 2016 his Mutator VR Art Experience developed with long term collaborator Stephen Todd, with Lance Putnam and Peter Todd has been exhibited to much acclaim at museums and galleries in Linz, Shanghai, Brussels, Kyoto, Venice, Dusseldorf, London and in St. Petersburg (linked to The Hermitage Museum) and Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

Frederic works on creativity and AI systems, including robots which can perform with artistic skills similar to expert humans.

He also conducts work with specialists in the biosciences, helping to develop interactive computer environments (occasionally in the form of serious games) to facilitate the study of complex biomolecular problems (folding, docking).

Frederic has a long term interest in shape understanding where he combines knowledge from perception, vision science, AI, the visual arts. Frederic joined Goldsmiths in 2004, when he launched an MSc in Arts Computing.

Outside academia, Frederic leads the consulting activity London Geometry in partnership with Prof. William Latham.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

Xueni Pan is a Senior Lecturer in Virtual Reality. Working in VR for almost 20 years she developed a unique interdisciplinary research profile with journal and conference publications in both VR technology and social neuroscience. Her work in training and education in VR has been featured multiple times in the media, including BBC Horizon and the New Scientist magazine.
Before joining Goldsmiths in 2015, she worked as a research associate in Computer Science, UCL from 2009-2013, and in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), UCL from 2013-2015, where she remains an honorary research fellow.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

Marco Gillies is Academic Director of Distance Learning for Goldsmiths. His role involves developing and supporting new initiatives in online and distance learning. This includes short courses in a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) format, working with partners such as Coursera and FutureLearn and also developing full online degrees. This work is in close collaboration with the University of London International Academy. He also does work to support blended and online learning on campus via our VLE, learn.gold.

Marco is a reader in Computing and a pioneer of interdisciplinary computing at Goldsmiths. He was one of the founders of the creative computing degree and has since been instrumental in developing several other interdisciplinary degrees including Digital Arts Computing and Games Programming. He is a co-founder of the Embodied Audio-Visual Interaction (EAVI) group and has previously been Director of Studies for Computing and Deputy Head of Department.

CHAIR
ALTERNITY

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is a writer, technologist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Alternity, a creative studio which explores alternative histories, social experiments and speculative futures. At Goldsmiths, he is exploring the commercial, scientific and recreational applications of creative computing. He is a trustee of the Cove Park artists' residency centre, the arebyte gallery and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Trained as a physicist at Imperial College, he subsequently turned to journalism and spent fifteen years writing about finance and technology in London and New York before returning to science in 2008. Between 2011 and 2017 he edited New Scientist, the world’s most popular science weekly. He was the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Arc and the founding creative director for New Scientist Live.

CHAIR
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

Rachel Falconer is an independent writer, curator and researcher operating at the critical intersection of digital art practice, feminist technoscience, immersive technologies and networked culture. She is Co-Head of Digital Arts Computing at Goldsmiths University and is a lecturer across undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

She has curated a broad portfolio of digital and computational art exhibitions internationally and is regularly invited to speak at public events on her subject at institutions such as; Transmediale, Tate, Barbican, ICA, V&A, The Photographers Gallery, The Lumen Art Prize, The Whitechapel Gallery, Rhizome, Arebyte Gallery and Gazelli Art House. Her writing and research has been published across a wide range of platforms including; Routledge, Sternberg Press, The Guardian, Frieze, Bomb, Dazed Digital, The British Journal of Photography and The White Review.