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.
Chaired by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where: on Zoom.
Click here to register
or here.
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Christina Agapakis (UCLA) on "AI as feminist technology: biology, computation, and new paradigms for engineering"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Jason Eshraghian (UC Santa Cruz) on "Larger Language Models on Smaller Budgets"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Bios:
- Christina Agapakis is an extremely interdisciplinary synthetic biologist working to build more creative and human futures for biotechnology. During her time in academia and a decade at Ginkgo Bioworks ( http://ginkgobioworks.com ) , she has built organisms, brands, teams, products, and cultures across the bioeconomy and biosecurity, started two ( http://www.methodquarterly.com/ ) magazines ( http://growbyginkgo.com ) , engineered photosynthetic animals ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21533097/ ) , launched a Biodesign ( http://normalphenomena.life ) store ( http://normalphenomena.life ) , resurrected the smell of extinct flowers ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fragrant-genes-of-extinct-flowers-have-been-brought-back-to-life/ ) , put a T-Rex on the NY stock exchange ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/ginkgo-bioworks-goes-public-after-closing-spac-merger-11631922847 ) , made COVID testing ( https://covidedtesting.com/ginkgo ) available for millions of American students, and made cheese with the bacteria from human skin ( https://sciencegallery.org/self-made ) , among other projects. Today , she lives with an anthropologist ( https://nickseaver.net/ ) and a menagerie of children and greyhounds in Somerville, MA and is the founder of Oscillator ( http://oscillator.bio/ ) , a consultancy helping early-stage biotech stories come to life.
- Jason Eshraghian is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz. He received the Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic) and the Bachelor of Laws degrees from The University of Western Australia, WA, Australia, in 2016, where he also received the Ph.D. Degree in 2019. From 2019 to 2022, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, MI, USA. He serves as the Secretary of the Neural Systems and Applications Technical Committee and as an Associate Editor for APL Machine Learning. He was awarded the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Darlington Best Paper Award, the 2019 IEEE Very Large Scale Integration Systems Best Paper Award, the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems Conference, and the Best Live Demonstration Award at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Electronics Circuits and Systems for his work in neuromorphic computing. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Australian-American Fulbright Commission), a Forrest Research Fellowship (Forrest Research Foundation), and the Endeavour Research Fellowship (Australian Government). His research interests include neuromorphic computing, spiking neural networks, and memory circuits, and he is the developer of snnTorch, a widely used Python library used to train and model spiking neural networks.
- 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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