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Past Events

Person speaking at a podium with a colorful laptop cover, purple backdrop, and microphone. Engaged audience in backdrop.

October 17, 2023

Professor Lindsay Grace – 6:00 p.m.

Human Computation, Games and AI

Knight Chair in Interactive Media and Director of the MFA in Interactive Media, University of Miami, School of Communication

Parker Reed Room – SSWAC Building, Colby College 

AI GAMES start at 6:00 pm – BRING YOUR LAPTOP!

TALK starts at 7:00 pm

Professor Lindsay Grace covers the intersection of games, human computation, and artificial intelligence.  Drawing from the trajectories of social impact game design,  we examine the lessons learned and new opportunities in improving work and knowledge sets through games. Case studies are drawn from a wide range of fields, including citizen science, medical treatment, and sentiment polling.  Using play as the key ingredient to a recipe of engaging, effective games that improve data sets and increase our understanding of the world around us, this talk aims to help a wide audience understand the value and potential of digital games to improve human performance, increase real world efficacy and augment a variety of information systems.

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Event poster featuring Naomi Fitter, details on social robots in interventions, date, time, and QR code for livestream.

September 19, 2023

Naomi Fitter – 7:00 p.m.

Playful Social Robots in Early Motor Interventions and Beyond

Assistant Professor – School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering – Oregon State University

Parker Reed Room – SSWAC Building, Colby College 

Dr. Naomi T. Fitter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Her past degrees include a B.S. and B.A. in mechanical engineering and Spanish from the University of Cincinnati and an M.S.E. and Ph.D. in robotics and mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania, and she completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California. As a member of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute, Dr. Fitter aims to equip robots with the ability to engage and empower people in interactions from playful high-fives to challenging physical therapy routines.

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Event poster for AI Bill of Rights talk featuring Dr. Sorelle Friedler and Dr. Farah Qureshi on April 13th, 7PM.

April 13, 2023

Sorelle Friedler – 7:00 p.m.

Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Protecting People and Innovation

Ostrove Auditorium, Diamond Building, Colby College

Join us for a talk with Shibulal Family Associate Professor of Computer Science at Haverford College; Co-author of AI Bill of Rights; and Assistant Director for Data and Democracy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Sorelle Friedler. 

In partnership with Davis Institute for AI, The Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, the Departments of Computer Science, Science, Technology and Society, and Anthropology at Colby College.

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Panel discussion on Art and AI featuring Oscar Santillán, LaFleur, Stewart, and Williams at Colby College on April 10, 6-7 PM.

April 10, 2023

Oscar Santillán – 6:00 p.m.

Art & AI: Panel Discussion

Greene Block + Studios, Downtown Waterville, Colby College 

A panel discussion between Oscar, Amanda Stent, Erica Wall, and Lisa LaFleur. Santillán will discuss and present his work with Colby undergraduate research assistants, that will bring his project to fruition. Free and open to ALL!

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A smiling man in a suit holds a microphone on stage, with a blue background highlighting his presence.

March 28-30, 2023

Felipe Tovar-Henao – 4 p.m. & 6:00 pm

Visiting Artist/Composer

Bixler Building, Colby College 

Felipe Tovar-Henao is a Colombian composer and software developer who specializes in computer-assisted creativity, procedural art, and music information retrieval. Working with Colby students, Tovar-Henao and Assistant Professor José Martínez helped them create new sounds and compositions that were brought together in a stunning and fun concert and installation with audience participation.

A woman with long, dark hair in a black jacket gestures while speaking, set against a dark background.

March 9, 2023

Ruha Benjamin – 6:00 pm

Viral Justice: Pandamics, Police Violence & Public Bioethics

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College 

Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JustDataLab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. 

Hosted by the Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab with co-sponsorship from African-American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, Science, Technology, and Society, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies.

2022 Miles and Katharine Culbertson Prentice Lecture with Oscar Santillán, featuring a talk and Q&A on his artistic practice.

November 10, 2022

Oscar Santillán – 5:00 pm

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College

Oscar Santillán will speak about his practice and introduce the research and work that he will be doing during the 2022-2023 academic year as a Lunder Senior Fellow at the Museum of Art here at Colby.
 
This talk will also be available to watch and participate in the Q&A via Zoom. Use link below.
 
The talk and Q&A will be followed by a reception in Ostrove.
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October 18, 2022

Claire Monteleoni – 7:00 pm

AI Research for Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College 

Despite the scientific consensus on climate change, drastic uncertainties remain. Crucial questions about regional climate trends, changes in extreme events, such as heat waves and mega-storms, and understanding how climate varied in the distant past, must be answered in order to improve predictions, assess impacts and vulnerability, and inform mitigation and sustainable adaptation strategies. Machine learning can help answer such questions and shed light on climate change. An overview of our climate informatics research, focusing on challenges in learning from spatiotemporal data, along with semi- and unsupervised deep learning approaches to studying rare and extreme events, and precipitation and temperature downscaling.
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Portrait of a woman with shoulder-length hair, smiling warmly at the camera in a softly lit interior setting.

May 6, 2022

Beáta Megyesi – 7:00 pm

Professor of Computational Linguistics – Uppsala University, Sweden

Cracking Historical Ciphers in Medieval Texts with AI in the Loop

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College 

She is specialized in digital philology and natural language processing. Her research interests include the automatic analysis of non-standard language data from historical texts and ciphers to student writings to allow large-scale empirical studies for the humanities and social sciences. She is the former president of the Northern European Association for Language Technology, former head of department of Linguistics and Philology and campus director of the English Park Campus at Uppsala University. She serves as the PI of the DECODE and DECRYPT projects, aiming at the development of infrastructural resources and tools for historical cryptology.
Smiling person with glasses in a blue sweater, seated in front of colorful framed artworks on a textured wall.

April 7, 2022

Roy Bahat, Bloomberg – 7:00 pm

Working in an Age of Automation

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College 

Join us for a fireside chat discussing the use of AI for optimizing and automating work.
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Panel discussion featuring four speakers wearing masks, seated on stage with a projector screen in the background.

February 24, 2022

Stacy Doore (Colby College), Allison Cooper (Bowdoin College) and Fernando Nascimento (Bowdoin College) – 7:00 pm

Computing Ethics Narratives – Teaching Computing Ethics Through Storytelling

Ostrove Auditorium – Diamond Building, Colby College 

Join the Computing Ethics Narratives team on Thursday, February 24th at 4:00 pm for a conversation about what its members learned over the course of their research and to celebrate the launch of the project’s website, computingnarratives.com. 

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