[Air-L] Announcing 4 public seminars for Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies

[Christopher Haworth]

We are delighted to announce a series of 4 public seminars taking critical
and creative perspectives to the current state of AI in music and related
arts. The seminars air the work of the research programme ‘Music and AI:
Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’ (MusAI). The MusAI research
team is an international one and the programme is based at the Institute of
Advanced Studies <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/> and
Department of Anthropology
<https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/ucl-anthropology>, UCL, with links to
the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
<https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/the-institute/people/owen-green.html>, KTH
Royal Institute of Technology <https://www.kth.se/profile/bobs>, the University
of New South Wales <https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/oliver-bown>, Carnegie
Mellon University <https://lti.cs.cmu.edu/people/222228444/fernando-diaz>,
the University of Birmingham
<https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/music/haworth-christopher.aspx>,
City, University of London
<https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/aaron-einbond>, and Kings
College London <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/darci-sprengel>.



*Date of the first seminar:* Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm UK Time

*Location: *The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd.,
London NW1 2DB

*Title:** Re-Engineering Recommendation – Prototyping Radical
Interdisciplinarities*

*Presenters: *

*Georgina Born, PI (UCL)
*Fernando Diaz (Carnegie Mellon University, formerly McGill University,
Mila, Google)
*Jenny Judge (University of Melbourne)

*Abstract: *

Scholars in the critical arts, social sciences and humanities have long
sought greater collaboration with computer science and engineering. In this
seminar, anthropologist Georgina Born, computer scientist Fernando Diaz and
philosopher Jenny Judge present experimental work embodying this vision.
The project focuses on reinventing recommender systems curating music and
other cultural content by translating principles derived from public
service media into sociotechnical design. This entails a methodology akin to
 Agre’s ‘critical technical practice’: sustained, critical interdisciplinary
dialogues between researchers in computer science and the social sciences
and humanities. If recommendation is a key public interface with AI,
existing research on recommender systems neglects their aggregate influence
across populations and over time. Tackling this challenge, the project
identifies universality of address and content diversity in the service of
strengthening cultural citizenship as goals for recommender
systems curating cultural content. To advance these goals the project
develops a metric, commonality, which measures the degree to which
recommendations familiarize a user population with diverse cultural
content. The seminar probes the challenges of translating normative
principles into sociotechnical design, as well as the project’s
philosophical implications. Envisaging a new paradigm, this work
contributes to the increasingly urgent concern with developing public good
rationales for machine learning systems.

** This is the first of 4 seminars organized by the MusAI research
programme between January and March 2024, with each seminar hosted by one
of the contributing projects. The dates are as follows, and please NB: the
times vary –

*Seminar 1, *Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm – ‘Re-Engineering
Recommendation–Prototyping
Radical Interdisciplinarities’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London

*Seminar 2, *Tuesday February 6 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Music and Copyright after
Generative AI: Social, Ontological and Legal Perspectives’: hosted by
Inspace, Edinburgh University

*Seminar 3, *Friday February 23 2024, 3-5pm – ‘AI and Practice-Based
Research in Music and the Arts’: hosted by PRiSM
<https://www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-activity/research-centres-rncm/prism/>,
Royal Northern College of Music & Manchester University



*Seminar 4, *Friday March 1 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Towards Radically
Interdisciplinary AI Pedagogies’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute,
London



https://www.turing.ac.uk/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/research/music-and-artificial-intelligence

https://musicairesearch.wordpress.com/