What happens if you fill a pub with clever and lovely people then invite loads of amazing Goldsmiths scientists to entertain them?
Join us on Wednesday 15 March for a chaotic science cabaret in the Amersham Arms, featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts who will delve into the weird and wonderful side of computer science and psychology.
Expect laughs, serial killers, Brad Pitt, a high-tech smart glove, facts that sound totally made up but aren’t, and loads of terrible PowerPoints. Compered by comedian Steve Cross. The line-up:
Mark d’Inverno (Computing): Why machines can never be creative – the history and future of creativity
Hadeel Ayoub (Computing): Let’s have a talk… glove to glove
Sarah Wiseman (Computing): People are weird: Why we shouldn’t experiment on students
Caoimhe McAnena (Psychology): The psychology of the Croydon Cat Killer
Ashok Jansari (Psychology): What’s the difference between Brad Pitt and a Super-cop?
Robert Chapman (Psychology): Why science reporting isn’t funny
When: 6:30pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 15 March 2017 Where: Amersham Arms, 388 New Cross Road, SE14 6TY Tickets: £6 (£5 for Goldsmiths staff/students). Buy online
Part of British Science Week. All proceeds from ticket sales will go to CARA, the Centre for At-Risk Academics.
A Goldsmiths Computing student’s ‘sign language glove’ has taken first prize in an exclusive South Korean hackathon attended by hand-picked students from some of the world’s best universities.
PhD Arts & Computational Technologies candidate Hadeel Ayoub, third-year BSc Creative Computing student Leon Fedden, and 2016 MSci Creative Computing graduate Jakub Fiala took part in the IBM Watson A.I. Hackathon in Seoul earlier this month. Organised by the Art Centre Nabi, the hackathon focused on pioneering technology for use in social care.
Hadeel, an MA Computational Arts graduate who is now studying for her PhD, has spent the past year working on the second version of her BrightSign glove, which turns hand motions into text and speech. In addition to the new developments in the glove’s technology, she has also consulted with Rose Sinclair from Goldsmiths’ Department of Design on the best textiles to use for the product.
During the three day hackathon, the Goldsmiths team built, programmed and trained the BrightSign glove on site. On the final day they presented the project at a public event with a judging panel including the director of IBM Watson.
The BrightSign glove contains an on-board, battery-powered single board computer, flex sensors and an accelerometer. Used in combination with a range of gestural and semantic analysis tools, users can generate and control reliable speech through a dictionary of hand gestures.
The first version of the design made international headlines in 2015, with Hadeel explaining the glove’s potential to improve communication between people with different disabilities.
The Goldsmiths team, supervised by the Department of Computing’s Dr Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr Mick Grierson, were up against stiff competition from Seoul National University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and New York University, among others.
A festival of experimental sound, film and performance – co-curated by Goldsmiths and London College of Communication – takes place in Rotherhithe this December.
Guy Sherwin >> ‘Sound Cuts’ – 4 projector performance
Sherwin’s film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Sherwin was guest curator of ‘Film in Space’ an exhibition of expanded cinema at Camden Arts Centre. His films have screened at Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
Alice Kemp >> live art performance
Kemp works with dream-image-language and subtle trance states to create live-art performances and audio compositions. Her practice involves composition, public and private rituals, doll-making, drawing and painting. Her performances have been described as hypnotic, intense, unnerving, beautiful, dark and reflective, aggressive, confusing, meditative, pointless, brave, sensual, baffling, delicate, and absurd.
Simon Katan >> ‘Conditional Love’ – participatory networked device performance
Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He is a researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audio Visual Interactions group.
Heather Ross >> Domestic Dawn Chorus
Ross is concerned with how human experience is mediated, by exploring the tensions between reality and representation. How do the technologies of reproduction and representation affect the way we understand the world through our senses? Dealing with themes of alienation, melancholy, remoteness, disembodiment and longing, her work conjoins realities and fictions, to convey ambiguous environments, spaces and forms.
Claire Undy & Bill Leslie >> Video work
Claire Undy is an artist and curator, working largely with performance, video and time-based media. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2016, and co-founded the curatorial project Skelf. Bill Leslie is a visual artist whose work draws on Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-movies, as well as Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. Concerned with the relationship of sculpture and the photographic image, his works develop through transformations of scale, context and media.
Sunday 11 December
Lee Patterson >> Amplified devices and processes
Working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation, Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings through different ways of listening. Characterised by revealing subliminal and barely audible sound materials within commonplace things, his unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians.
Áine O’Dwyer >> DJ set with field recordings
With a background combining Irish traditional music and contemporary performance, Áine O’Dwyer creates multi-layered, experiential work that begs questions of historicism and the social proximities of the everyday, as well as the presumed nature of records themselves. For this DJ set, she will play her collection of field recordings, drawing on her knowledge of the acoustics of the Brunel Tunnel from her two year residency there.
Howlround >> Live tape manipulation on 3 reel-to-reel machines, tape loops stretching across the space…
Howlround create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.
Wajid Yaseen & Anthony Elliot >> Oscillators, Extended vocal performance, drawn circuits
Anthony & Wajid’s ‘Crossing Lines’ recently opened the Tempting Failure festival. An improvised vocal and sound-drawing performance, it involved Wajid Yaseen’s experiments in extended vocal techniques with Anthony Elliott’s sculpture-sound-printing rheostat to explore a balance between all-gate square wave generators that allow on-off vocal input. A contrast in frequency and sound texture generated by the two performers and two systems was suspended between the systematic and the unplanned.
This November promises to be a month full of events – most of which are free (or cheap) and open to everyone. Here’s what’s coming up…
6.30pm Thursday 3 November Goldsmiths Showoff: Strange days
Comedy and cabaret in the pub featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts including Kate Devlin on the algorithms of online dating, Sylvia Pan on virtual humans, Sarah Wiseman on the quantified self, and Dee Harding on so-called experts.
4pm Wednesday 9 November Lecture: Linguistic and perceptual colour categories
Christoph Witzle (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) discusses his work investigating how linguistic colour categories may be related to colour perception.
4pm Wednesday 16 November Lecture: Cultural Computing: Looking for Japan
Renowned media artist Naoko Tosa discusses the role of information technology in enabling new understandings of a multicultural world.
4pm Thu 17 Nov NEW! Lecture: The Hearing Body
Talk on using of sound to change people´s experiences of their body and the surrounding space, as well as its impact on emotion and behaviour.
6.30pm Thursday 17 November NEW! Talk and performance: Unreal-time improv and actual-timeline composition
Composer and improviser Panos Ghikas discusses his research developing a live performance interface for navigation through audio-timelines with the purpose of re-sequencing audio gestures.
Friday 18 – Sunday 20 November NEW! I am human: precarious journeys
Featuring interactive design by Goldsmiths Computing and music by Brian Eno, Sue Clayton’s multimedia installation traces the journeys of refugees as they navigate the perils of the sea, the national border and the camp.
Sat 19 – Sun 20 November AdventureX: Narrative Games Convention
Now in its sixth year, AdventureX is a free event bringing together developers & gamers with a passion for interactive storytelling. Encompassing everything from retro pixel-hunts to rich, branching narratives, AdventureX is celebration of creativity, indie development and geek culture.
3pm Thursday 22 November NEW! Innovation Lecture Series: Kate Russell (BBC Click)
Kate Russell writes about technology, gaming and the Internet reports for BBC technology programme Click. Her book Working the Cloud is aims to help businesses better use the Internet.
4pm Wednesday 23 November Characterising human imagination through art and science
Sheldon Brown (Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination) shows artworks that aim to engage components of cognition that make up “the imagination”.
4pm Wednesday 30 November Lecture: Attention and cross-cultural differences
Eirini Mavritsaki (Birmingham City Uni) discusses her use of computational models to observe differences in visual attention in East Asian and European American cultures.
4pm Wednesday 8 December Lecture: Composer, Performer, Listener
Jason Freeman (Georgia Tech) explores real-time music notation, live coding, laptop ensembles, mobile technology, and open-form scores.
Friday 17 – Saturday 18 December Sex Tech Hack NEW!
A 24-hour hackathon exploring sex tech hardware, interfaces and apps, working on the themes of intimacy, companionship and sexuality.
Monday 19 – Tuesday 20 December Conference: Love & Sex with Robots
In this 2-day conference, academics and industry professionals discuss their work on intelligent sex tech, teledildonics, ethics, gender and sex robots.
Lecturer Dr Sarah Wiseman reports on a Goldsmiths initiative to get more girls studying and working in computing.
An issue common to computer science departments throughout the world is the gender inequality in the student population. Almost wherever you look, the majority of students are male. For the past 10 years, just 15% of students accepted to computer science degree programmes were women – though here at Goldsmiths, the figures are a more healthy 31%.
To tackle this inequality, there are many initiatives being set up to try and encourage more women to consider computer science as an option for further education. These can range from peer support groups for women in university (such as the Hoppers in Edinburgh) to dedicated programs aimed at educating young girls (for example Black Girls Code) and women (for example Code Liberation).
Not all initiatives are successful however. Do you remember Hack A Hair Dryer? IBM set out to encourage women into computing and engineering by suggesting they create things using their hairdryers – a message that could easily be considered pretty patronising.
This year at Goldsmiths, we wanted to approach the problem by doing something that would benefit both boys and girls who were might be interested in computer science; we wanted to provide school children with strong female role models.
We decided to run a series of workshops that would do just that, whilst also showcasing the exciting and diverse range of topics that come under the term “computer science”. We invited 100 pupils aged between 12 and 15 from schools within the local area to come to Goldsmiths and get involved in one of four different computer science-related workshops run by women within the department.
The first workshop looked at problem solving. The aim of this session was to give the kids an idea about the types of puzzles you can solve in computer science. The pupils learnt about encryption by sending a chained up, locked box file between groups. The contents of the box, decided by the students at the time, ranged from Justin Beiber’s new album title to nuclear missile launch codes (both equally sensitive information). Other tasks included arranging celebrities in alphabetical order for the red carpet (using sorting algorithms) and designing a city layout using graph theory.
In other workshops, children programmed Arduinos to send Morse code, and created a servo-powered fortune teller. In our Game Design workshop the children considered how games can be designed to be fun and engaging, and designed their own board games and rule sets. The process isn’t as easy as it seems, no matter how many coloured pens and tokens you have available to you!
The final workshop looked at machine learning, and how you can use the webcam on your computer to create an instrument. Rebecca Fiebrink showed pupils how to use her fantastic Wekinator tool to create drum machines controlled by moving in front of the webcam. The noise from that lesson was quite incredible, from the strange and wonderful noises coming from the instruments, and from the students’ excited conversations while they learnt about machine learning.
At Goldsmiths, we want 50% of our Computing students to be women. And one of the ways of doing this is by working with the generation of children who are just beginning to think about what they want to do at GCSE and ‘A’ level. This project engaged 100 kids – and we’re looking forward to meeting more of them next year.
Thanks to Harris Academy Peckham, Harris Girls’ Academy, Eltham Hill School, Streatham and Clapham High School and Chislehurst School for Girls.
A new dissertation by MSc Data Science student Caroline Butler highlights the relationship between health and politics in the USA.
MSc Data Science student Caroline Butler has been investigating whether there is a relationship between mortality among middle-aged white Americans, social and economic well-being, and the 2016 presidential primary election outcomes at county-level.
Her research suggests that middle-aged white Americans living in counties with higher death rates are more cautious voters. That is, they are more likely to vote for a safe bet over a wildcard such as Trump.
After analysing data from the United States Center for Disease Control’s WONDER tool, the United States Census Bureau’s County QuickFacts, and the Kaggle forum, 2016 US Election, Caroline discovered a pattern connecting death rates to voting.
Contrary to expectations, a one unit increase in the all-cause mortality rate increased log odds of Hillary Clinton winning in that county’s Democratic presidential election primary by 1.5693 compared to Bernie Sanders. However, this result could have been skewed by Bernie Sanders’ younger fan base.
To Caroline’s surprise, a one unit increase in the all-cause mortality rate decreased log odds of Donald Trump winning his primary in a county by 1.4371.
The project was inspired by recent evidence that drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and chronic liver diseases have caused the mortality rate among middle-aged white people in the United States to increase. At the same time, anti-establishment candidates, such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have achieved unexpected success.
In a follow-up investigation to her project, Caroline ran her data on mortality, socio-economic status of a county, and which state the counties were in through the CHAID machine learning algorithm, and found that with 85-89% accuracy, you could predict who would win the primary for each political party.
Her results suggest that for both white people and all races combined, the social and economic well-being of a county is as much related to the outcomes of the 2016 primary election as the mortality rates of middle aged Americans is.
“Understanding whether mortality data for middle-aged white Americans is associated with political viewpoints is important not only from a political perspective, but also for purposes of developing appropriate public health directives,” Caroline explains.
“I was surprised to find that in areas with higher mortality rates, people were more likely to vote for Clinton over Sanders in the primaries – but I’d suggest this could be because Sanders had a high number of young, so generally more healthy, voters.
“A similar study should definitely be done for the United States Presidential Election so we can compare the voting patterns from the Democratic Party to the votes from the Republican Party.”
Ulla Nolden, graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA/MFA Computational Arts, has been announced as one of four winners of the 2016 FutureFest Art Prize, run by the UK innovation foundation Nesta.
Following an open call for entries, twelve shortlisted artists were selected from over 270 entries responding to four themes of FutureFest – Love, Play, Work and Thrive. Works were showcased at FutureFest in London on 17-18 September 2016. Four winners were selected and announced at the event, following a live audience vote.
Winning the ‘Play’ category, Ulla Nolden’s Pure Movement 3, environment 1.2 maps the behaviour of swarms through intricate algorithms, inspired by an interest in the balance between simplicity and complexity in insect swarms.
The four winners each receive a £500 cash prize. In addition, their work will be launched and promoted on Sedition to an international audience of art collectors and digital enthusiasts. The judging panel included artist Claudia Hart, FIELD creative studio, Ghislaine Boddington (body>data>space) and Dr Morgaine Gaye (Bellweather: Food Trends).
