Seminar Blogs
“With a little help from animated friends” – Max Peters
One of the main challenges in coordinating robot behavior, as shown by Roos van Berkel and Emilia Barakova in their lecture, centers around the ability to let robots respond to movement and emotion; essential to human behavior. They demonstrated a variety of approaches, ranging from gaze matching to Laban Movement Analysis, and it quickly became…
Read more“I am not a robot…or am I?” – Elissavet Kardami
Melvin Waver’s talk, Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, provided some critical insight on the potential of neural networks in conducting academic research in the field of Humanities. The proliferation of available data and the rapid developments in the processing possibilities, in conjunction with the increasing digitization of archives, has…
Read more“Digital Humanities: the necessity of collaboration” – Gido Broers
In Melvin Wevers’ lecture Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, he explained why humanities researchers should collaborate with computer scientists. He did this by showing a neural network that can analyze and categorize images in advertisements. This network could then recognize certain patterns, which eventually could lead to new insights…
Read more“Essentialism and free labour – the other side of neural networks” – Irene Alcubilla Troughton
In his talk Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, Melvin Wevers exposed a type of research that, relying on large corpora of data for advertisements, employed computational devices in order to be able to proceed with his analysis. The amount and accessibility of data nowadays, as it has been addressed…
Read more“On the pedagogy of algorithms” – Tamalone van den Eijnden
The underlying idea of pedagogy is that parents, teachers and other adults bear responsibility for the upbringing, education and conduct of children. These responsibilities range from the mental life of the child to behavioural manners to legal liability. Ideas of the responsibility in education are not only limited to human-human relations but are equally applicable…
Read more“Bring neural networks into the public eye!” – Max Peters
Reflecting on the fascinating research presented by Melvin Wevers on neural networks and the ongoing technical innovations within the field of computer recognition and identification software. Through a complex explanation of the mathematical and algorithmic techniques going into these research, Wevers showed us how computers are not just research tools, they are, as if they…
Read more“It’s time to nut up or shut up: can science catch up with technology?” – Alexandra Kinevskaya
For as long as humanity existed, people have been occupied with the essence of things around them. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers tried to understand the world since the ancient times, looking up at the sky, at nature, at art to find the answers to the most fundamental questions. Later many other scientists studied the air, the…
Read more“Reconstituting the senses though and beyond media” – Elissavet Kardami
Frank Kessler’s lecture brought forward several questions about the role of the media in daily life and its potential to transform the way we perceive and describe our daily experiences. For example, I started reflecting on the ways that cinema has reconfigured the senses and shaped our experience of the world, and how it has…
Read more“An Odd Couple: Vision and Truth” – Tamalone van den Eijnden
Frank Kessler’s session of Transmission in Motion on the 13th of January, the topic was “Media and the Reconfiguration of the Senses” with a special focus on vision. During the session, we were presented with several philosophers who somehow engaged with the topic such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Béla Balázs, Vilém Flusser, and most…
Read more“Technology and the senses: an ethical account” – Irene Alcubilla Troughton
In the past session of Transmission in Motion, thanks to the lecture of Frank Kessler, we gained more insight on the role of the senses in different media, with special attention to the reconfiguration of them and the discussions around that topic from several scholars. Beginning with the legend of Zeuxis and his competitor Parrhasius,…
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