Zoom Link for All days: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/97892294271

Gathertown link for social Hours on select times for All days (check schedule below, 2 hours daily),: https://gather.town/app/h3g5Ngjb0otUShuY/SAAISPACE

Youtube Live Streaming/Recording (August 8th): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AUhKBK67Fw

Youtube Live streaming/Recording (August 7th): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUueusdnJ0

Facebook Live streaming/Recording (August 6th): https://www.facebook.com/10158364499525872/videos/781002019236329

Following the open call for the SAAI Factory, many people signed up endeavoring to create new projects in Art and AI. In this symposium we want to open up the creative process with a stream of  ideas and mind-boggling examples. We invited experts and pioneers that enable the field of Artificial Intelligence to go further and expand to share their passion, knowledge and inspiration with the audience. With a series of events we want to offer participants as well as anyone interested in Art and AI a spectrum of current perspectives and developments within the field. Through workshops the viewers will be given access to technical knowledge surrounding machine learning that is being applied in artistic fields of music, sound, image, pictures, motion, movement, language and text. Through keynote speeches and input talks, the speakers will sketch out the past, present and future of AI intertwined with Art. 

Friday, 6th, Program: 3:30 – 7pm (UTC), Social hours: 7pm-9pm (UTC)

To open up the Symposium, the audience will have a chance to get to know the SAAI Factory as well as receive inspiration from the keynote speakers. Those will shine light on the scientific background of image generation and neural networks, cognitive and neuroscientific research, as well as the connection to AI in the contemporary art practice. 

  • 3:30 Welcome Notes / Christoph Faulhaber, Artistic Director at the SAAI Factory, Artist in Hamburg
  • 4:00 Keynote 1 / Ahmed Elgammal, Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Founder and Director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University
  • 5:00 Input 1 / Marc Schipper, Professor of Psychology at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Ottersberg; Manouchehr Shamsrizi, Co-Founder of RetroBrain R&D and gamelab.berlin part of Humboldt University’s Cluster of Excellence: Subjective Reality, Constructivistic Mechanisms and Digital Encounters
  • 6:00 Keynote 2 / Luba Elliott, AI Art curator: AI in Contemporary Art Practice. Over the past few years, there has been increasing interest in applying the latest advances in machine learning to creative projects in art and design. From DeepDream to GANs and CLIP, AI art has moved beyond the world of research and academia to become a trend in its own right. Meanwhile, the contemporary art world's fascination with the social impact of facial recognition, recommendation systems and deep fakes has encouraged artists to explore AI critically as subject matter. This talk will give an overview of how artists and technologists are using and thinking about machine learning and its creative potential.
  • 7pm-9pm Social Hours on Gathertown, https://gather.town/app/h3g5Ngjb0otUShuY/SAAISPACE

Saturday, 7th,Program: 3 –  8pm (UTC), Social hours: 8pm-10pm (UTC)

The second day of the symposium will offer keynote speeches, input talks and a workshop which guide the audience through AI technologies applied within the current field of immersive experiences, subjective reality as well as interactive storytelling and game design.

  • 3:00 Keynote 3 / Mohamed Elhoseiny, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Visual Computing Center at KAUST
  • 3:30 Workshop 1 / Divyansh Jha (KAUST), Kilichbek Haydarov (KAUST), Isha Khurram (KAUST), Arnab Chakraborty (KAUST), Shyma Alhuwaider (KAUST), Mohamed Elhoseiny (KAUST): Creative AI for Visual Art and Music
  • 5:30 Input 2 / Barry Reese, Lead Data Scientist at Capgemini Germany: What Is a Project?
  • 6:00 Input 3 / Eike Langbehn, Professor for Media Informatics at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences: AI in Interactive Storytelling and Game Design. Interactive Media and Games continuously improve their storytelling abilities and narrative skills. To tell a story in an interactive way is a tough challenge. Therefore, there have been several approaches to use AI for this over the years. In this talk, we have a look at some of these approaches and also present current technologies and tools in the field of AI and narrative design.
  • 6:30 Workshop 2 / Areej Al-Wabil, Director of the AI Center at Alfaisal University, Affiliates of Alfaisal, e.a.: Reality Engines for Designing Immersive Experiences.
    Immersive technologies have opened many opportunities for the visual analytics, AI and media arts communities. To create immersive experiences that are believable to the human mind, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) - collectively known as extended reality or XR - requires complex scenes rendered in exceptional quality at very high frame rates. This workshop is designed to get you acquainted with XR engines and OpenXR, the open standard for VR/AR/MR. The XR ecosystem is an emerging landscape of physical and digital interactions, limited only by our imagination. Through demos and activities, we will explore XR's spectrum, including environmental input, perceptual changes, and design challenges to see how people can connect with presence, share across space, and collaborate with one another, from anywhere in the world, through immersive and extended reality experiences. Duration: 70 min. plus 15-20 min. Q&A
  • 8pm-10pm Social Hours on Gathertown, https://gather.town/app/h3g5Ngjb0otUShuY/SAAISPACE

 

Sunday, 8th, Program: 9am – 6pm (UTC), Social hours: 6pm-8pm (UTC)

The last day of the symposium will focus on the connection of AI and Art, Design and Music. While the speakers will offer a spectrum of current perspectives within the field, the workshops will deliver usable tools, guidance and visualizations of the interconnections between artistic intelligence and AI. 

  • 9:00 Workshop 3 / Peter Kabel, Professor for Interaction Design at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences; Kim Lassen, Tom-Lucas Säger, Safian Sidney Bello, Sarah Pfeiffer, Katharina Mumme, Benjamin Betram; Students of Interaction Design:`aiXdesign´ Creative Kitchen | Cooking & Digestion. Students from the Department Design offer pre-arranged experiments. Participants can replicate these experiments, varying them using platforms such as RunwayML, Style GAN, or GPT-3. Under the moderation of Prof. Peter Kabel, the assisting students and (parts of) the participants, experiences and results will be discussed. The goal is to reduce the threshold fear of less technically trained creatives when dealing with data sets and AI models. And, to strengthen the understanding of creative questions on the part of more technically trained participants. Duration: Cooking: 2 hrs & Digestion: 1 hr. Please, RSVP, workshop is restricted to 25 pers.
    Three tracks: »Picture to Poem« I »Zoom Background 3000« I »Your Own Dancing 3D-Avatar« 
  • 11:00 Workshop 3 / Digestion - everyone is welcome to join and watch the workshop-results!
  • 1:00 Workshop 4 / Werner Bogula, Digital Enabler at Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg (ARIC): AI and Music Generation. The lecture deals with the possibilities of automatic generation of music pieces using examples of lute music from the Renaissance. The idea of the lecture is to build a bridge between the cultural techniques of the Renaissance and the most modern technologies of our time. In addition to information about the technology, the lecture is intended to provide stimuli for thinking about basic cultural concepts such as work, author, and creativity. Duration: 60 min. plus 20-30 min. Q&A 
  • 2:30 Workshop 5 / Tristan Behrens, AI Expert and AI Musician: Composing Music/CyberPunkMetal with GPT-2. GPT is OpenAI’s famous language Deep Neural Network. The beautiful thing is that it can do more than words. With a little engineering magic the model can be trained on music. Tristan will provide a how-to and talk about how he composed three albums using Deep Learning. Duration: 45 min. plus 15 min Q&A
  • 4:00 Workshop 5 / Sean Blagsvedt, CEO of Dara.network: Dara RadBots: Turing-test passing interactive video bots by non-coding writers and playwrights.
  • 5pm Panel Discussion  / Sean Blagsvedt (CEO at Dara.Network), Negar Rostamzadeh (Google Brain),Célia Bugniot (Head of Business at Veesual), Lia Coleman (AI Artist & Researcher, Adjunct Professor at RISD), Mohamed Elhoseiny (Assistant Professor, KAUST), Luba Elliott (AI Art Curator), Christoph Faulhaber (Artist, Hamburg), Isaac Sullivan (Artist, Dubai). Duration: 45 minutes-60 minutes incl. Q&A
  • 6pm-8 pm Social Hours on Gathertown, https://gather.town/app/h3g5Ngjb0otUShuY/SAAISPACE