Language and Thinking (L&T) Program Presents
How Drones See
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room
9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
a workshop led by Arthur Holland Michel, Co-Director, Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. For Language and Thinking students only.
Just like L&T students, drones are increasingly being taught how to learn on their own. This talk will explore cutting edge developments in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomy, focusing on efforts to teach drones to learn for themselves their surroundings, and then make complex decisions based on environmental factors. Students will be introduced to a broad variety of military and civilian research initiatives, and will consider the many potential applications of highly autonomous robots (for example, in emergency response missions, or for delivery services, or surveillance operations). We will focus on initiatives that are seeking to teach drones how to ‘see,’ either by sensing their environments or by ‘reading’ images using computer vision algorithms. By reflecting on the idea of drone vision as it becomes increasingly sophisticated and powerful, this talk will seek to complicate our understanding of the philosophical concepts of ‘seeing’ and aesthetics, and challenge students to consider what it means for our notions of these concepts when images can be ‘read’ and ‘understood’ by machines without any human intervention. This talk will integrate Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," Thomas Kuhn's Preface & Chapter VI from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Gertrude Stein's “Composition as Explanation,” Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The workshop will be led by Arthur Holland Michel, who is the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, a research and education initiative that explores the opportunities and challenges associated with unmanned systems technology in both civilian and military spheres.Wednesday, August 10, 9am. Seating is limited to Language and Thinking students.
For more information, call 845-758-7141, e-mail [email protected],
or visit http://languageandthinking.bard.edu.
Time: 9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
Location: Campus Center, Multipurpose Room