NYCML 2018. Highlights and Insights

In September I had the chance to participate in NYC Media Lab, an event meant to gather professionals, students and researchers from New York’s media lanscape and showcase some important innovations in the field. I found it extremely helpful and inspiring, and I thought I could share some ideas.

Next, I will highlight some of the things that sparked my attention. I will start with the first keynote, which was a presentation by Thomas Reardon, Co-Founder and CEO of CTRL-Labs, on the future of neural interfaces. Which is, they argue, the concept of “intention capture”. This process is translating human intention into action through neural networks, which “decode the hidden language of biological neurons using neuron-inspired algorithms”. It was very interesting to see some video examples of how one might text on their phone without using their hands, for example — just with the help of this tool (if I might call it just a tool) which uses the neurons’ signals.

As the presentation was going on, I guess for many of us the future seemed a bit scary, not just innovative, because it looked like scenes of Science Fiction are parts of our present now. But I liked the way Reardon argued the necessity of this projects or other similar projects. Basically, from what I have understood, he said the the more control you have, the more mental energy you you have to be the “social animal” we need to be nowadays. Which I find somehow true, it might be difficult to keep up with the speed of information today. He also emphasized the switch from learning how to control a machine and using it to actually controlling the machine. You can read more about it here if you are interested.

After the keynote, there was a showcase of projects made by students from different universities within the past year, in collaboration with different companies, and supported by NYC Media Lab. The projects covered different topics, from history, to press freedom or health, and used technologies like VR or even blockchain. You can find them here. Personally, I liked the “Let’s Make History” and “Secret Club” the most.

My favorite part of the conference was the debate on Synthetic Media. This new form of media stands at the intersection of computer generated images, voice and video. The reason why it is under debate is because it became such an easy weapon for deep fakes or other forms of fake news, which are definitely a threat to democracy. The participants were Manoush Zomorodi, Stable Genius Productions; Matthew Hartman, betaworks; Karen Kornbluh, Council on Foreign Relations; Eli Pariser, Omidyar Fellow, New America Foundation; Ken Perlin, NYU Future Reality Lab. And it was interesting to see how they covered the good, the bad and the ugly of this new form of media. Among the good parts, the fact that it is a great way for artists to create new projects, and by knowing how synthetic media works, we also become more aware of how it can be used for “evil” purposes. The downside is still represented by the fact that it is quite easy to generate such media, therefore anyone can be a deep fakes creator — and this is obviously a problem. Nonetheless, I have also participated to the workshop related to synthetic media so anyone who’s interested in the subject can send me an e-mail and I’d be glad to share my notes!

The 100 demos exhibited within the event were definitely worth checking. All the projects I had managed to see were both very creative and meant to have a social impact. Good representations of text mining, natural language processing or VR / AR. You can check them here, I believe most of them also have a website!


This site (thehashtags.commons.gc.cuny.edu) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely mine and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.

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