Dave Murray-Rust

Designing with and around intelligent infrastructuresDave Murray-Rust is a Lecturer in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has a MEng in Information Systems (Cambridge), MSc in Informatics (Edinburgh) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Music (Edinburgh). His work is concerned with ways that people, data and things interact. Current research questions include: How can we understand the "social machines" – large-scale human-computer collective systems – that are a manifestation of the algorithmically mediated society that we are heading towards? How can we ensure that there is space for people within computational systems, preserving privacy, choice, identity and humanity while making use of possibilities of computational coordination and personal data? How can we work with things that have an increasing sense of agency, from sensing to responding to shaping the world around them? In practice, this relates to: IoT, personal data, human data interaction, physical computing and manifesting data.

Synopsis

“Creating relationships with intelligences"

What do we want AI to do? When it comes to working creatively with technologies, how do we draw out the bits that feel joyous and creative, that expand our horizons. One of the key questions here is agency - how do we shape the technology, and how does it shape us. This is a tricky question with AI systems, as it takes a lot of work to understand their possibilities, limitations and embeddings. In this talk, I'll go through some of these questions, so that we can think together about the role of AI in art.