Melvin Wevers (Assistant Professor of Digital History) and Sara Magliacane (Assistant Professor of Informatics) will have a conversation about Prediction and Causality. This episode is part of the seminar series 'Interdisciplinary Perspectives on AI & Culture: Art and Science In Conversation' organized by Canal / Cultural Analytics Lab and the ASCA Research Group AI and Cultural Production.
Register via the link below. Registration is on a first come, first served basis. The seminars will be hybrid (in-person and Zoom).
Historians have a complicated relationship with causality and the idea that history is governed by laws as thus predictable is met with skepticism. In a short overview of the historiography on causality and prediction, Wevers will argue how insights from these debates offer future methodological directions in digital history for working with causality and prediction. Magliacane will discuss how in some cases we can learn causal relations from data, including learning a notion of causal variables from high-dimensional data like sequences of images, and how causality helps improve robustness in machine learning approaches.
Via this interdisciplinary encounter we will show where our fields (unknowingly) overlap and we also hope to highlight disagreements, fueling debate with the participants.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on AI & Culture: Art and Science In Conversation is an interdisciplinary seminar series focused on bringing humanities scholars and computer scientists to the table to exchange critical perspectives on the intersections between AI and culture.
Across four sessions, the series aims to identify gaps in how different disciplines conceptualise AI in culture and culture in AI. We aim to find a common language as a first step towards establishing interdisciplinary collaboration.
The speakers represent diverse sections in UvA, including history, philosophy, film and media studies, cultural studies, complex systems, multimedia analytics, and machine learning.
All four sessions will take place at 15:00-17:00 at the Institute for Advanced Study (Sweelinck Room, Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC Amsterdam).
The seminars will be hybrid (in-person and Zoom). Participation is free, please register if you would like to attend. The seminar series will culminate in a roundtable discussion in June 2023 where we will ‘hack’ current imaginations/misconceptions, as well as methodologies of researching and applying AI in cultural contexts.