Keynote
Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink: How Machine Learning Can Benefit Human Creators
DATE: July 6, 2021
TIME: 11.00 - 11.40 CEST
SPEAKER: Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink
REGISTER: This session is part of the 4-day Music & Innovation Summit by Wallifornia MusicTech. You can register for the whole event here, and attend all sessions for free.
ABSTRACT: Computer scientists typically think about machine learning as a set of powerful algorithms for modeling data in order to make decisions or predictions, or to better understand some phenomenon. In this talk, Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink invites you to consider a different perspective, one in which machine learning algorithms function as live and interactive human-machine interfaces, akin to a musical instrument. These “instruments" can support a rich variety of activities, including creative, embodied, and exploratory interactions with computers and media. They can also enable a broader range of people—from software developers to children to music therapists—to create interactive digital systems. Drawing on a decade of research on these topics, she’ll discuss some of our most exciting findings about how machine learning can support human creative practices, for instance by enabling faster prototyping and exploration of new technologies (including by non-programmers), by supporting greater embodied engagement in design, and by changing the ways that creators are able to think about the design process and about themselves. She’ll discuss how these findings inform new ways of thinking about what machine learning is good for, how to make more useful and usable creative machine learning tools, how to teach creative practitioners about machine learning, and what the future of human-computer collaboration might look like.
Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink
Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink is a Reader at the Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London, where she designs new ways for humans to interact with computers in creative practice. Fiebrink is the developer of the Wekinator, open-source software for real-time interactive machine learning whose current version has been downloaded over 40,000 times. She is the creator of the world’s first MOOC about machine learning for creative practice. Dr. Fiebrink was previously an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University.