Talk at The Collective on Irresponsible AI

The Collective is bringing together creative & digital innovators, thought leaders & industry professionals from across the East Midlands to share, learn, connect, hatch plans & collaborate through a series of regular events & talks.

Professor Lars Erik Holmquist will give a talk at the next event:

Wednesday 9 October 2024, 1700-1930 at Belgrave Postgraduate Centre, Nottingham Trent University. 

Irresponsible AI: Why artists and creatives must take control of the means of generation

Generative artificial intelligence has quickly become an important tool in the creative industries. It is now possible to create high-quality text, images, music and even videos from just a simple text prompt. However, the most accessible AI models are currently firmly in the hands of a few very large companies in the tech industry, who are wary of any controverses that can affect their stock price. While safety and ethics are important, art thrives on uniqueness and breaking boundaries, and there is a danger that when the generative models are controlled and owned by a small number of actors, this will stifle creativity. In the worst case, it can lead to bland and generic outputs, and even become a form of pre-censorship. I will discuss how users of AI, in particular artists and creatives, need to take matters of technology in their own hands – in other words, take control of this means of generation.

BOOK HERE!

AI commentary on ITV news

Professor Lars Erik Holmquist appeared in an ITV television special on artificial intelligence and on ITV News on October 3. He talked about artificial intelligence and creativity, and how generative AI is already used in many creative fields such as music and filmmaking. But his prediction is that in the workplace, AI is only taking over "low-level" tasks like writing office memos and producing diagrams. For work that requires real human quality, AI is just another new tool that will help creatives to maximise their potential.

Watch the special on ITV below. The segment on creativity and AI starts at 11:30. There are also some nice views of NTU's new Design & Digital Arts building!

Commentary on Apple's AI announcements

Today, Professor Lars Erik Holmquist comments on the new announcements from Apple in The Conversation. 

It is anyone’s guess if Apple’s approach to AI will be able to claw back some of the lost stock price, not to mention the hundreds of billions invested by them and the rest of the tech industry. After all, AI still has amazing potential, but it may be time to slow down a bit, and take a moment to consider where it will actually be the most useful.

There is little in "Apple Intelligence" at the moment that will convince anyone to get a new phone, but some features point towards realising the research vision of ubiquitous and context-aware computing, such as the Hummingbird inter-personal awareness device (right) developed by us back in 1999!

Read the full article in The Conversation here:

AI probably isn’t the big smartphone selling point that Apple and other tech giants think it is.

Welcome new PhD student Anh Pham!

Anh Pham is a PhD student at the Nottingham School of Art & Design. She is joining us from Edinburgh Napier University, with a strong academic background in Graphic and Digital Design (BA) and User Experience Design (MSc). Driven by a deep passion for research and a curiosity for the future of technology, her current work is titled Conquering Social Anxiety: Embracing Comfort through Realistic Metaverse Interactions.

This PhD thesis aims to analyse the effect of the Metaverse on the experience of people having social anxiety disorder (SAD). It demonstrates how Metaverse may assist patients with social anxiety since they will have environment and avatars to interact, thereby bolstering their self-confidence in these settings and in the real life. The study will employ a robust mixed-methods approach to explore an experimental investigation that tracks the progression of participants’ social anxiety over time. By addressing the gaps in current understanding of the therapeutic applications of virtual reality, this study aims to contribute valuable insights into parameters and principles of human body movements, facial expressions in the Metaverse context, and social presence factors associated with interactive environments. 

New project on prototyping physical devices with AI

CXL has received funding from the EPSRC pro2 network+ for the project Conversational Prototyping:  Leveraging generative AI to support iterative device production and testing, led by Professor Lars Erik Holmquist. The one-year, £100K project will develop a new way to prototype interactive devices using Large Language Models. We will develop a system where users enter into a dialogue with the prototype to define and refine its functionality. 

The project collaborators are Datalink Electronics in Loughborough, which specialises in high-technology product design, development and manufacturing; Electric Circus, an art robot company in Amsterdam that is pioneering in the field of street-theater; and Poppe & Partners in Amsterdam, who specialise in the combination of culture and technology. 

Electronic Textiles demo at CHI 2024

The Advanced Textiles Research Group at the Nottingham School of Art and Design will give a lab demo at Interactivity at CHI 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.

The demo entitled Wearable Electronic Textiles for Healthcare, Wellbeing, and Protective Applications will let attendees interact with textiles capable of fall and near-fall detection, temperature sensing, acoustic sensing, giving haptic feedback, and harvesting solar energy. 

Professor Lars Erik Holmquist of CXL co-authored the demo and also co-chaired the Interactivity program at CHI 2024. We hope to see you there!

Professor Lars Erik Holmquist talks about design and AI

Ahead of the opening of our new Design & Digital Arts (D&DA) building, Professor Lars Erik Holmquist, an expert in design and innovation at the Nottingham School of Art & Design, explains how artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionise creativity in new and unimagined ways.

The D&DA facility is a significant investment in NTU’s digital provision, providing enhanced digital sophistication to our new suite of courses. For more details visit https://www.ntu.ac.uk/dda

Lecture by Wendy Ju: Interaction Intelligence for Everyday Robots

Nottingham School of Art and Design, Bonington BON224 
March 20, 2024, 2-3.30PM

Nottingham School of Art and Design and the Design Research Centre are proud to welcome Associate Professor Wendy Ju from the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion to give the next Research Lecture. 

Dr. Ju came to Cornell Tech from the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, where she was Executive Director of Interaction Design Research, and from the California College of the Arts, where she was an Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the Design MFA program. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Dr. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

In her lecture, she will talk about how in everyday human interaction, people monitor each other to see if others understand their meaning, and they stop and self-correct if they recognize that they have made an error. As intelligent systems such as autonomous cars or delivery robots increasingly permeate our lives, it becomes important to think about these machines might recognize and recover from errors in the way that people expect. The design of interaction intelligence relies on an understanding of how people normally behave, and how they behave when something is out of the norm. I present recent work from my research group which considers how interaction intelligence can be as important as task intelligence for robots working around people.

The lecture will be given "remotely in person" at the Bonington building with snacks provided, as well as on Teams.

AI commentary in the press

Professor Lars Erik Holmquist has given a number of comments on AI in the press recently. This builds on his Inaugural Lecture Intelligence on Tap: Artificial Intelligence as a New Design Material, which was given at Nottingham Trent University on February 7, 2024 (a recording will be available soon). He previously wrote an article on the same subject for ACM SIGCHI's Interactions magazine (right), arguing that AI will become a vital design material for a new generation of digital products and services. 

First, he wrote a piece for The Conversation entitled Google’s Gemini AI hints at the next great leap for the technology: analysing real-time information. This article talks about how new AI models will move from generating text and images to understanding and acting upon real-time information, in the real world. A well-known example is self-driving cars, and we will also see new forms of AI assist us in the home, on travel, while shopping and so on. This provides amazing opportunities for new applications, but also gives rise to privacy issues.

Next, he provided some Predictions For Artificial Intelligence in 2024 for Techround. He predicts that this year we will see both specialisation and convergence of the data used by AI models. On the one hand, there will be many new startups and services that apply off-the-shelf models on highly specialised datasets, such as in-house sales figures or media production, to create tailor-made analysis and content creation - "AI in a box". On the other hand, we will see the major players such as Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) merge their enormous amounts of private user data - emails, habits, location and so on - and combine it with massive amounts of existing text and media to enable a new wave of even more personalised services (as well as another set of privacy implications!)

Finally, he was interviewed by tech journalist Rob Waugh for The Daily Mail in an article entitled Robotic priests, AI cults and a 'Bible' by ChatGPT: Why people around the world are worshipping robots and artificial intelligence. The article talks about how new religions seem to be forming around artififical intelligence and other forms of advanced technology. Professor Holmquist mentions how it is already known that humans tend to form relationships to technology as if they were dealing with other humans (something that is developed in the book The Media Equation by Stanford researchers Byron Reeves and Cliff Nass). Now, with highly advanced chatbots it is even easier to ascribe consciousness to machines - even if they do not have any. But perhaps this is not such a new behaviour after all, since in the Asian religion of Shintoism the physical world is inhabited by spirits and believers treat inanimate objects with respect, as if they are imbued with spirits?

One thing is for certain - the AI revolution is only beginning, and we will see many amazing new applications and ideas in 2024!