[ISEA2019] Panel: Eunsu Kang, Haru Hyunkyung Ji, Sey Min & Jean Oh — The Rise of Minority and Creativity in AI: What, Why, and How

Panel Statement

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Creative AI, AI Art, Artificial Life, Biased Dataset, Diversity and fairness, Visibility of minority, Implicit Bias

Abstract

This panel explores what is currently happening at the intersection of Art and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, why it is important to acknowledge the power of creativity, lack of diversity, and visibility of minority groups in the field, and how we share our knowledge to raise awareness of these issues and discuss what we can do for the better future. Four panel members bring their expertise and firsthand experiences as media artists, creative coders, machine learning researchers, educators, exhibition curators, and art and technology community members.

  • Eunsu Kang is a Korean media artist who creates interactive audiovisual installations and AI artworks. Her current research is focused on creative AI and artistic expressions generated by Machine Learning algorithms. Creating interdisciplinary projects, her signature has been seamless integration of art disciplines and innovative techniques. Her work has been invited to numerous places around the world including Korea, Japan, China, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, and the US. All ten of her solo shows, consisting of individual or collaborative projects, were invited or awarded. She has won the Korean National Grant for Arts three times. Her researches have been presented at prestigious conferences including ACM, ICMC, ISEA, and NeurIPS. Kang earned her Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Experimental Media from DXARTS at the University of Washington. She received an MA in Media Arts and Technology from UCSB and an MFA from the Ewha Womans University. She had been a tenured art professor at the University of Akron for nine years and is currently a Visiting Professor of Art and Machine Learning at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
  • Haru Ji is a media artist and co-creator of the research project “Artificial Nature”, exploring the subject of life in art through artificial life worldmaking: a form of computational generative art creating and evolving virtual ecosystems as immersive environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from UCSB and is an assistant professor in DPXA & the Digital Futures programs at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been shown in art festivals, conferences, and venues including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, EvoWorkshops, La Gaite Lyrique, ZKM, CAFA, MOXI, the AlloSphere, and Seoul City Hall, and recognized in the 2015 VIDA Art & Artificial Life competition and the 2017 Kaleidoscope Virtual Reality showcase. artificialnature.net
  • Sey Min is a data visualization artist and designer, who is interested in dealing with live data sets in various media formats. She makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technologies, to societies and cities, and to environments. Combining elements of environmental studies, visual art, programming, and data storytelling, her projects range from building a real-time interactive information graphics system for a music club (Gender Ratio, 2007) to visualizing Seoul City expenditure data (City DATA: Seoul Daily Expenditure, 2014).Her work has been shown at NIPS 2018, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; TED 2011; TEDGlobal 2012; Art Center Nabi in Seoul, and Lift Conference, and featured on CNN Asia, Lift09 etc. After serving as an urban information design researcher at MIT SENSEable City Lab, She was selected as a 2011 TED Fellow and Senior Fellow from 2012 to 2013. Her work is also available at ttoky.com.
  • Jean Oh is a faculty member at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Jean is passionate about creating persistent robots that can co-exist with humans in shared environments, learning to improve themselves over time through continuous training, exploration, and interactions. Her current research is focused on the intersection between vision, language, and planning in robotics. Jean has been leading several robot intelligence tasks in government, defense, and commercial projects in various problem domains including soldier-robot teaming, self-driving cars, disaster response, eldercare, and healthcare. Jean heads an interdisciplinary research group, Bot Intelligence Group (BIG), that currently includes 10 graduate and 2 undergraduate students from the Robotics Institute, Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, School of Information Science, and Mechanical Engineering Department. Jean’s team has won two Best Paper Awards in Cognitive Robotics at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2015 and 2018 for the works on natural language understanding in robot navigation and socially-compliant robot navigation in human crowds, in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Jean received her Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. in Computer Science at Columbia University, and B.S. in Biotechnology at Yonsei University in South Korea.

Full text (PDF) p. 705-709