CHAIRS: Tami Spector and Piero Scaruffi

Program:

7:00-7:25:  Rosanna Guadagno (University of Texas at Dallas) on "Women, Men, and Social Media use at Work: An Example of Peace Data"

7:25-7:50:  Neeraj Sonalkar (Stanford/ Design) on "What improvised theater, jazz and design thinking have in common"

7:50-8:10: BREAK. Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

8:10-8:35:  Carlo Sequin (UC Berkeley) on "Klein bottles and Super-Bottles"

8:35-9:00:  Paul Dresher (Composer) on "What Would Happen If..Inventing Musical Instruments - the Experimental Playground at the Intersection of Music, Craft and Physics."

Speakers:

Paul Dresher is one of the foremost composers of the post-minimalist generation. He has composed opera, chamber and orchestral works, live instrumental electroacoustic music and scores for theater, dance, and film. Paul's many honors include a 2006-07 Guggenheim Fellowship and commissions from the Library of Congress, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, Zeitgeist, San Francisco Ballet, Chamber Music America, among others. Compositions include: the post-minimalist classics Liquid and Stellar Music (1981) and Channels Passing (1982), the trio Double Ikat (1989); the "American Trilogy" (1985-90), three operas in collaboration with writer Rinde Eckert; the evening-length collaboration with choreographer Margaret Jenkins "The Gates" (1994); the Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band (1997); the solo percussion work "Schick Machine" (2009), created for percussionist Steven Schick and performed on a set huge invented musical instruments and sound sculptures; the Concerto for Quadrachord & Orchestra (2012), "Sound Maze" (2015), a hands-on sound installation of twelve invented musical instruments that toured the USA in 2017; and the multidisciplinary piece "Molded by the Flow" in collaboration with playwright Rinde Eckert and faculty and students at the University of Southern Maine, where Paul has been appointed USM Libra Professor for the 2016-17 academic year. He has had a long time interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanian drumming, Hindustani classical music, Balinese and Javanese music. His music has been performed throughout North America, Asia and Europe. His recordings include: This Same Temple & Liquid and Stellar Music (Lovely Music, 1984), Dark Blue Circumstance (New Albion), Opposites Attract (New World), Slow Fire (Minmax), and Casa Vecchia (Starkland).

Rosanna Guadagno is a social psychologist who conducts research at Stanford's Peace Innovation Lab and who teaches Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. She was previously at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at UC Santa Barbara and served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation for three programs. Her work has been widely published in scholarly journals and covered by mass media. Her forthcoming book is "Why We Click: The Psychology of Social Media."

Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008 and the Life Art Science Tech (LAST) festival in 2014. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Carlo Sequin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and -- most recently -- for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures, and for mathematicians who want to construct tangible visualization models.

Neeraj Sonalkar is Research Associate at Stanford's Center for Design Research. The question that motivates his research is: how do engineering design team co-create new product possibilities? His research is focused on investigating how team behavior influences the generation and propagation of ideas into products. The Human Innovation Engineering group at the Center for Design Research conducts empirical and field research oriented towards acceleration of radical innovation by teams, organizations and regional ecosystems. We study and model how humans innovate both at the interpersonal interaction level and at the broader level of an organization or a regional innovation ecosystem such as the Silicon Valley. This research furthers our understanding of innovation as the outcome of an integrated system spanning individual mindset, interpersonal interaction dynamics, and the underlying physical, institutional, financial and knowledge infrastructure.

SPONSORS:

LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. 

The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.