CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi

Schedule

7:00-7:25:  Geri Migielicz (Stanford/ Communications) on "The Future of Journalism is Visual - Nothing Else is Certain"

7:25-7:50:  Reza Zadeh (Stanford Institute for Computational Mathematics) on "Computer Vision Made Simple"

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:  Adriana Manago (UC Santa Cruz) on "Millennials go Online to Build their Offline Lives"

8:35-9:00:  Patricia Lange (CCA) on "Is Ranting Ever a Good Idea?"

Speakers

Patricia G Lange is an Anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA). Her work focuses on technical identity performance and use of video to express the self. She is the author of Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2014). She also produced and directed the film Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2013) which provides a diachronic look at the rise and fall of YouTube as a social media site. Hey Watch This! was screened in Paris at Ethnografilm (2014), an international film festival showcasing films that visually depict social worlds. Her work has appeared in seminal collections such as The YouTube Reader and Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, as well as numerous publications and journals. She was also named an early influential vlogger and invited to reflect on her work in the Online Lives 2.0 issue of Biography. She also teaches undergraduate courses in: digital cultures; anthropology of technology; new media and civic action; space, place & time; and ethnography for design. She has been a keynote speaker at the Transforming Audiences Conference, held in London, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, etc.

Adriana Manago is an assistant professor in the psychology department at UC-Santa Cruz. She earned a PhD in developmental psychology from UCLA in 2011 with an interdisciplinary certificate from the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Previously, she was an assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University and a post-doctoral fellow in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Manago's research focuses on communication technologies as cultural tools for human social life that shape social development in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. She has published empirical studies and books chapters on the role of MySpace, Facebook, and mobile devices in identity, sexuality, friendship, social capital, values, and sociocultural change. Manago maintains a long-term field site in a Maya community in Mexico studying the impact of the Internet and mobile devices on social development and also collaborates with Israeli, Japanese, and French colleagues examining cross-cultural differences in communication technology use and social development. In 2016, the Society for Research on Adolescence recognized Manago with an Early Career Research Award for the breadth and scope of her interdisciplinary work and contributions to diverse research literatures.

Geri Migielicz is visiting professor in Professional Journalism at Stanford University, teaching multimedia courses in the Stanford Journalism Program. She has served as visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and is an instructor and advisory board member for the Stan Kalish Workshop. She was Director of Photography at the San Jose Mercury News from 1993 to 2009. Under Geri's tenure, the Mercury News won major awards for photo editing and for multimedia, making the paper a destination for the leading talent in the photojournalism industry. She was executive producer of a 2007 national News and Documentary Emmy Award-winning web documentary, Uprooted, for mercurynews.com. She was on the leadership team for the coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake that won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize in general news reporting for the Mercury News. She also edited the paper's coverage of California's recall election, a 2003 Pulitzer finalist in Feature Photography. Geri was a 2004-5 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she studied multimedia narratives. She is a 2013 inductee to the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame. She is co-founder and executive editor of Story4, (www.story4.org) a multimedia production studio. Story4 is in production of a feature documentary project, "The Cannon and The Flower", (thecannonandflowermovie.com).

Reza Zadeh is CEO at Matroid and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. His work focuses on Machine Learning, Distributed Computing, and Discrete Applied Mathematics. Reza received his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Stanford under the supervision of Gunnar Carlsson. His awards include a KDD Best Paper Award and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award. He has served on the Technical Advisory Boards of Microsoft and Databricks. As part of his research, Reza built the Machine Learning Algorithms behind Twitter's who-to-follow system, the first product to use Machine Learning at Twitter. Reza is the initial creator of the Linear Algebra Package in Apache Spark. Through Apache Spark, Reza's work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. In addition to research, Reza designed and teaches two PhD-level classes at Stanford: Distributed Algorithms and Optimization (CME 323), and Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms (CME 305).

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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.