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 20 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.

Program (the order of the speakers might change):

• 7:00-7:25:  Carrie Hott (Media Artist) on "Nets for the Unweighable: a Brief History of Nets."
• 7:25-7:50:  Maya Ackerman (Santa Clara Univ/ Computational Creativity) on "An Introduction to Computational Creativity."
• 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:  Michael Snyder (Stanford, Co-Principal Investigator at the Center for Genomics) Abstract TBA.
• 8:35-9:00:  Mikey Siegel (Consciousness Technologist) on "Can we hack consciousness itself?"

Speakers:

Maya Ackerman specializes in Artificial Intelligence, with an emphasis on Computational Creativity and Machine Learning. Her work has been featured on NBC News and New Scientist, and her research appears at top academic venues. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech and UC San Diego, followed by two years as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University. Ackerman is currently an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University.

Carrie Hott (Media Artist) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Through her practice, she works to find origins, connect tangents, and locate invisible histories. Her research interests include whales, artificial light, blackouts, lace, nets, tools, and the systems often employed to learn about our surroundings. Hott was born in Fort Collins, Colorado and grew up in the southwestern United States between Arizona, Colorado, and California. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Psychology from Arizona State University in 2003, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. In addition to working in installation, video, and drawing, she regularly completes related projects that include mixed media presentations, classes, and various collaborative endeavors. She is a past founder of Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland and Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. She is currently one half of JOAN 5000.

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.

Mikey Siegel is a robotics engineer turned consciousness hacker. He envisions a present and future where science and technology support psychological, emotional and spiritual flourishing. Where our devices not only connect us to information, but also connect us to ourselves and each other, acting as a catalyst for individual and collective awakening. He is currently teaching at Stanford University, founder of Consciousness Hacking, BioFluent Technologies,, and the Transformative Technology Conference. He received an MS in robotics from the MIT Media Lab.

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state-of-the-art "omics" technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. He is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.