Dear CRUMBSTERs,



We would love to see you at The Photographers’ Gallery next week for this event if you happen to be in London.



“Curating” in this panel will focus on the computer science’s understanding of the cultural practice.



Best wishes

Katrina





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MACHINES WITH TASTE? PHOTOGRAPHY, ALGORITHMS AND AUTOMATED CURATING

Thu 17 Mar, 18.30

Free with day pass

http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/unthinking-photography



In recent years, we have seen the development of new software for the aesthetic evaluation of photographs, from Flickr’s Interestingness algorithm<https://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/> to EyeEm’s EyeVision algorithm<http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/17/eyeems-algorithms-are-learning-what-makes-a-photo-great/>.



In this panel discussion, we will explore the ways in which photographs are read, sifted, and evaluated in online platforms. Speakers will address advances in machine learning, the challenges of connoisseurship online, and the new forms of cultural value being created in online imaging platforms.



Speakers include: Miriam Redi, Research Scientist at Yahoo London<http://www.visionresearchwitch.com>; Appu Shaji, Head of Research and Development at EyeEm<https://www.eyeem.com/blog/2014/08/meet-the-team-appu-shaji/> and Mario Klingemann, artist<http://quasimondo.com>.



The event forms part of Unthinking Photography, a new initiative from The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image<http://www.centreforthestudyof.net> London South Bank University, exploring photography’s relationship to computational culture.



Speaker biogs:



Miriam Redi is a Research Scientist at Yahoo London. Her research focuses on content-based social multimedia analysis and computational advertising. In particular, she explores ways to automatically assess visual aesthetics and creativity, and exploit the power of computer vision in the context of web, social media, and culture understanding. Miriam got her Ph.D. at the Multimedia group in EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis. After obtaining her PhD, she was a Postdoc in the Social Media group at Yahoo Labs Barcelona. Since then, she maintains collaborations with main academic research groups from both the multimedia and the social media communities.



Mario Klingemann is a code artist and a skeptic with a curious mind. His interests are manifold and in constant evolution, involving generative art, data visualization or robotic installations. If there is one common denominator it's his desire to understand, question and subvert the inner workings of systems of any kind. Since he taught himself programming 30 years ago he has been trying to create algorithms that are able to surprise and to show almost autonomous creative behavior. The recent advancements in artificial intelligence, deep learning and data analysis make him confident that in the near future "machine artists" will be able to create more interesting work than humans.  At the moment he is helping institutions like the British Library or the New York Public Library with the processing and classification of their vast digital archives since he believes that his future creative agents will require a solid foundation of human knowledge to build upon. He lives in Munich, Germany where he also runs a little gallery space called the Dog & Pony. He has been speaking on conferences around the world for more than 10 years, his works have been shown at the Centre Pompidou Paris, the British Library London and the Museum of Modern Art New York.



Appu Shaji is the Head of R&D at EyeEm where he is working on indexing the world's photography. This involves understanding photographs from various aspects , such as the concepts in the photographs, aesthetics conveyed through the image, the quality of photo and photographer. Previously Appu co-founded sight.io, which developed technology to rate images based on computational aesthetics built on deep learning, computer vision and machine learning.



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