Schedule of Keynote Speeches

The talk will be a very personal, informal monologue about the Arts, using the lens of a Computer Science professor who studies how machines can think and act like humans. I will talk about AI, and how things are playing out with the mainstreaming of chatGPT, from OpenAI. I will go back to its notable predecessors and precursors, back to Alan Turing in the years prior, during, and right after World War 2. I will also talk about the Summer of 56 at Dartmouth. The huge discoveries that came every decade or so since the 60’s onwards were profusely celebrated and touted to usher a drastically changed cyberworld; a few years of hype, a summer of sorts, followed by an AI winter of despair and disappointment.  For this current, renewed AI summer, I will pin the “March of the Machines” to 2017, just a few years before the pandemic, and a little over a century after the birth of Alan Turing. This was when AlphaGo Zero, subsequently AlphaZero, from DeepMind, dispensed with human expert players to teach the machine how to play well. From AlphaGo Zero, I will then piece things together, going thru Deep Fakes and generative AI that have marked the AI summer years that continue until today; and beyond.

I will pepper the talk with personal encounters with poets and artists, and insights about how great artists think about their own craft. I will also try hard, very hard, to entangle theoretical Computer Science and poetry, using a few lines of poetry that I amused myself with, which I had occasionally shared with my students while teaching hard core Computing. Finally, pitting classical arts and literature against the ultra-modern, machine generated sonnets, novels, songs, paintings, and entire movies, I will pull out a celebrated poem that was recited from memory, as part of the script of a commercially successful film.

This talk is a retrospective look into the speaker’s encounter with experimental theater practice and community work—with a particular focus towards the reconsideration of the two not merely as separate modes of production but as practices that can merge, complement, and give birth to a whole new collaborative strategy that can benefit one’s overall theater practice and research. By citing the speaker’s related work experiences from Langgam Performance Troupe and the Society in the Arts course of the Theater Arts Program in De La Salle College of Saint Benilde, the talk is also a survey into how the combined forces of avant-garde methods and community engagement can further enrich our pedagogical approach and understanding of the wider public audience. 

See bioprofiles of keynote and plenary speakers