Polymathic Pizza

What the deep fake is going on?  Was that Queen Elizabeth in a tic tok video dancing on top of her regal desk or a cautionary production highlighting the dangers of misinformation? The word deepfake combines the terms “deep learning” and “fake,” and is a subset of AI. There are useful sides to this developing technology to be sure.  But with the democratization of technology, anyone, yes anyone, can access the myriad deepfake tutorials on YouTube and apps available at Walmart to create a fictional video of a person doing or saying anything the...

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”—Leonardo da Vinci

There are various paths for action: some bold, some grand, some right in front of us—wherever we find ourselves or however we think ourselves capable, the ultimate polymathic value is… to act. 

“All through my life, the new sights of Nature made my rejoice like a child.”

--Marie Curie

Pondering, purposeful play, and wonder—what Curie experienced—are polymathic values that can free us up, and move things forward in ways that our hurried, pressured lives might cause us to miss. The qualities of marinating on ideas (even procrastinating sometimes); transcending our disciplinary siloes; and discovering joy and wonder in our academic lives are the kind of counter-intuitive polymathics that can unfetter our minds and illuminate the unfathomable.

Critical thinking is a polymathic value employed by ancient philosophers to present day scholars to understand who we are and why we are who we are.  It is methodological and epistemological, as students become self-conscious about the processes by which they address problems in their fields and how other fields may go about considering similar problems.  Join Professor Laura Serna as she guides us through her cinematic and historical frameworks toward critical self-awareness and more clarity of the world around us.

 

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE: Thursday, October 15 5p to 6...

“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances. ”

― Maya Angelou

Creativity emerges from a dialectic relationship between the imagination and intellect.  Imagine how the art of Hip Hop dance, grimes tells us, “brings a plethora of pedagogical tools, really thought through technical methodologies, and community building practices.”  Within this framework, creativity possesses the power to transform art into the sublime, resulting in the elevation of humanity. Professor grimes will engage with students the polymathic value of creativity in...

Historically speaking, the genius, “lone polymath” is a misnomer.  The great polymath Leonardo da Vinci surrounded himself with a diverse circle of musicians, architects, engineers, mathematicians, and anatomists to 1. indulge his insatiable curiosity, and 2. because he humbly knew he didn’t know everything.  Polymathy shows us that the most significant progress and innovations come from the sharing, collaboration, and intersection of varied knowledge bases, perspectives, and experiences.  Join Dean Soni and your student colleagues from across the university...

What the deep fake is going on?  The word deepfake combines the terms “deep learning” and “fake,” and is a subset of AI. There are useful sides to this developing technology to be sure.  But with the democratization of technology, anyone, yes anyone, can access the myriad deepfake apps available (even at Walmart) and tutorials on YouTube to create a video of a person doing or saying anything the creator wants.  Just as fast as technology develops to detect deepfakes and protect machine learning for beneficial purposes, malevolent techy actors...

Facial Recognition technology is a “sprawling, invisible, privacy-wrecking surveillance system built by tech companies, global militaries, law enforcement, commercial interests, and a secretive array of data brokers.” What is there to worry about?  We are pleased to have two of the foremost scholars on facial recognition engage our polymaths in discussion on the historical racial lineages, contemporary realities, and future developments of one of the most concerning biometric sciences.

From the gaze of the eye to the slightest gesture of a fingertip, body movements convey who we are.  Today, a new generation of machine learning based systems makes it possible, the science claims, to detect human body language directly from images, which includes languages of identity, gender, age, and emotion. This emerging tech of the computational perspective of the body—a most basic human/machine interfacing—engenders important polymathic queries:  How does pose detection technology enhance the human experience?  Is there anything lost when we technologize...

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

Albert Einstein

 

The velocity of technological developments during Einstein’s lifetime was of grave concern to him. The promise of atomic energy had turned into a nightmare of annihilation.  The speed at which technology changes and advances today is staggering and should cause us pause as well.  Einstein cautioned us to align and inform tech innovations with our values, our humanity, and our wisdom: “The human spirit must prevail over technology,” he said...