Polymathic Pizza: META~verses: Language Beyond Words | USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study

Jan 28 2026

When: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, DML 241
Event Type: Polymathic Pizza

RSVP Required

RSVP By: Tue, 01/27/2026

Event Details

In the last two decades, more people have access to the tools of generative artificial intelligence. These models analyze billions of data points to recreate speech, music, and visuals. ~ Taj Frazier, Associate Professor of Communications

Language death is not part of some natural process; most languages are lost at gunpoint. And when languages die, the cultures, social structures, and unique windows on the human mind, die as well. ~ Khalil Iskarous, Professor of Linguistics

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart. ~ Nelson Mandela

Language. Whatever form it takes ~ verse, movement, visuals, music ~ it is the connective tissue between us. It defines who we are. It holds our culture. It can disrupt, create, elevate, and empower.

Technologies such as AI and deep learning are now in the mix with human cultural production of language. For instance, Taj Frazier tells us Hip Hop artists are on the forefront of using AI to transform their sound and visual imagination. In a completely different discipline, Khalil Iskarous says linguists like himself are employing machine and deep learning to recover endangered languages in peril of being lost forever.

For our spring 2026 opening Polymathic Pizza event Professors Taj Frazier and Khalil Iskarous will guide us through their respective fields of research to show us how AI and machine learning are enhancing and transforming their domains of language in its myriad forms. Both scholars agree that AI is a tool to enhance human expression but caution us that this technology is not the expression itself. Join us to explore technology used to create and recover…empowering language beyond words.

Speaker Information

Speaker

Taj Frazier

Associate Professor of Communication; Director of the Institute for Difference and Empowerment in the Arts

Robeson Taj Frazier is an Associate Professor of Communication and Director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg). He is the author of two books, a multimedia/film producer, and has published articles and essays about U.S. Black social movements and political ideologies, globalization, fine arts, popular culture, and U.S.-China relations and cultural contact.

His most recent work, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (Angel City Press, 2023), is a book and media arts platform that explores the creative contributions and philosophical insights of Los Angeles filmmaker and multimedia artist Ben Caldwell and the community arts organization he founded, KAOS Network. Frazier’s first book, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014), analyzes the political and cultural ties cultivated between China and U.S. Black political movements during the Cold War, and the role that travel, media and representation played in this process. His second project, It’s Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet (2019), is a documentary film that examines how hip-hop artists’ and the broader global hip-hop community’s use of the Internet and digital technologies has revolutionized the music industry and global youth culture.

Frazier obtained his BA in Africana studies and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in African Diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining USC Annenberg, he taught at New York University, Princeton University, and CUNY-Bronx Community College; served as a history, arts, and culture instructor in Oakland and New York City public schools; and created music and performed as an emcee/rapper, independently releasing two albums and a mixtape.

Khalil Iskarous

Professor of Linguistics

Khalil Iskarous is a Professor of Linguistics at USC. He’s interested in animal motor control, from the undulation of worms to the smooth maneuverings of octopus arms, and the agile motions of the human tongue, which are responsible for many hundreds of sound distinctions in the world’s languages. His research interests include Laboratory Phonology, Motor Control, Hydrostatic Skeletons, Experimental Methods in Linguistics, Endangered Languages.

Iskarous is intrigued by the computational nature of two animal skills: cognition and motor control. Iskarous uses two tools to try and understand the computational structure underlying the two skills: dynamical systems analysis and several interrelated methods from modern AI: Neural Turing Machines, Modern Hopfield Neural Networks, and Attention-based Neural Networks.

Iskarous has worked on different aspects of phonological cognition and the integrated phonetic skills of speech production and perception, and the application of this knowledge to language change, various forms of atypical speech, and understanding the inner workings of modern AI systems. In terms of motor control, Iskarous has worked on human tongue dynamics using MRI with Dani Byrd (USC Dornsife), Krishna Nayak (USC Viterbi), and Shri Narayanan (USC Viterbi and Dornsife), octopus arms with Jennifer Mather (University of Lethbridge), and C. elegans, a beautiful worm, with Andrew Gracey (USC Dornsife). Iskarous pursues the hypothesis that the computational similarities of cognition and motor control can allow us to understand each through its similarities and differences with the other.

Three NSF grants have supported this research program: INSPIRE: Dynamical Principles of Animal Movement (NSF 1246750, Iskarous (PI) and Gracey (co-PI), 2012-2017), MRI: Development of a High Performance Low-Field MRI for Dynamic Imaging (NSF-2240349, Nayak (PI), Byrd, Haldar, Iskarous, Naranan (co-PIs), 2018-2024), CompCog: Deep Causal Inference grounds the Perception of Cognitive Objects in Speech (NSF-2240349, Iskarous (PI), Byrd and Narayanan (co-PIs), 2023-2026).