Berlin, the city of music and culture, is pleased to welcome bot music overlords, CJ Carr and Oswald Berthold. Come and join us as we explore the edges between AI and human creativity.

Turing-test competition winner CJ is visiting from the US where he has been training neural networks to compose very human sounding music. Read his NIPS 2017 paper on Generating Black Metal and Math Rock: Beyond Bach, Beethoven, and Beatles. He is a regular hackathon winner, with boundless enthusiasm for the intersect between bots, and human creativity

Berlin based Oswald hovers between academic research, robotics companies, and music. Building machines to generate motion, sound, media and art, testing that in the public, and turning technology itself into experience.

Kate McCurdy is a founding alumna of Babbel's CLU (Computational Linguistics Unit) engineering team, now pursuing a PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. will highlight some recent work on language, music, and AI from Edinburgh researchers, and delve deeper into the language-music connection by exploring data on rhyme in rap music.

Babbel is really pleased to host CJ, Oswald, and Kate, well as other speakers TBC -- and to invite the Berlin tech community to join us for an early evening journey into the world of AI, Music, Language and Creativity. Expect 2 hours of food, conversation, presentations and meeting fellow tinkerers over a beer.

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CJ Carr is a creativity hacker, oneironaut, traceur, throatboxer, cs grad, and information age existentialist who wins hackathons for a living. He perceives every moment of life as art. CJ's mad science scheme is to shrink the time/effort between ideas and creative output to nil because lack of inspiration is a public health issue. His projects can be found here. He tweets here.

Oswald Berthold has spent last 15 years doing CS studies at Humboldt University with a diploma from 2012 and a PhD expected in 2019, focusing on AI and robotics, all things learning, adapting, and self-organising, leaning heavily into biologically inspired approaches and algorithms from neuroscience, developmental psychology, evolutionary biology. For even longer he has been advancing contemporary aesthetics and cultural production with projects like farmersmanual. He tweets here and here.

Kate McCurdy studies computational linguistics as a doctoral candidate in the University of Edinburgh’s department of Informatics. Previously, she was a founding engineer in Babbel’s Computational Linguistics Unit, following research work at McGill, Harvard, and the University of Potsdam. She's previously presented at Babbel on her study of cross-linguistic gender bias in word embeddings, previously presented at ACL’s Women in NLP workshop. Her interests include bias and fairness in AI alongside broader questions of how to democratize technology.

Also presenting:

Gene Kogan is an artist and a programmer who is interested in generative systems, computer science, and software for creativity and self-expression. He is a collaborator within numerous open-source software projects, and gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of code and art. Gene initiated ml4a, a free book about machine learning for artists, activists, and citizen scientists, and regularly publishes video lectures, writings, and tutorials to facilitate a greater public understanding of the subject.

Samim Winiger is a code magician, doing research and projects at the intersection of machine learning, fora-fauna-human-computer-interaction, generative design, and mindful creativity. His interests span a range of ideas, but his attention lies primarily in developing tools for enlightenment instruments and habits to simply sit & breath, here and now.