A FREE afternoon/evening celebration of techno-arts beginning with a public lecture, followed by an early evening performance and punctuated by a VIP launch of the Art-AI Festival 2019, taking place at Phoenix Leicester.

The event presents a special guest lecture by human-machine research pioneer, Gerhard Fischer, visiting from Colorado, USA. Gerhard's work has explored theoretical frameworks and system developments for human-computer interaction and he co-founded conferences in Germany on “Mensch-Maschine Kommunikation” (1980) and “Software Ergonomics” (1983). Later work at CU Boulder was centered on domain-oriented design environments, critiquing systems, and the exploration of high-functionality environments. In 1994, the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design was founded and in the following years, he (in close collaboration with numerous colleagues, including Ernesto Arias, Hal Eden, Michael Eisenberg, and Walter Kintsch and a large number of PhD students) explored themes in meta-design, social creativity, cultures of participation, computer-supported collaborative learning, support environments for people with cognitive disabilities, and collaborative problem solving and decision making with table-top computing environments. His lecture will discuss aspects of his lifelong contribution to the field of human-machine science.

The VIP launch event celebrates the launch of the Art-AI Festival 2019: in its second year, and back by popular demand, this year's event takes place at a number of venues across Leicester. Tonight's launch celebrates the signature festival artwork of Mario Klingemann, on show in The Gallery at Phoenix throughout the Festival (ends 31st May). Mario, along with a number of leading techno-artists will be in Leicester to discuss their work on 23rd May (tickets here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-the-ai-art-tickets-59371400457).

Last and by no means least, we present Improbotics, which is both an improvised comedy show and a live Turing test: an actual artificial intelligence-based chatbot is performing in the show alongside human improvisers. The AI sends lines to one of the improvisers via an earpiece. The cast’s impossible and hilarious challenge is to justify - physically and emotionally - lines that may make no sense at all. The audience’s challenge is to guess who is the AI and who is Human. Piotr Mirowski, a research scientist in artificial intelligence as well as a theatre and improv actor, comes back to Art-AI Leicester to direct Improbotics and to talk about the science of chatbots and the use of AI to inspire performance artists. Last year, Piotr and his collaborator Kory Mathewson presented HumanMachine, their work on AI improv; Improbotics takes this further with a full cast of professional theatre actors and of seasoned improvisers.

The format for the afternoon/evening is -

16:00-17:00 Lecture: Gerhard Fischer, ETC Suite

17:30-18:30 VIP Launch event, The Gallery

18:30-19:45 Performance: HumanMachine, Screen 2**

Speaker Bios

Gerhard Fischer

In 1971 Gerhard graduated with a Masters (Mathematics and Physical Education) from the University of Heidelberg. With a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), he spent the following two years at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the University of California, Irvine. He obtained a PhD from the University of Hamburg in Computer Science (1977), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, Cambridge, (working with Seymour Papert and the LOGO community) and Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay and the Smalltalk community).

From 1978 to 1984 he served as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Stuttgart. During these six years, he spent several extended visits at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh to study with Herbert A. Simon who served as the primary advisor for his “Habilitation” degree that he obtained in 1983 from the University of Stuttgart. In 1984 he accepted a position in the Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder combined with being a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. During the years at CU Boulder, he spent sabbatical years at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany (1994-1995) and at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (2002-2003).

He was awarded a "Chair of Excellence" at the Charles III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain and he spent 6 months in 2012 and 2013 as a visiting professor at UC3M. He obtained a fellowship from the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) an Advanced Study Institute in Delmenhorst, Germany and he spent 6 months in 2014 and 2015 at the HWK as a fellow.

He was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2007 and was elected as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2009, for contributions to human computer interaction and computer-mediated lifelong learning. In 2012, he received the RIGO award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC). In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and was featured as one of the pioneers of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Improbotics / HumanMachine

Improbotics was co-founded by Piotr Mirowski (London, UK) and Kory Mathewson (Edmonton, Canada), two research scientists in artificial intelligence as well as professional actors and improvisers, who were joined by Jenny Elfving (Stockholm, Sweden), drama and language instructor at KTH, as well as by large casts of improvisers in their three respective hometowns, making this a fully international collaboration.

Improbotics, which has performed at Improvaganza and at the Rapid Fire Theatre in Edmonton, in London, at Camden Fringe, at Brighton Fringe, at Impro Amsterdam, at Festival International de Théâtre d’Improvisation Subito! in Brest, France, and Presens Improkällare in Stockholm, was featured in the New York Times (“A Robot Walks Into a Bar. But Can It Do Comedy?”, 8 August 2018) and New Scientist (“AI tries bad improv comedy to trick people into thinking it is human”, 14 September 2018). The troupe are encouraging an arts-meet-science interdisciplinary exploration of how actors can seamlessly perform while controlled by a machine.

Piotr Mirowski has been improvising for twenty years and was a member of New York-based volunteer improv charity Cherub Improv before co-founding HumanMachine, and Improbotics - two artistic experiments fusing improv with AI - as well as Wretched Strangers, a European theatre company producing aiming at giving a voice to foreigners living in the UK. Piotr obtained an MSc in computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France in 2002 and a PhD in deep learning at NYU in 2011 with Turing Award-winning professor Yann LeCun.

Kory Mathewson is an award-winning comedian with Canadian theatre company Rapid Fire Theatre and performs and teaches improv regularly around the World. Kory is currently finishing his PhD in robotics at the University of Alberta.

**Additional tickets are available for the performance only and can be booked here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/humanmachine-comedy-improv-performance-tickets-59717991119

Promotional image: copyright Mario Klingemann, used with permission

This event is funded by Arts Council England, De Montfort University, including its award winning #DMULocal programme and Phoenix Leicester