Christoph studied Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken before working at IBM R&D and IBM Software Group for 8 years. During the same period, he completed a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. In October 2003, Christoph was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg. Christoph’s interests lie at the intersection of Machine Learning and Data Science and its application in a interdisciplinary context. He is an internationally recognised scientific referee for the Leibniz Association, Springer, IEEE and served as expert reviewer at international conferences such as IJCAI, AAMAS, CogSci, ECML, and others. Christoph regularly organises lecture series/Ph.D. workshops and is the author of numerous scientific papers and books. He has (co-)supervised 21 Ph.D. projects in Luxembourg, Turin and London and currently oversees 12 Ph.D. projects. He has taught a total of more than 130 courses at the University of Luxembourg and at several other universities in Germany, Beijing (Tsinghua) and Singapore (SUTD). Christoph maintains contacts with industry and the National Ethics Council; he is a member of the ACM, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft.

Abstract: Obvious is a collective of researchers and artists, who work with Deep Learning-techniques (DNN) to explore the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence in Arts. As a milestone in their professional work, Pierre Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, and Gauthier Vernier, the founders of Obvious, fed 15000 classical portraits into a generative, adversarial network (GAN) and let this Deep Learning technique autonomously create a series of new portraits. From these, they selected some by themselves and thus “founded” the so-called “Belamy Family”. In 2018, the painting of “Edmond Belamy” was finally auctioned and sold at Christie’s for more than 400K US dollars, almost twice as much as other auctioned paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Pablo Picasso together. But not everyone who knows the artificial character considered the painting “Edmond Belamy” as art. For Pierre Fautrel, however, there is no doubt as he explains: “even though the GANs have created the painting artificially, it is up to us (humans) to decide to compute and to print it on canvas”. So what is art? Is art exclusively limited to a human creativity? Since Deep Learning Networks work according to natural systems and simulate them as much as possible, is the result produced consequently art (art is what pleases)? The lecture should serve as inspiration and provide some more clarity in the field of DNNs.

Professor Dov M. Gabbay is an internationally recognized logician.

Since the past 15 years he has been Visiting Professor and a Researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg.

He is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Department of Informatics, King’s College London as well as Emeritus Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Gabbay has authored over five hundred research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor in chief of several international Journals, and many reference works and Handbooks of Logic, including the Handbook of Philosophical Logic, the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science , and the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming.

A beginning discussion meeting with artists.
Points of discussion

• What is exactly artificial intelligence (AI)?
• Is a chess program intelligent?
• Is a face recognition program/neural net intelligent?
• Is a recognition program/neural net of X-ray of sick lung (vs.  healthy lung) intelligent?
• Is a recognition program between a lying victim of explosion/accident vs. simple homeless person lying
• Can AI create art? I believe yes
• Can AI appreciate art? I believe no

The lecture is based on the theory of the Wizard of Oz Experiment used in Artificial Intelligence and today we are looking at the possibility of detecting this experiment in art as well. The appropriation of institutions and enterprises by artists is an example that may be interesting. In 2000 Alexandre Gurita appropriated the Biennale de Paris. He appointed himself as the “fake” new director of the Biennale de Paris and he leads the institute in exactly the opposite direction: it is forbidden to display works of art during the biennale.

I myself appropriated the art & project gallery, I call myself “fake” director of this gallery that closed in 2003. The gallery was famous for its conceptual art exhibitions. Since 2018 I have been using the gallery as a “conceptual work of art”. I use the famous gallery name to promote conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s that has been almost forgotten in the contemporary art world.

There is also an app from the Biennale de Paris au Luxembourg in which the experiment of the Wizard of Oz is applied in the same way as in Artificial Intelligence.
We will all experience exactly how that works during the kickoff, that is still a secret for now!

Thibaud Latour is in charge of Outreach and European Affairs activities at the Luxembourg institute of Science and Technology (LIST). He holds a PhD in Theoretical Computer Chemical-Physics from the University of Namur (Belgium), specialised in molecular mechanics and dynamics as well as in applications of AI techniques to polymer catalysis. He joined the Informatics department of the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (now LIST) where he managed the “Knowledge Intensive Systems and Services” research team. His work on Knowledge Technologies and Semantic Web led to the creation of the leading open-source computer-based competency assessment platform called TAO.

As  a member of several international consortia, he coordinated the deployment of the platform in the PISA and PIAAC international studies commissioned by OECD between 2006 and 2015. In 2013, he co-founded Open Assessment Technologies S.A. where he acted as Chief Technology Officer which is now employing 60+ collaborators in Luxembourg, US and Spain. Back to LIST, he founded the “Human Dynamics in Cognitive Environments” research unit and the “Cognitive Environment Laboratory”. His recent research focused on ambient intelligence and more particularly on the technological and cognitive aspects of interactions between multiple humans and their physical environment, in collaborative, multi-modal and natural ways. His team created an electronic board and a playful programming platform to support kids electronic and programming learning called “Kniwwelino” which is now commercialised by a new LIST spin-off called Succy SàRL. His scientific activities has been developed synergistically with his artistic activities in theatre as an actor, writing and directing assistant, and co-founder of an international festival; as a musician; and now as a visual artist working on semiotics emerging from mathematics and algorithms using screen-printing, painting, and concrete sculpture, as well as installations. He is invited regularly as a speaker in public events relating to art and science.

Abstract: The very nature of AI and especially the prophetised convergence with artificial life not only impacts our daily lives and jobs, but also questions the very notion of art and lets us rethink its relationship with science and technologies in our digital times. The talk will try to bring some elements aiming at feeding the reflection about the artists and the possibility of artificial artists, about the way art pieces integrate contemporary science and technologies

Francisco J. Rodrı́guez received his Ph.D. degree in intelligent sys-
tems for engineering in 2015 from the School of Industrial Engineer-
ing and Information Technology at University of León (Spain). Cur-
rently, he is working as a researcher in the Mobile Robotics Group at
University of León (Spain) after two years working as a postdoctoral
research associate in the AI Robolab, which belongs to the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at University of Luxembourg. Much of his research interest lies on develop
ing technologies for social robots able to interact and communicate
with people in real human-robot interaction scenarios, particularly
in cognitive architectures, designing motivational-oriented architec-
tures able to generate natural behaviors in autonomous robots for
human-robot interaction scenarios.

Abstract:

Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Everybody knows how awesome creative minds achieved greatest artistic success in different historical moments. History presents these minds as half crazy – half genius individuals, showing madness behaviors, and unstable actions in several key moments of their lives. However, robots were created to perform repetitive tasks with an
awesome level of accuracy. Today, given the AI advances and hardware improvements, it is not clear how a robot can perform awesome artistic success for its own and how creativity would be added in the system for making robot behaviors more astonishing for humans. This presentation overviews how the decision-making process would be adapted for generating new artistic drives in assistive robots and where we would find art in current robot behaviors.

Eduardo studied music at the “Centro Morelense de las Artes”, (CEMA). Gathered experience in the musical field during the following years by joining diverse musical projects. As well, he studied Physics at the “Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México”, (UNAM), followed by a masters in mathematical physics with the additional cooperation of the “Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan” (UAdY), and “Centro de investigación en Matemáticas”, (CIMAT). During this period he learned to represent musical theory with mathematics. This ideas are still novel, and will allow encounters between music and science. He is currently a PhD. student at the mathematics department at the University of Luxembourg, and this position has given him the chance to continue experimenting over this connection.

Abstract: The talk pretends to introduce this techniques of “numerical” representation of music, by means of an example, which consists on obtaining melodies starting from the Fibonacci sequence. The results are “musically protected”, this means that, unlike other methods to obtain music starting from data sets, the results will be musically beautiful, or at least one could define the resulting set of noises as a melody with musical properties.

Timotheus Kampik is pursuing a PhD degree at Umeå University and also Scientist in Residence (Product) at Signavio, a fast-growing software startup.
His research interests are the intersection of non-monotonic reasoning and microeconomic decision theory, and the engineering of multi-agent systems.
Timotheus is an avid open-source software contributor and has a decade of experience in the software industry.

John Conway’s Game of Life is one of the earliest and most well-known examples of how unexpected patterns emerge from societies of artificial agents that act in accordance with simple rules. To commemorate Conway’s recent death (a consequence of the covid-19 pandemic), we create a new version of his Game of Life, in which the agents’ rules evolve over time, based on the sounds the agents are exposed to. As the foundation of such a Game of Life, we use recently developed, bleeding-edge technologies for on-the-fly multi-agent system-oriented programming. The project intends to serve as an interactive metaphor for the feedback loop between art (or, somewhat similarly, artificial intelligence research), and societal rules and norms.

Yolanda Spinola-Elias holds a PhD in Fine Arts and is an Associate Professor in Art and New Technologies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Seville(Spain), founding and leading the Arts, Science,Technology & Society Lab(ASTSLab, HUM1045). She co-founded and chaired the Atoms and Bits: Artists, Architects and Digital Researcher Andalusian Association. She is member of other research groups of the CNPq-Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológicoin Brasil:GIIP -Grupo Internacional e Interinstitucional de Pesquisa em Convergências entre Arte, Ciência e Tecnologia(UniversidadeEstadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho)and Estudos Visuais(Universidade Estadual de Campinas).She is an expert, external reviewer for the Spanish National Research Agency, La Caixa Foundation in the European Universities Postdoctoral Program and for several indexed journals and editorials.She is member of the Network of Experts of the Campus of International Excellence in Heritage Project (CEB09-0032). She has led national and international research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation related to Art&Science,the role of Art in multidisciplinary labs and their methods for collaborative cocreation.

She is also participating in otherones related to inclusive pedagogy and disability in HE. She has been granted by the Erasmus+ (KA107) Staff Mobility Program in different countries.She has been Visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA)as well as researcher or artist in residence at Art Science Lab (Paris), Le Laboratoire(Cambridge, MA), the Spanish Collegein Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Museum of Modern Art of New York, the University of Washington (W St.), the Tamarind Institute (New Mexico) or the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara (Italy).She has been organizing annually conferences related to Art and Society, being regularly invited as speaker in public events involved in Art & New Technologies.Her artistic production is composed by more than 170 exhibitions in the national and international context(Taiwan, Italy, Germany, USA, Russia, Argentina, Czech Republic, Canada, UK, France, Colombia…), participating in the Universal Exhibition of Hannover 2000 and other International Art Symposiums. Her work has been awarded in several occasions and incorporated into art collections of public and private institutions (Royal

Academy of Fine Arts Santa Isabel of Hungary, Seville City Council, Fondazione Peano in Italy, Círculo de Bellas Artesin Madrid, the University of Seville, FEE Foundation in New York, Grúas Lozano, Cruzcampo Foundation).She has participated as an artist and curator in the CF project (The Research Pavilion) of the 57th Venice Biennial (2017)and in the AI+Art serendipity?events (LuxLogAI, 2018). Currently, her research interests revolve around AI+Art world and the ASTS system

The current technological evolution, especially that in the Artificial Intelligence area, is implementing such a deep impact in our society that goes beyond the questions raised by Marvin Minsky. He explained how our minds work, how the emotions progress from simple thoughts to more complex forms that enable us to reflect on ourselves, what make us being self-aware, self-conscious. He argued that emotions are different ways to think, that they are turned on to deal with different problems according to a kind of rule-based mechanisms. In this sense, the talk will present some case examples that activate emotions with different mechanisms, to reflect on Artificial Intelligence, Art and the emotional fact from both,the human and the machine perspectives.