Art + Tech Panel: Machines and Vision

Please note that there will be a pre-panel performance by Daniel Landau in Gates-Thomas 235 at 4:00 p.m.

This panel on "Machines and Vision" brings together Daniel Landau, Janet Vertesi, and Pietro Perona to explore the intersections of artistic, scholarly, and scientific inquiry surrounding human and machine perception. Each panelist will give a brief presentation on his or her work, followed by a moderated discussion.

• Daniel Landau - Artist; Senior Research Fellow, Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya, Israel; PhD Researcher, Alto University Media Lab, Helsinki

  Mr. Landau explores the boundaries of body, identity, and self using virtual reality technology. He will present his live-event series, "Time Body Study," which involves a lecture and demonstration of an experiment where a participant, wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD), is re-embodied in the body of a 7-, 40- and 80-year-old person.

• Pietro Perona - Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, Caltech
  

  Professor Perona's research centers on computational vision. He has contributed to the theory of partial differential equations for image processing and boundary formation, and to modeling the early visual system's function. He is currently interested in visual categories and visual recognition.

• Janet Vertesi - Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, Princeton University

  The majority of Professor Vertesi's research is on robotic spacecraft teams at NASA and how the teams' social organization affects and reflects their robots' activities and scientific results. Her first book, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, is based on over two years of working with the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

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The Art + Tech Speaker Series features conversations between artists and scholars on themes related to art, science, and technology. Participants include contemporary artists and scholars from different fields, from the humanities to science and technology, who deal with similar concepts through different means. At each event, the panelists give brief presentations on their own work and participate in a facilitated discussion on the evening's theme. The panels are organized to coincide with ongoing discussions in Caltech undergraduate classes and are intended to be of general interest to Caltech faculty, students, and the community at large.

This series is made possible through the support of the James Michelin Distinguished Visitors program established in 1992 to bring to Caltech "notable, innovative thinkers who will be able to spark the imagination of faculty and students alike and stimulate thought and discussion on a wide range issues," with special emphasis on the "creative interaction between science and the arts."