News/Research

BCNM around the Web July 2019

24 Jun, 2019

BCNM around the Web July 2019

Here's a round up of the latest faculty, students, and alumni around the web!

Executive Committee member Ken Goldberg brought his robotics expertise to bear on "Why Americans Haven't Yet Welcomed Robots into their Homes" in the SF Chronicle!

From the article:

“The biggest challenge is unrealistic expectations driven by movies and television,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics expert and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley. “A lot of jobs around the house are actually very, very subtle and require a dexterity level far beyond what robots can achieve. It’s important to let people know that Rosie is not just around the corner.”

Article here.

He also weighed in on Stephen Chen's Forbes article "Will AI And Robots Force You Into Retirement?"

From the article:

Ken Goldberg in particular believes “Rather than worrying about an impending Singularity, consider instead the concept of Multiplicity: where diverse combinations of people and machines work together to solve problems and innovate.“

Article here.

Ken was also recently presenting his work in Budapest at BrainBar, billed as the biggest European festival of the future. His talk was titled: MACHINE BOOST-Fantastic robots and how to tame them

More information here!

Executive Committee member Nicholas de Monchaux discussed the making of NASA's moonsuit on June 16th at the Santa Fe institute's interplanetary festival.

Details here.

Alum Bo Ruberg's great book Video Games Have Always Been Queer was cited in the Real Life column Well Played by Vicky Osterweil.

From the article:

As Ruberg argues, there is often an implicit denial of sexual energies in the way we think about and play video games. When reactionary gamers reject queer, politicized, or minoritarian readings of games, they “are seeking to defend the sanctity of the ‘magic circle’ in which games are safe from cultural and political meanings.”

Article here.

Bo has also been busy sharing their knowledge across the country, including at Laguna College of Arts and Design on June 28th at the Game Lecture Evening, where Bo joined Nele Van de Mosselaer and Brian Upton. Bo xplored the relationship between gender, sexuality, and video games, arguing that even video games that do not seem to contain LGBTQ representation can be understood queerly when considered through queer interpretation, queer design, and queer play.

More info here!

Alum Jane McGonigal has been quoted in Greg Bensinger's "'MissionRacer’: How Amazon turned the tedium of warehouse work into a game" discussing gamification in Amazon warehouses. She warns against this process in the workplace!

From the article:

But the rush to gamify comes with risks, said Jane McGonigal, a video game designer who has studied workplace gamification. “Competition is only enjoyable for a short time,” she said. “As soon as workers start underperforming against their colleagues, it becomes less fun and can actually be counterproductive.”

Article here.

Fast Company highlights alum Trevor Paglen and Our Privacy Mess in an interview from 2018!

From the article:

I think I had the sense of growing up within structures that didn’t work for me and feeling like there was a deep injustice around that. Feeling like the world was set up to move you down certain paths and to enforce certain behaviors and norms that didn’t work for me, and realizing that the value of this word formerly known as privacy, otherwise known as liberty, plays not only at the scale of the individual, but also as a kind of public resource that allows for the possibility of, on one hand, experimentation, but then, on the other hand, things like civil liberties and self-representation.

Article here.

Trevor Paglen also joined Benjamin Bratton Carmen Weisskopf, and Doreen Mende for an Artist talk at Art Basel on June 13th.

From the description:

Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed the Internet's impressive, and sometimes scary, coming of age. What began as an open platform for connectivity, instant communication, and unrestricted access to information has mutated into a space filled with false information, data miners, targeted advertising, and open surveillance. While we cannot imagine our lives without the Internet, it is hard to think of it with the same optimism it was looked at in the late 1990s. In this panel, a group of artists and thinkers whose work revolves around notions of surveillance and technology will discuss the state of the Internet, and what its future could be.

Event details here.

Alum Jen Schradie spoke at the Microworks Platform Conference in France on June 13-14.

From the description:

Internationally, Amazon Mechanical Turk is the most widely known micro-work platform. In France and in French-speaking Africa, other platforms are attracting a growing number of workers to supplement or even substitute for their primary income. How widespread is the phenomenon? How to recognize, organize and regulate this new form of work? How, finally, does it relate to traditional forms of employment?

Details here.