AI for Impact ~ Spring 2020 @ MIT Media Lab

Together with colleagues Professors Alex "Sandy" Pentland and Ramesh Raskar, I'm co-teaching the AI for Impact seminar this Spring 2020 every Monday afternoon starting Feb 3rd from 2:30-4:30a in E14-633, the penthouse classroom on top of the MIT Media Lab! Our class goal is to bring computational, analytics, and AI techniques to bear on solving problems in the high impact realms of health & wellness, cities & sustainability, education & content, finance & commerce, and civics & governance across scales of action from each of us as individuals to embracing all of humanity, in both developed and emerging markets alike. We want to help students identify top AI opportunities for impact and help make progress towards building prototypes, planning action ventures, and/or better understanding the emerging technology and impact trendscape.

Also known as "Media Ventures" and formerly also known as "Imaging Ventures", “AI Ventures”, and "Digital Anthropology", this “AI for Impact” class seeks answers to the question: If you could make almost anything, what's actually most worth making, i.e. what problems are most worth picking? We believe starting with the right problem is 90% of what makes for great projects and ultimately epic, worthy solutions.

AI for Impact ~ Spring'19 @ MIT Media Lab...

Together with colleague Ramesh Raskar, I'm co-teaching the AI for Impact seminar this Spring 2019 every Mon afternoon starting Feb 11th from 2:30-4:30a in E15-341, the heart of the MIT Media Lab! Our goal is to bring computational, analytics, and AI techniques to bear on solving problems in the high impact realms of health & wellness, cities & sustainability, across scales of action from each of us as individuals to embracing all of humanity, in both developed and emerging markets alike, all broadly understood.  We want to help students identify top AI opportunities for impact and help make progress towards building prototypes, planning action ventures, and/or better understanding the emerging technology and impact trendscape.  Formerly known as "Imaging Ventures" or “AI Ventures”, this “AI for Impact” class seeks answers to the question:  If you could make almost anything, what's actually most worth making, i.e. what problems are most worth picking?  We believe starting with the right problem is 90% of what makes for great projects and ultimately epic, worthy solutions.

Moral Machines ~ Discovering Ethical Views...

Nature published The Moral Machine experiment results...

"Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers that will regulate them. The Moral Machine was deployed to initiate such a conversation, and millions of people weighed in from around the world. [...] an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and terri tories. [...] Geolocation allowed us to identify the country of residence of Moral Machine respondents, and to seek clusters of countries with homogeneous vectors of moral preferences."

Here's the summary visualization of results...

MIT Media Ventures ~ Thurs 10a-12n Spring '17

UPDATE: Due to MIT's snow closing, our kickoff class was Thursday morning 10a-12n February 16th, 2017 in Media Lab E14-633.

Our MIT Media Ventures ~ Media Lab Entrepreneurship & Digital Innovations class surveys a broad landscape of emerging media technologies interwoven with live- and historic-cases of intre- and entrepreneurship-based on new media ideas, culminating in a term project. The core goal of this Action Lab offering is for students to gain increased understanding of how emergent media and digital innovations translate into commercial reality and transform society.

We survey case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapple with the difficulties of deploying and diffusing products and as a means of exploring a range of business models and opportunities enabled by emerging Media Lab and related innovations. This year we will be especially emphasizing urban innovations, personal data rights, health, civic engagement, financial service innovations, mobile transactions, and social media generally with special focus on social networks, quantified self and society, AI, robotics, automation, and data analytics. Join us at first class Thursday morning 10a-12n February 9th, 2017 in Media Lab E14-633.

Rise ~ SF Short on Sentient AI vs Humans...

Nice short SF film Rise on sentient AI robots vs humans...

RISE ~ SF Exploring Human-Robot Relations...

Concept-trailer for RISE created by David Karlak...

"In the near future, sentient robots are targeted for elimination after they develop emotional symmetry to humans and a revolutionary war for their survival begins."

CHAPPiE ~ Sentient AI, Childlike Robot, Plus++

Prime cultural exports from South Africa involved in new AI robots SF futureflick CHAPPiE! Blomkamp directs, dialing up post-District 9 & Elysium, starring Sigorney, Jackman, Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er too! This is not merely Die Antwoord, but Die AI! Check the trailer... FYI, here's Blomkamp's original Tetra Vaal short...

Inevitable Future Bots ~ Humans Need Not Apply...

CGPGrey opines about our inevitable botified future...

EX_MACHINA ~ Robo-AI-psychothriller SF Film...

Check out trailer for SF robo-AI-psychothriller film EX_MACHINA...

Exponential Technologies ~ Towards Abundance...

UD spots Exponential Technologies leading to Abundance 360...

"Armed with exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and cloud computing, today's entrepreneurs are poised to create abundance. This Draw Shop video, originally created for entrepreneurs in Peter Diamandis' Abundance 360 coaching program, illustrates the powerful implications of six key technologies: 3D printing, robotics, artificial intelligence, the "Internet of Things," infinite computing and synthetic biology."