I generally agree with more or less everything stated in this report. However, I am not sure the goals are realistic. If you want to increase research across the institute to $250M then you either need to more than double the current tt/t faculty size, or the faculty need to bring in twice as much as they currently do, or some combination of the two. I find this number to be unrealistically ambitious. If you want to include such a number as an aspirational goal then this is fine, but I usually like to suggest numbers that we can realistically benchmark against.
The second point that I want to make is that there needs to be stated somewhere that any investment in NYC should be accompanied by an investment on the Troy campus, i.e., it should not be viewed that we are investing x dollars for a strategic effort in NYC and so we are not going to invest in a similar strategic effort here anymore. I understand that balancing between different research areas need to occur, but there should be statements included that make this point.
The overall report looks exciting. Enhanced support for Corporate/Industry fellowships and establishing student programmes with other industries ( for eg. as we have one with IBM) is key to increase research outputs. Also, it becomes more important for international students who are more often than not limited by number of federal funding opportunities.
Report also focuses on overall success and retention of students--which is a good point. Graduate students, especially fully funded PhD students should have no additional fees per semester ( to be in tandem with peer universities, that would act as a point to attract talent and thereby increase research outputs in coming years.)
I agree that one area of research we should expand is environment and sustainability. As a technological university we should be a leader in green technology, green architecture, etc.
We also need to apply these Technologies to the RPI campus infrastructure.
Regarding Action Item ix: It is fantastic to see that there is a focus on the graduate student population that is seeking to look holistically at their experience and support. I would encourage including a critical look at the needs of the international graduate student population within this group, as they are a significant component of the graduate population. It is important to recognize that international students are not a monolith and there will be a variety of needs, however, there will be a certain level of overlap within concerns (such as dependent - spouses and children - support and community building, determining where career develop opportunities fit within the immigration regulations and the plan of study, and more).
The Research Forward guiding document is strong in many respects. It outlines a broad scope of effort that is ambitious and necessary to catalyze a technological future for humanity. As noted by another commenter however, there is a conspicuous omission of "sustainability" focused work.
A few years ago Rensselaer rallied around the topic of nanotechnology, today we are rallying around microelectronics. I think we are missing an opportunity to connect with the next generation of students (and their children) who have already experienced environmental catastrophe and will become custodians of our planet. We should be ready to teach them and we should be doing the research to develop the tools they need to use in creating a sustainable society.
I’m writing as new faculty member in HASS. I’m glad to see in this report an acknowledgement that there are “few mechanisms for internal seed support” and that “revenues should be re-invested into internal seed programs.” When the Research Council who would eventually oversee this action item convenes, I’d like them to keep in mind the limitations of certain funding mechanisms and to work to provide discipline-specific funding opportunities. For instance, I was surprised to learn that RPI’s HASS flash grants only come around once per year and that there are currently no other internal funding opportunities available (but the idea of a flash grant would suggest that they are available when needed and can provide flexibility for short-term or new projects. Other universities, by contrast, may have something like three cycles to apply to internal grants). Often, researchers in HASS disciplines work on very different timescales from those of our colleagues in STEM fields, and our research needs don’t always have external grant opportunities. Sometimes what’s needed is a relatively minor expense that our current travel/research funds cannot cover (e.g., archival visits, buying equipment for multimedia projects) if we want to also attend in-field conferences and stay current in our disciplines and professional associations. If the goal is to increase research across all schools, I would argue that the internal funding mechanisms need to be more tailored for each.
Agreed with the faculty member above about funding in HASS.
Another potential area to address would be getting different offices to talk to each other and coordinate, as sometimes different offices give different answers to the same questions. Additionally, staff seem overworked and overburdened; things like expedited IRBs (for things like interviews and surveys, which are common in humanities) take months. This is not for lack of hard work and dedication on the part of the IRB (all of whom seem like wonderful people), but because it seems like there are few people.
Agreed with the faculty member above about funding in HASS.
Another potential area to address is getting different different offices to coordinate and talk to each other, as sometimes different offices have different answers to the same question. Staff also seem overworked and overburdened staff, so things like expedited IRB proposals (for things like interviews and surveys, which are common in humanities) take months.
The framing of "the joy of research" and recognizing the inherent creativity in the endeavor is wonderful. One area where this seems particularly relevant is in the frequency of sabbatical leave and its availability (e.g., providing one semester after 3 years, full AY after 6). This would help junior faculty on the tenure track and Associate level faculty taking on admin leadership who are trying to get promoted to Full Prof., and create more time and cognitive space for developing new ideas. It would also afford the bandwidth to fully engage in the interdisciplinary collaborations that make Rensselaer such a unique place to conduct research.
I agree with murram8's comments about the limited availability of seed/flash funding, and the need for it to be available on a more frequent basis. I am a newer faculty member, but having discussed the issue with senior faculty, I was surprised that travel funding for disciplinary conferences actually shrunk over time and hasn't been increased for years. This severely limits the reach of our research impacts and the presence of our Rensselaer and our departments in our given fields.
I was pleased to see a focus on making staff (particularly admin) feel more valued. One of the more difficult issues I have faced, along with my colleagues, is frequent administrative staff turnover. Many talented staff (rightly) get promoted, but the lack of institutional and position/office-specific memory means many people have to be learning on the job about their roles as well as the Institute and School's procedures, culture, and rhythms. This also means that staff aren't able to develop the contacts and lines of communication across the Institute that are crucial for streamlining things like funding proposals, IRB and other pre-study processes, and reimbursements.
Finally, greater allotment of discretionary budgets at the departmental level would help fostering departmental culture, allow more generous funding for inviting outside speakers and drawing audiences for them, and support new departmental initiatives more organically and democratically.
I’m writing this submission as a full time faculty artist whose research-creation practice uses traditional musical instrumentation augmented with electronics, often in collaboration with computer graphics artists, as well as as a historian of media arts and technology.
1. It’s interesting to learn that the report authors consider MAST signature thrust to have “excellent infrastructure.” Calculating the brilliant design, advanced production technologies and head-count of full time personnel working in the EMPAC facility, this is an unimpeachable statement. The salient issue for research purposes is the degree to which faculty and students can benefit from by directly using EMPAC spaces and equipment with support and collaboration from the 12-16 full time technical specialists who work for EMPAC’s production teams. This issue needs to be objectively analyzed, since the policies as established by the previous administration were prohibitively restrictive and blatantly counter-productive. The opportunity costs of privileging the work of non-RPI artists in EMPAC’s international curatorial costs should be calculated in this analysis. For the purposes of teaching and learning, the same general point applies.
2. A holistic campus engagement should forthrightly recognize the specific exclusions that occurred between the framing of EMPAC's initial program and its eventual built structure. These exclusions are decidedly not covered in RPI’s non-EMPAC spaces for MEAST, which are mainly unsatisfactory in comparison with a typical community college that teaches media arts, much less with an R1 univeristy.
3. There are opportunities for closer alignment of the MAST research enterprise with the core STEM basis of this report. The core principle can be found in the Rensselaer Forward Plan itself, which underlines essential role of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in bringing a “humanistic view to our research enterprise.” Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity.
Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity. In the early 1980s, the convergence model formulated by Negroponte at MIT led to the founding of the Media Lab, anticipating the merging of the print/publishing, motion pictures and television, and computing industries around the emerging science of human-computer interaction. In recent years the European Union’s vision for a New Bauhaus posits another tripartite approach, conceived around the values of sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics, “bringing design to the green transition.” Rensselaer is now poised with many of the elements needed to offer a distinctive synergistic approach bringing together the Computational arts and design, Cognitive and computer science, and Innovation policy.
Here are four cross-cutting themes that could serve as criteria for defining research development and future faculty searches.
1.Models for human flourishing in close interdependency with nonhuman agencies, promoting “abundant” rather than “artificial” intelligence. (“Nonhuman” can refer to computational as well as organic agents).
2.Improvisatory technologies grounded in music and the performing arts as antidote to the proven adverse mental effects of omnipresent technologies of surveillance and prediction.
3.Embodied sensors and responsive systems serving the augmentation of human skills and modes of mindful consciousness, rather than the apocalyptic ideology human replacement by technological “singularities”.
4.Policies for “post-digital” innovation, conceiving the digital and analog as co-equal branches which taken together have the potential to favor techno-diversities rather than extractive monopolies.
Prof. Michael Century, Department of the Arts
For some further reading on the background on this envisioning of humanistic computational creativity follows
Salter, Chris. Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2022.
Oliveros, Pauline. "Improvising Composition: How to Listen in the Time Between." In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
Hui, Yuk. "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene." Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Special Issue on the Anthropocene 21, 2//3 ( 2017): Pages 319-41. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201711876.
I’m writing this submission as a full-time faculty artist whose research-creation practice uses traditional musical instrumentation augmented with electronics, often in collaboration with computer graphics artists, as well as a historian of media arts and technology.
1. It’s interesting to learn that the report authors consider MAST signature thrust to have “excellent infrastructure.” Calculating the brilliant design, advanced production technologies and head-count of full time personnel working in the EMPAC facility, this is an unimpeachable statement. The salient issue for research purposes is the degree to which faculty and students can benefit by directly using EMPAC spaces and equipment with support and collaboration from the 12-16 full time technical specialists who work for EMPAC’s production teams. This issue needs to be objectively analyzed, since the policies as established by the previous administration were prohibitively restrictive and blatantly counter-productive. The opportunity costs of privileging the work of non-RPI artists in EMPAC’s international curatorial program should be calculated in this analysis. For the purposes of teaching and learning, the same general point applies.
2. A holistic campus engagement should forthrightly recognize the specific exclusions that occurred between the framing of EMPAC's initial program and its eventual built structure. These exclusions are decidedly not covered in RPI’s non-EMPAC spaces for MAST, which are mainly unsatisfactory in comparison with a typical community college that teaches media arts, much less with an R1 university.
3. There are opportunities for closer alignment of the MAST research enterprise with the core STEM basis of this report. The core principle can be found in the Rensselaer Forward Plan itself, which underlines the essential role of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in bringing a “humanistic view to our research enterprise.” Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity.
Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity. In the early 1980s, the convergence model formulated by Negroponte at MIT led to the founding of the Media Lab, anticipating the merging of the print/publishing, motion pictures and television, and computing industries around the emerging science of human-computer interaction. In recent years the European Union’s vision for a New Bauhaus posits another tripartite approach, conceived around the values of sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics, “bringing design to the green transition.” Rensselaer is now poised with many of the elements needed to offer a distinctive synergistic approach bringing together the Computational arts and design, Cognitive and computer science, and Innovation policy.
Here are four cross-cutting themes that could serve as criteria for defining research development and future faculty searches.
1. Models for human flourishing in close synergies with nonhuman agencies, promoting “abundant” rather than “artificial” intelligence.
2. Improvisatory technologies grounded in music and the performing arts as antidote to the proven adverse mental effects of omnipresent technologies of surveillance and prediction
3. Embodied sensors and responsive systems serving the augmentation of human skills and modes of mindful consciousness, rather than the apocalyptic ideolog of human replacement by technological “singularities”.
4. Policies for “post-digital” innovation, conceiving the digital and analog as co-equal branches which taken together have the potential to favor techno-diversities rather than extractive monopolies
Salter, Chris. Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2022.
Oliveros, Pauline. "Improvising Composition: How to Listen in the Time Between." In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
Galloway, Alexander. "Golden Age of Analog." Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (2021).
Hui, Yuk. "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene." Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Special Issue on the Anthropocene 21, 2//3 ( 2017): Pages 319-41. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201711876.
Comments
hahnj wrote Feedback
I generally agree with more or less everything stated in this report. However, I am not sure the goals are realistic. If you want to increase research across the institute to $250M then you either need to more than double the current tt/t faculty size, or the faculty need to bring in twice as much as they currently do, or some combination of the two. I find this number to be unrealistically ambitious. If you want to include such a number as an aspirational goal then this is fine, but I usually like to suggest numbers that we can realistically benchmark against.
The second point that I want to make is that there needs to be stated somewhere that any investment in NYC should be accompanied by an investment on the Troy campus, i.e., it should not be viewed that we are investing x dollars for a strategic effort in NYC and so we are not going to invest in a similar strategic effort here anymore. I understand that balancing between different research areas need to occur, but there should be statements included that make this point.
upadha2 wrote Feedback
The overall report looks exciting. Enhanced support for Corporate/Industry fellowships and establishing student programmes with other industries ( for eg. as we have one with IBM) is key to increase research outputs. Also, it becomes more important for international students who are more often than not limited by number of federal funding opportunities.
Report also focuses on overall success and retention of students--which is a good point. Graduate students, especially fully funded PhD students should have no additional fees per semester ( to be in tandem with peer universities, that would act as a point to attract talent and thereby increase research outputs in coming years.)
swankd wrote Research emphasis
I agree that one area of research we should expand is environment and sustainability. As a technological university we should be a leader in green technology, green architecture, etc.
We also need to apply these Technologies to the RPI campus infrastructure.
bennev wrote Thank you for highlighting…
Thank you for highlighting this! I would love to see the environment and sustainability as a thread throughout the Rensselaer Forward strategic plan.
busee wrote Regarding Action Item ix: It…
Regarding Action Item ix: It is fantastic to see that there is a focus on the graduate student population that is seeking to look holistically at their experience and support. I would encourage including a critical look at the needs of the international graduate student population within this group, as they are a significant component of the graduate population. It is important to recognize that international students are not a monolith and there will be a variety of needs, however, there will be a certain level of overlap within concerns (such as dependent - spouses and children - support and community building, determining where career develop opportunities fit within the immigration regulations and the plan of study, and more).
lewisd2 wrote Let's Pivot to Sustainability
The Research Forward guiding document is strong in many respects. It outlines a broad scope of effort that is ambitious and necessary to catalyze a technological future for humanity. As noted by another commenter however, there is a conspicuous omission of "sustainability" focused work.
A few years ago Rensselaer rallied around the topic of nanotechnology, today we are rallying around microelectronics. I think we are missing an opportunity to connect with the next generation of students (and their children) who have already experienced environmental catastrophe and will become custodians of our planet. We should be ready to teach them and we should be doing the research to develop the tools they need to use in creating a sustainable society.
murram8 wrote Feedback
I’m writing as new faculty member in HASS. I’m glad to see in this report an acknowledgement that there are “few mechanisms for internal seed support” and that “revenues should be re-invested into internal seed programs.” When the Research Council who would eventually oversee this action item convenes, I’d like them to keep in mind the limitations of certain funding mechanisms and to work to provide discipline-specific funding opportunities. For instance, I was surprised to learn that RPI’s HASS flash grants only come around once per year and that there are currently no other internal funding opportunities available (but the idea of a flash grant would suggest that they are available when needed and can provide flexibility for short-term or new projects. Other universities, by contrast, may have something like three cycles to apply to internal grants). Often, researchers in HASS disciplines work on very different timescales from those of our colleagues in STEM fields, and our research needs don’t always have external grant opportunities. Sometimes what’s needed is a relatively minor expense that our current travel/research funds cannot cover (e.g., archival visits, buying equipment for multimedia projects) if we want to also attend in-field conferences and stay current in our disciplines and professional associations. If the goal is to increase research across all schools, I would argue that the internal funding mechanisms need to be more tailored for each.
jonesl8 wrote HASS
Agreed with the faculty member above about funding in HASS.
Another potential area to address would be getting different offices to talk to each other and coordinate, as sometimes different offices give different answers to the same questions. Additionally, staff seem overworked and overburdened; things like expedited IRBs (for things like interviews and surveys, which are common in humanities) take months. This is not for lack of hard work and dedication on the part of the IRB (all of whom seem like wonderful people), but because it seems like there are few people.
jonesl8 wrote HASS
Agreed with the faculty member above about funding in HASS.
Another potential area to address is getting different different offices to coordinate and talk to each other, as sometimes different offices have different answers to the same question. Staff also seem overworked and overburdened staff, so things like expedited IRB proposals (for things like interviews and surveys, which are common in humanities) take months.
fitzga2 wrote Supporting research and school & dept level discretionary needs
The framing of "the joy of research" and recognizing the inherent creativity in the endeavor is wonderful. One area where this seems particularly relevant is in the frequency of sabbatical leave and its availability (e.g., providing one semester after 3 years, full AY after 6). This would help junior faculty on the tenure track and Associate level faculty taking on admin leadership who are trying to get promoted to Full Prof., and create more time and cognitive space for developing new ideas. It would also afford the bandwidth to fully engage in the interdisciplinary collaborations that make Rensselaer such a unique place to conduct research.
I agree with murram8's comments about the limited availability of seed/flash funding, and the need for it to be available on a more frequent basis. I am a newer faculty member, but having discussed the issue with senior faculty, I was surprised that travel funding for disciplinary conferences actually shrunk over time and hasn't been increased for years. This severely limits the reach of our research impacts and the presence of our Rensselaer and our departments in our given fields.
I was pleased to see a focus on making staff (particularly admin) feel more valued. One of the more difficult issues I have faced, along with my colleagues, is frequent administrative staff turnover. Many talented staff (rightly) get promoted, but the lack of institutional and position/office-specific memory means many people have to be learning on the job about their roles as well as the Institute and School's procedures, culture, and rhythms. This also means that staff aren't able to develop the contacts and lines of communication across the Institute that are crucial for streamlining things like funding proposals, IRB and other pre-study processes, and reimbursements.
Finally, greater allotment of discretionary budgets at the departmental level would help fostering departmental culture, allow more generous funding for inviting outside speakers and drawing audiences for them, and support new departmental initiatives more organically and democratically.
century wrote Media, Arts, Science and Technology Signature Thrust
I’m writing this submission as a full time faculty artist whose research-creation practice uses traditional musical instrumentation augmented with electronics, often in collaboration with computer graphics artists, as well as as a historian of media arts and technology.
1. It’s interesting to learn that the report authors consider MAST signature thrust to have “excellent infrastructure.” Calculating the brilliant design, advanced production technologies and head-count of full time personnel working in the EMPAC facility, this is an unimpeachable statement. The salient issue for research purposes is the degree to which faculty and students can benefit from by directly using EMPAC spaces and equipment with support and collaboration from the 12-16 full time technical specialists who work for EMPAC’s production teams. This issue needs to be objectively analyzed, since the policies as established by the previous administration were prohibitively restrictive and blatantly counter-productive. The opportunity costs of privileging the work of non-RPI artists in EMPAC’s international curatorial costs should be calculated in this analysis. For the purposes of teaching and learning, the same general point applies.
2. A holistic campus engagement should forthrightly recognize the specific exclusions that occurred between the framing of EMPAC's initial program and its eventual built structure. These exclusions are decidedly not covered in RPI’s non-EMPAC spaces for MEAST, which are mainly unsatisfactory in comparison with a typical community college that teaches media arts, much less with an R1 univeristy.
3. There are opportunities for closer alignment of the MAST research enterprise with the core STEM basis of this report. The core principle can be found in the Rensselaer Forward Plan itself, which underlines essential role of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in bringing a “humanistic view to our research enterprise.” Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity.
Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity. In the early 1980s, the convergence model formulated by Negroponte at MIT led to the founding of the Media Lab, anticipating the merging of the print/publishing, motion pictures and television, and computing industries around the emerging science of human-computer interaction. In recent years the European Union’s vision for a New Bauhaus posits another tripartite approach, conceived around the values of sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics, “bringing design to the green transition.” Rensselaer is now poised with many of the elements needed to offer a distinctive synergistic approach bringing together the Computational arts and design, Cognitive and computer science, and Innovation policy.
Here are four cross-cutting themes that could serve as criteria for defining research development and future faculty searches.
1. Models for human flourishing in close interdependency with nonhuman agencies, promoting “abundant” rather than “artificial” intelligence. (“Nonhuman” can refer to computational as well as organic agents).
2. Improvisatory technologies grounded in music and the performing arts as antidote to the proven adverse mental effects of omnipresent technologies of surveillance and prediction.
3. Embodied sensors and responsive systems serving the augmentation of human skills and modes of mindful consciousness, rather than the apocalyptic ideology human replacement by technological “singularities”.
4. Policies for “post-digital” innovation, conceiving the digital and analog as co-equal branches which taken together have the potential to favor techno-diversities rather than extractive monopolies.
Prof. Michael Century, Department of the Arts
For some further reading on the background on this envisioning of humanistic computational creativity follows
New European Bauhaus
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/21/eu-new-european-bauhaus-ursula-von-der-leyen/
On Abundant Intelligences
https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/nfrf-fnfr/stories-histoires/2023/inclusive_artificial_intelligence-intelligence_artificielle_inclusive-eng.aspx
Salter, Chris. Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2022.
Oliveros, Pauline. "Improvising Composition: How to Listen in the Time Between." In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
Hui, Yuk. "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene." Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Special Issue on the Anthropocene 21, 2//3 ( 2017): Pages 319-41. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201711876.
century wrote Media, Arts, Science and Technology Signature Thrust (corrected)
I’m writing this submission as a full-time faculty artist whose research-creation practice uses traditional musical instrumentation augmented with electronics, often in collaboration with computer graphics artists, as well as a historian of media arts and technology.
1. It’s interesting to learn that the report authors consider MAST signature thrust to have “excellent infrastructure.” Calculating the brilliant design, advanced production technologies and head-count of full time personnel working in the EMPAC facility, this is an unimpeachable statement. The salient issue for research purposes is the degree to which faculty and students can benefit by directly using EMPAC spaces and equipment with support and collaboration from the 12-16 full time technical specialists who work for EMPAC’s production teams. This issue needs to be objectively analyzed, since the policies as established by the previous administration were prohibitively restrictive and blatantly counter-productive. The opportunity costs of privileging the work of non-RPI artists in EMPAC’s international curatorial program should be calculated in this analysis. For the purposes of teaching and learning, the same general point applies.
2. A holistic campus engagement should forthrightly recognize the specific exclusions that occurred between the framing of EMPAC's initial program and its eventual built structure. These exclusions are decidedly not covered in RPI’s non-EMPAC spaces for MAST, which are mainly unsatisfactory in comparison with a typical community college that teaches media arts, much less with an R1 university.
3. There are opportunities for closer alignment of the MAST research enterprise with the core STEM basis of this report. The core principle can be found in the Rensselaer Forward Plan itself, which underlines the essential role of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in bringing a “humanistic view to our research enterprise.” Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity.
Picking up this challenge, it will be useful to think across disciplines about what such a human-centered approach will entail in an era of rapidly emerging computational creativity. In the early 1980s, the convergence model formulated by Negroponte at MIT led to the founding of the Media Lab, anticipating the merging of the print/publishing, motion pictures and television, and computing industries around the emerging science of human-computer interaction. In recent years the European Union’s vision for a New Bauhaus posits another tripartite approach, conceived around the values of sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics, “bringing design to the green transition.” Rensselaer is now poised with many of the elements needed to offer a distinctive synergistic approach bringing together the Computational arts and design, Cognitive and computer science, and Innovation policy.
Here are four cross-cutting themes that could serve as criteria for defining research development and future faculty searches.
1. Models for human flourishing in close synergies with nonhuman agencies, promoting “abundant” rather than “artificial” intelligence.
2. Improvisatory technologies grounded in music and the performing arts as antidote to the proven adverse mental effects of omnipresent technologies of surveillance and prediction
3. Embodied sensors and responsive systems serving the augmentation of human skills and modes of mindful consciousness, rather than the apocalyptic ideolog of human replacement by technological “singularities”.
4. Policies for “post-digital” innovation, conceiving the digital and analog as co-equal branches which taken together have the potential to favor techno-diversities rather than extractive monopolies
New European Bauhaus
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/21/eu-new-european-bauhaus-ursula-von-der-leyen/
On Abundant Intelligences
https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/nfrf-fnfr/stories-histoires/2023/inclusive_artificial_intelligence-intelligence_artificielle_inclusive-eng.aspx
Salter, Chris. Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2022.
Oliveros, Pauline. "Improvising Composition: How to Listen in the Time Between." In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
Galloway, Alexander. "Golden Age of Analog." Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (2021).
Hui, Yuk. "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene." Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Special Issue on the Anthropocene 21, 2//3 ( 2017): Pages 319-41. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201711876.
Respectfully submitted,
Prof. Michael Century
Department of the Arts