[listen
to my NPR interview]
[listen
to my Pacifica Radio interview]
About me:
I am a philosopher of science, technology and media. My work includes academic scholarship, documentary film making, and technological and artistic projects. My interests focus on natural and synthetic brains, and their relationships with and through computational, information and media technologies. In addition to my continuing work on the history of cybernetics and brain modeling, I am studying how contemporary science and technology address the relationships between the brain, ideas, the mental self and culture. My latest project examines the new forms of identity and social practices that emerge from the use of tele-operated and autonomous systems, and the nature of tele-agency and responsibility in distributed socio-technical systems. This work extends my interests in engineering ethics and participatory design, social and emotional robotics, and new media communication technologies, and is currently focusing on the use of robotics for police and military applications.
Representative work:
[listen to my NPR interview]
[listen to my Pacifica Radio interview]
(2001) Love
Machine
(2009) "Military
Robotics and Just War Theory"
(2009) "Modeling
the Moral User: Designing Ethical Interfaces for Tele-Operation"
(2009) "Special Issue on the Intellectual Legacy
of W. Ross Ashby, Int. Journal of General Systems"
(2008) "How
Just Could a Robot War Be?"
(2008) "Pornomechanics:
Sex Robots and the Mechanisms of Love"
(2008) "From Mechanisms
of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W.
Ross Ashby"
(2007) "Heinz von
Foerster and the Bio-Computing Movements of the 1960s"
(2007) "Robots
and Responsibility from a Legal Perspective"
(2006) "What Should We
Want from a Robot Ethic?"
(2006) "Working
Models and the Synthetic Method: Electronic Brains as Mediators
Between Neurons and Behavior"
(2005) "A.I.
and Emotional Robots: Collaborative Fiction in Science and Film"
(2000) "Transforming Society
by Transforming Technology: The Science and Politics of Participatory
Design"
Brief Bio:
I am a member of the faculty of the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School University, where I taught "Media Studies: Ideas" for the Master of Arts Program in Media Studies. I am also a founding member and co-director of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC).
I was a Visiting Scholar in New Media Literacies at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Prior to that, I was a Fellow in Mind and Culture at the Center, and taught a course on "Minds, Machines and Persons" for the Department of Philosophy. Before that, I was a Fellow in Digital Humanities at the HUMlab of Umeå University in Sweden.
My graduate studies were done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I received a Master of Arts from the Department of Philosophy, a Master of Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, and a PhD from the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science Program in 2006. I was also active in organizing the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, Information and Medicine (STIM).
After completing my PhD, I was a Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where I made documentary films of the scientific practices of European Space Agency scientists, and designed a gallery exhibit on the impact of space science and satellite technologies on modern life and culture.
I have worked at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc. in the areas of virtual reality, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot vision, and neuromorphic robotics. My dissertation was on the relationships between brain modeling, the development of early computers, and cybernetic and cognitive theories of mind in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Much of this work focused on the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Ilinois (1958-1976) and the cyberneticians W. Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster who worked there.
Currently, I am also involved in the design of the natural language interface for the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine, for Wolfram Research.
Contact me: