The lecture will take place in TANNA SCHULICH HALL, followed by a wine and cheese reception in the lobby of the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building. This event is free and open to the general public.
Registration
For CIRMMT Students wishing to have their attendance tracked for awards eligibility, please make sure to scan the QR code available at the entrance of Tanna Schulich Hall.
Abstract
Recent computing technologies can make it compelling to wander, sometimes aimlessly, through large datasets of language and media, eliciting serendipitous questioning, reflection, and creativity in the process. Crafting interfaces for these situations poses both technical and design research problems. Sensory augmentation offers one class of approaches, which aim at extending human perception by building open-world mappings on top of existing cognitive models and sensorimotor skills. Unexpectedly, by behaving more as sounding boards than search engines, large language models have also been acting as interfaces for wandering in data.
In this talk, I argue that designing for wandering might be able to counteract a side effect of being the user subjects of ubiquitous consumer technologies: that despite having access to more information about the physical world than ever before, we find ourselves so often deprived of the pleasures and sensibilities of being physically present. I introduce two projects through which I have tried to rise to this challenge: first, a bone-conducting augmented reality headphone that merges its wearer’s auditory perception with sensors and microphones in the surrounding landscape; and second, a pandemic era performance practice of sampling from deep embeddings of public domain field recordings for audiences falling asleep.
Biography
Gershon Dublon (they/them) is an interaction researcher, electrical engineer, and artist working with sensing and mixed reality to empower human perception. Currently, Dublon is a Senior Researcher in the Advanced Technologies team at Sonos, focusing on applications of multimodal sensing to next-gen audio UX.
Dublon's doctoral work proposed systems and methods to comprehend massive, longitudinal sensor data and AI systems in the service of a sensory connection to self and environment. Dublon has published articles in the journal Presence, Scientific American, Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), IEEE Sensors, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Body Sensor Networks (BSN), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), and others, and recently contributed a chapter to the MIT Press book Swamps and the New Imagination. Dublon’s projects and studio productions have been exhibited in venues and festivals including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Mexico’s National Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, and the Sundance Film Festival, and covered by the New York Times, Associated Press, BBC, NHK, and others.
In 2018, with artist Xin Liu, Dublon co-founded slow immediate, a creative engineering studio incubated by The New Museum’s NEW INC program and ONX Studio. As the firm's applied researcher, Dublon designed electronic controls for a microgravity robotic system that was launched into space, scent micro-delivery systems, experimental audio-haptic immersive experiences, and more. Dublon is also a board member of Living Observatory, a Boston-based non-profit organization focused on the future of wetland restoration. Dublon received an SM and PhD from the MIT Media Lab, where their research in the Responsive Environments Group was supervised by Prof. Joe Paradiso, and a BSEE from Yale.