ABOUT US.
DASH Carrera
DASH Carrera
Dashiel Carrera is a novelist, sound media artist, and Human-Computer Interaction researcher at the University of Toronto’s DGP Lab. He is the author of The Deer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022) and an editor at Conjunctions. His art and research have been supported by the BANFF Centre, the MIT Media Lab, UKAI Projects, Harvard’s MetaLab, HackPrinceton, and elsewhere. He is the founder and lead of the AI Metaphors Workshop.
Ishtiaque Ahmed
Ishtiaque Ahmed
Ishtiaque Ahmed is a computer scientist interested in the ethical aspects of AI. He directs the Third Space research group. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and affiliated with the Schwarts Reisman Institute at UofT. His work combines ethnography, design, computing, AI, and critical social sciences to find the situated meaning of “data”, “algorithm”, and “ethics”, and he hopes to explore these all at the Metaphor Workshop.
Kim Fernandes
Kim Fernandes
Kim Fernandes is a researcher, writer and educator interested in technologies and/of the body. They are a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Their past work has been generously supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Georgetown University and elsewhere. Through the workshop, they are interested in exploring how metaphors can open up new ways of imagining our relationships with AI.
Rachel Levine
Rachel Levine
Rachel Levine is a cultural anthropologist with area interests in animal studies and law. Since 2022, she has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Her postdoc project examines the normative and emergent ethics of human relationships with “robot pets.” With and through the AI Metaphors workshop, she is interested in how AI absorbs and/or dismantles metaphors of animality and species difference. She is also involved in the preformation of StoryTech, Inc, an educational initiative that trains highschool students to tell stories by integrating robotics into project-based learning. If any of this interests you, feel welcome to email her at rachel [dot] levine [at] utoronto [dot] ca. Levine is pronounced La - Vine (rhymes with online).
Jerrold McGrath
Jerrold McGrath
Jerrold McGrath is a writer, cultural theorist, and practitioner interested in how to make a home in a world facing rising authoritarianism, climate damage, and rapid technological change. His practice places ideological objects in dialogue with the world around them. By doing so, he hopes to throw ideology into disorder by finalizing it – by providing it with a precise and specific configuration. By de-abstracting the ideological currents that shape our cultural lives, absences and an essential incompleteness are highlighted. These sideways glances allow for new paths to be imagined and explored. He is the research director for UKAI Projects and a former program director at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Artscape Launchpad. I also served as program lead for the Goethe-Institut Toronto’s Algorithmic Culture programming.
Manveer Kalirai
Manveer Kalirai
Manveer Kalirai is a PhD student in the COoKIE HCI Group, in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research centres on conversational recommender systems (CRSs), with a particular focus on supporting information discovery through conversational design. Through the AI Metaphors Workshop, she would like to explore how creative metaphorical frameworks for AI might extend to CRSs to open new interaction possibilities.
Mitchell Akiyama
Mitchell Akiyama
Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto-based scholar, composer, and artist. His eclectic body of work includes writings about sound, metaphors, animals, and media technologies; scores for film and dance; and objects and installations that trouble received ideas about history, perception, and sensory experience. He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Mitchell and collaborator Maria Yablonina are the founders of MAYB Studio, an interdisciplinary art and design practice.
Daniel Wigdor
Daniel Wigdor
Daniel Wigdor is the Associate Chair of Industrial Relations and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Daniel Wigdor is a Canadian computer scientist, entrepreneur, investor, expert witness, and author. He specializes in inventing technologies that enhance people's lives, making them better, happier, and more productive. He has received numerous accolades for his research, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Research Fellowship, the Ontario Early Researcher Award, and over a dozen ‘best paper’ awards at top computer science conferences. His book, Brave NUI world, has been translated into multiple languages and has been used as a standard text at universities around the world. He is also the founder of several companies, including Iota Wireless, Tactual Labs, and Chatham Labs, which was sold to Facebook in 2020. Professor Wigdor’s technologies can be found in more than a billion devices worldwide.
Beth Coleman
Beth Coleman
B. Coleman works across locations of text, sound, and visuality, playing with frequencies of a generative aesthetic. An obsession with technology, aesthetics, white dogs, black cats, and formulations of power and agency are evident across the body of Coleman’s work. Coleman has a history of international exhibition at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Pioneer Works, Centre International des Récollets Paris, Waag Society Amsterdam, among others. Coleman codirected the decade long SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project that transformed New York City’s “electrotectural now,” along with other international sites. Coleman is a co-lead artists on the Wilding AI project (MUTEK, MUTEK MX, MONOM/CTM-transmediale). Coleman’s publications include Hello Avatar, Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds, “Technology of the Surround,” among others.
Jean-Olivier Richard
Jean-Olivier Richard
Jean-Olivier Richard is assistant professor in the Christianity and Culture Program at St. Michael's College, U of T. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology from the Johns Hopkins University and specializes in the interface of science and theology in the early modern world and during the French Enlightenment. He teaches a broad array of course, ranging on such topics as Church history, science fiction, environmental history, and the history of alchemy, astrology, and magic. In collaboration with Gerald Penn (Comp. Science department, U of T) he has also developed an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar called Intelligence, Artificial and Human, aiming to introduce first-year students to the history and philosophy of AI.
