EMPAC has released its schedule for the Fall of 2011. Check it out here.

Some of the things  that popped out to me:

Yesterday I was out on a morning run (I actually did two days in a row; someone get Rex Smith on the horn and tell him we need an evening edition printed) when I was flagged down by someone that [...]]]> One thing I’m always struck by is the generosity of friends, acquaintances, and outright strangers.

Yesterday I was out on a morning run (I actually did two days in a row; someone get Rex Smith on the horn and tell him we need an evening edition printed) when I was flagged down by someone that lived around the corner from me. He mentioned that he had talked to my next door neighbor and found out that my bike had been stolen off my porch two weeks ago. This man, whose only association with me is that his wife also works for RPI (but doesn’t work in the same part of campus as me let alone with me), said that he had a couple bikes and offered me one of them on the spot.

I was legitimately taken aback by the offer.

What’s more, I had to politely decline because my roommate had already given me one that he had: a bike that he and/or someone in his family easily could have sold for some decent change. Instead, without a thought, they offered it to me.

A month ago, someone ripped my bicycle off the railings of our front porch and carried it off with them. In the time since, through word of mouth, I have had nothing but offers of replacements that have reinforced a belief and outlook I’ve adopted in the last five years: that for every person that would deprive you of happiness, there are tenfold more that would step in to try to help in some manner.

One Christmas, before I was born, the presents my parents bought for their children were stolen out of their car. Then, in a scene ripped out of the cheesiest ABC Family made for television Christmas movie, friends and strangers that lived with us in the projects (a place called Griswold Heights) came together and surprised my parents with replacement gifts for all their kids.

Instances of generosity and kindness far outnumber those of selfishness. Unfortunately, it’s the latter that hits us the hardest. But if we allow ourselves to appreciate the other moments and give them equal weight and consideration, we’ll be surprised at how much good there really is in this world.

I’m seeing it, too, in the outpouring of support that all you readers have shown for Special Olympics of New York through my fundraising efforts for the Over the Edge event. I thank all who have given and all that will give in the coming weeks. If you haven’t yet, check out the page I put together: it explains what we’re doing, has a list of incentives for giving, and more. Even as little as $5 or $10 goes a long way towards providing services for the more than 47,000 differently abled athletes and their families.

So to Jackie’s husband, to my roommate, to my friends, to those folks in Griswold Heights (some of whom are no longer with us), and to all of you reading: on behalf of the human race, thank you for making us all a little richer.

UPDATE: contest closed. Congratulations to Alex, one of Kevin Marshall’s Americans. Enjoy the show!

Kevin Marshall’s America is honored to be giving away two (2) tickets to see “Jaroslaw Kapuscinski: Catch the Tiger!” live at EMPAC on Saturday, April 16th at 7:00pm.

To win the tickets, submit a comment in response to this blog post [...]]]>  

UPDATE: contest closed. Congratulations to Alex, one of Kevin Marshall’s Americans. Enjoy the show!

Kevin Marshall’s America is honored to be giving away two (2) tickets to see “Jaroslaw Kapuscinski: Catch the Tiger!” live at EMPAC on Saturday, April 16th at 7:00pm.

To win the tickets, submit a comment in response to this blog post by Thursday, April 14th at 5:00pm and tell us:

Where is your favorite place (locally) to see a live event?

The winner will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. In other words, USE YOUR REAL E-MAIL ADDRESS!

Saturday at EMPAC

In addition to providing stunning and adventurous visual art, music, and performance pieces, EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) boasts stunning architecture and even more astounding acoustics, making it literally one of the best locations on the planet to hear a concert.

The world-renowned pianist will engage the audience in a one-of-a-kind performance that is a delight to all the senses, not just the ears. From EMPAC:

Intermedia composer and pianist Jaroslaw Kapuscinski creates lighthearted and fanciful pieces in which musical instruments are used to control multimedia content. In these media compositions, he controls projections of videos and computer-generated graphics as he plays piano. The images, words, and music combine to entertain, but also provide insight into the artistic relationship between words and music. The witty integration of his virtuosic piano playing combined with a precisely timed flow of images informs his latest work, Where is Chopin?, in which he plays excerpts from Chopin’s 24 Preludes in conjunction with videos of people in various countries listening.

More information on the event and the artist, from EMPAC, is after the jump.

+ Website: http://www.jaroslawkapuscinski.com/
+ A trailer for Where is Chopin?: http://vimeo.com/21792605
+ A lengthy lecture on his process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyWYAcvwPOg

Tickets are required and are available through the EMPAC box office for $15 general admission; $10 for students, seniors, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute faculty and staff; or $5 for Rensselaer students.

Evelyn’s Café will open at 6 PM. Parking for this event is available in the Rensselaer parking lot on College Avenue.

Additional event information can be found on the EMPAC website: http://www.empac.rpi.edu/. Questions? Call the EMPAC Box Office: 518.276.3921.

Jaroslaw Kapuscinski is an award-winning intermedia composer and pianist whose work has been presented at New York’s MoMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; the Museum of Modern Art, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, among others. He trained as a classical pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and expanded into multimedia during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and through doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego. Kapuscinski is an assistant professor of composition and director of the Intermedia Performance Lab at Stanford University.

The three-day event coincided with the airing of three episodes of the long-running game show “

The secret headquarters of The Legion of Doom, where the three-day Jeopardy! event was shown while Lex Luthor and Gorilla Grodd plotted their latest scheme to defeat The Justice League. Image via Wikipedia

I watched the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge at RPI’s EMPAC facility last evening with an unhealthy combination of skepticism and ignorance.

The three-day event coincided with the airing of three episodes of the long-running game show “Jeopardy!” hosted by Alex Trebek that pitted two former champions (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) against Watson, an artificial intelligence software and supercomputer developed by IBM.

Watson won, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the complexity behind the mechanizations. Despite its appearance on television, Watson is actually a room filled with 90 servers processing a complex network of hardware and software and combined information retrieval with language processing, reasoning, and other factors. If you’re interested in the specifics, IBM has an entire website devoted to it.

I was far more interested in the crowd reaction to the machine. Students and community members from in and around Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – some of whom participated in the development of Watson – packed the auditorium to what I estimate was at least ninety percent capacity. When the facade of the computer appeared, they roared in approval. Correct answers garnered enthusiastic applause while the machine’s wildly inaccurate guesses were met with laughter that ranged from slight titters to agonizingly forced guffaws. Members of the crowd buzzed with anticipation while some showed off t-shirts that read “I <3 Watson”.

The endearment shown towards the IBM project was understandable given the school’s technical focus, though no less distressing to someone like myself who has far more appreciation for things he can grasp and appreciate; things such as endurance, creativity, and feeling. To put it kindly a more arts-minded fellow, though it may be more accurate to say “a dunce.”

Students made t-shirts and cheered for Watson, rather than the underdog humans. (Image courtesy The Approach).

Still, I couldn’t help but not be as impressed by the machine’s performance given my limited understanding of its intricacies and infrastructure. I had to ask the person I accompanied to the event – former Times Union intern and local blogger Erin Morelli – if I was correct in my analysis that the machine was essentially the equivalent of a very effective Google search. I suspected, of course, that wasn’t the case, and it isn’t. Erin was kind enough to tell me as such without flooding me with details I couldn’t possibly wrap my head around.

Discussion occurred before the program, during commercial breaks, and after the event with a panel that included IBM representatives and RPI alumni Adam Lally and Dr. Chris Welty, as well as members of RPI’s faculty, including Cognitive Science Department Head Dr. Selmer Bringsjord. They fielded questions from the audience and spoke on the progress of artificial intelligence and its application in this instance.

Dr. Bringsjord in particular introduced some exciting and insightful talking points, which made me curious about his view of the project. Having already decided to devote this space to the event, I was going to find him after the event and pick his brain, but by 8:30pm I hadn’t yet eaten dinner and was reminded that the Times Union does not actually pay me for my efforts.

Another time, Dr. Bringsjord. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

The real story to me, though, was the reaction I mentioned earlier to the machine. Aspiring scientists and engineers in the crowd treated the contraption with an eagerness and endearment that, though sometimes masked through attempts at ironic humor, was clearly affection for the machine. It was all in fun and a good sign for those of us who recognize our country’s quiet crisis in the maths and sciences, but I still felt slightly disheartened that people were rooting for the inorganic to triumph over the human underdogs.

When I cheered for a Jennings response early in the evening, Erin leaned over and said “you’re going to be in the minority here tonight.”

“I know,” I sighed.

As the Double Jeopardy round reached its apex, Watson hit the second Daily Double. Former champion Ken Jennings, who at one point in the program had given the machine a run for its money and put a scare into the pro-Watson crowd, leaned against his podium with a smirk of bemused resignation. He knew that with the given category and two-day totals, he had been caught in a checkmate. There would be more questions in the round and Final Jeopardy, but nothing barring a wagering error in Final Jeopardy that the computer was literally incapable of making was going to change the outcome.

"A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, but if you bring that steam drill round, I’ll beat it fair and honest. I’ll die with my hammer in my hand, but I’ll be laughing, because you can't replace a steel drivin’ man."

As I saw the sporting Jennings accept his fate, I was reminded of the American folk tale of John Henry. I looked at Jennings and imagined Henry, hammer in hand, competing against the steam-powered hammer that the railroad company designed to replace him.

In the case of artificial intelligence, we can take solace in the fact that there is no Watson to replace human ingenuity, creativity, and determination. As Dr. Bringsjord pointed out to the crowd that remained after the program, Watson is wholly incapable of actually creating thought. It is a series of processes that searches for an answer and can “learn” from its input and mistakes, but it cannot create a solution from original thought.

Based on my limited understanding of the subjects of artificial intelligence and human thought, that’s what makes ventures such as this an interesting conundrum. Human beings are trying to bridge a divide between a simulation of human problem solving and actual human thought, but with a limited understanding of exactly how, where, and why things like human thought and ingenuity are generated in the three pounds of hardware and software contained in our skulls. We are pushing machines like Watson to approach an endpoint, but don’t know where and what that endpoint is. Thankfully, this means the science fiction doomsday scenarios regarding artificial intelligence remain firmly rooted in the “fiction” and not so much in the “science.”

Still, there was a part of me that was disappointed when Watson’s two-day total was shown. It had completely trounced its human competition, with Jennings a distant second and Rutter an inconsequential third.

And as John Henry lay dead on the ground, this time defeated by the steam-powered hammer, the crowd roared with approval and heralded the coming of an exciting new age.