Annual AI Symposium

Kirsten Zirngibl is an artist and designer who has contributed to a variety of industries as a concept artist and 2D/3D illustrator, starting in game illustration, and branching into interaction design, advertising, and licensing, with clients including Wizards of the Coast and Google ATAP. She has also exhibited large scale work at Burning Man and multiple art museums in the United States.

Zirngibl is the founder of Zirnworks, LLC, a design and game development studio currently creating “Chroma Circuit”—a new twist on the racing genre, as well as a webapp called Zirnprompt to help artists better scope the AI possibility space.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that positively impact our community and the environment. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is the founder of the UF AI Climate Justice Lab and the Talk To Me About Water Collective. She founded Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation.

Kurt Paulsen is an accomplished artist and professor with over 20 years of experience in higher education. He has taught at multiple colleges and universities and is currently leading the film production courses at Minnesota State University and the graduate motion graphics courses at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. With a robust background in video production and motion graphics, Kurt also has taught photography, experimental media art, and visual communication. He was the founder of the Speechless Film Festival where he served as director for eight years. He serves as a media and education consultant for Spawning.ai and is actively engaged in experimental photography and AI-integrated digital art projects.

Friday, Sept. 13

Presentation: The artists’ control of consent: AI ethics and solutions.

Unlicensed creative content is widely used to create genAI models. Explore how your content is used and steps you can take to express control over your intellectual property.

John Licato, PhD is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at University of South Florida (USF), director of the USF Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab, and founder of a new AI startup Actualization AI, LLC. He designed and teaches the natural language processing course (the field that created ChatGPT) at USF, and his lab’s mission is to not only make AI smarter, but to use those advances to make people reason better as well. His research expertise lies in AI, NLP, human reasoning, cognitive modeling, and legal/regulatory reasoning, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He has been featured in outlets such as NPR’s Marketplace Tech, ABC Action News, and the Tampa Bay Business Journal.

Eamon O’Connor is an OPS adjunct faculty and Writer in Residence at the Digital Worlds Institute. He is a graduate of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, as well as UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department. His academic work focused on speech acts, ideology, poetry, and language games. He has written in a variety of professional contexts including PR and law, digital marketing, copywriting, criticism, digital publishing, and technical writing. He helped edit The Revealer, a publication of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and was founding editor of In The Mesh, an online magazine about decentralization in technology and culture. O’Connor was embedded with a team of AI specialists, artists, and machine learning scientists at the DBRS Innovation Labs, where he documented their research. Most recently, he worked at Ubisoft as a technical writer on the Rocksmith+ team.