If you're thirsty and have always wanted to know about looking for space microbes on Europa, what medieval people really thought about dragons, how to make energy from alternative sources, or what a philosopher has to say about what the heck is actually going on, come to Public Works! It's a free event in the style of Nerd Night but designed just for Ithaca. We're bringing a variety of intellectually-stimulating presentations right to you for your entertainment and educational pleasure at Liquid State Brewery, in partnership with Story House Ithaca. Come hear talks given by Cornell and IC graduate students, professors, community experts, and everything in between! Each session will feature one to three accessible talks, followed by a Q&A session where audience participation is highly encouraged but not required!
Bring a friend, make a friend, ask an expert, and drink a beer!
The April 21st Public Works event will feature 2 talks:
a cultural analytics talk:
"Dark & Stormy: Bad Humor in the Worst Sentences Ever Written"
by Venkata S Govindarajan
Assistant Professor in CS at Ithaca College
Humor is a fundamental part of being human, but what about *intentionally bad* humor? I'll be talking about my recent research paper (with Dr. Laura Biester at Middlebury College) on sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where writers compete to craft ‘atrocious opening sentences to the worst novel never written’. What’s unique about these sentences? Why are they so bad that they’re funny? And finally, how does AI like ChatGPT fare at writing sentences so bad that it makes us groan (and maybe chuckle)? I’ll try to answer these questions and more in my talk.
and another cultural analytics talk:
"Who’s Engineering Our Culture (And Why Aren’t We Doing It Openly)?"
by Omar Shehata
Independent Researcher
Last year, researchers secretly deployed AI bots on Reddit to change people's minds. The bots were six times more persuasive than humans, posed as trauma survivors and political minorities, and nobody noticed — until the researchers themselves confessed. The backlash was enormous. But this kind of covert influence campaign happens constantly, run by corporations, governments, and political operatives with no oversight and no accountability. The researchers were the first ones doing it openly, and for science, but they were punished for it.This talk is about the gap between those who engineer culture in secret and those trying to study it openly — and what we can do about it. We're going to look at the tools & techniques for doing this, focusing on how language models trained on massive amounts of human text function as detailed simulations of the culture that produced them. You can query them the way you'd query a population — ask what concepts cluster together, what ideas feel "good" or "bad," what associations different communities hold. I argue that the primary value of AI is not in performing any particular function at all but in simulating society, and lowering the barrier for computational culture mapping (which may be used for defense or offense).
Time and Location
We're figuring out a new schedule in collaboration with Story House Ithaca!
Schedule: TBD.
Liquid State Brewery
620 W. Green Street
Ithaca, NY
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We want to hear from you! Come talk to us at a Public Works event or send us a message at ithacapublicworks@gmail.com. Are you an academic? Feel free to list your Public Works talk as an outreach event on your CV! Are you not an academic? We still want to hear from you!
