Jun 25
Sag Harbor Cinema Sag Harbor, NY
TicketsDr. Steven Skiena
Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University
Ex Machina— Synthetic Dreams and Ghost Machines
Program Description
Dr. Steven Skiena, Associate Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University, will join the Cinema for a presentation exploring the rapidly evolving worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics.
Film Synopsis
A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a breath-taking humanoid A.I.
Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an Internet company, wins a contest that sends him to the private estate of Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), his firm's brilliant CEO. When he arrives, Caleb learns that he has been chosen to be the human component in a Turing test to determine the capabilities and consciousness of Ava (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful robot designed by Bateman. However, it soon becomes evident that Ava is far more self-aware and deceptive than either man imagined.
About the Speaker
Dr. Steven Skiena is the Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. His research interests include data science, bioinformatics, and algorithms. He is the author of six books, including The Algorithm Design Manual, The Data Science Design Manual, and Who's Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank, and over 200 technical papers.
Skiena received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois under Herbert Edelsbrunner in 1988. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a current and former Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the University of Virginia Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (WahooWa!), the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineer Teaching Award. His paper on the DeepWalk approach to graph representation learning received the ten year Test of Time Award at KDD 2024.