AISB 2018 Symposium: Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined

About the Symposium

Following the successful AISB Member Workshop VII: Serendipity Symposium held at St Mary's University in June 2017, with keynotes by leading serendiptologists and nine contributed talks, we invite full papers, short papers, and demos for a Symposium on the theme of "Cybernetic Serendipity" -- broadly understood.

We take the 50th Anniversary of the famous Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, curated by Jasia Reichardt at the London's Institute for Contemporary Arts, as our inspiration. The show introduced a broader audience for the first time to emerging work on the intersection of art and technology. It coincides with the founding of the Computer Arts Society (CAS). “Cybernetic Serendipity” lends itself beautifully (perhaps even serendipitously) to a sensory and emotionally evocative exploration of “AI for the Digital Society”, the theme of this year’s AISB convention.

Serendipity has been studied extensively to theorise human discovery. However, there has been little consideration of serendipity in AI -- it simply wasn’t needed, because systems were designed to run in a perfectly predictable manner within highly constrained environments. In recent years, anticipation of AI systems with increasingly unpredictable behaviour leads us to reconsider the role of serendipity in a computational context. Serendipity has been addressed in a variety of adjacent fields such as recommender systems, machine ethics, information retrieval, information science, planning and computational creativity. With this symposium, we want to encourage a mutually beneficial exchange between these and other disciplines beyond computing.

This symposium is part of the AISB 2018 convention. An article on our preceding AISB Member Workshop has been published by Studio International, and a separate report, written by the organisers, was published in AISB Quarterly 147.

Schedule

The symposium will be opened by a 50-minutes keynote, following by long (20 min talk, 5 min questions) and short (15 min talk, 5 min questions) talks. We conclude the symposium by a series of brief (10 min talk, 2 min questions) "cyber-talks" given by on-line participants. Following their talks, the on-line participants will join a panel for a more comprehensive discussion. We have provided links to the papers where available. Please note that these papers will also be available as part of the AISB convention proceedings.

Submit a Paper or Demo

Relevant topics include:

• Historical material related to the 1968 "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition in London, and its artefacts and archives.
• Discussions of other landmarks and trends in computer art and the culture of computing, with a particular focus on “lessons learned” that can encourage further serendipitous encounters between artists and computer scientists.
• Serendipity, not limited to themes discussed in the Member Workshop, which included information encountering, social platforms, machine intelligence, robustness and anti-fragility, and intelligent support tools for research.
• The implications of learning and adaptive systems for AI ethics.
• Contemporary research that draws on Cybernetics, e.g., in complex systems science, organisational theory, semiotics, etc., and that develops a new interpretation of the theme “Cybernetic Serendipity”
• Research on innovation, including simulation studies and computational modelling of serendipity, surprise, curiosity, etc., as well as experience reports about innovative system designs implemented using non-computational means. Reports of both successes and interesting failures are welcome.
• Additional philosophical implications arising from the above topics.

Registration

Please register through the AISB 2018 convention website.

Programme Committee

Organisers / Contact