Nerd Nite is always fun and interesting, but this month, we also can claim to be TOPICAL! Whether you can’t stop thinking about last Sunday’s Super Bowl or if the preeminence of ChatGPT has you wondering about what AI can do for you (and what you hope it doesn’t), February’s Nerd Nite is on point! Join us on Thursday, February 13 at LIVE! Doors open at 6:30 pm, talks start at 7 pm and, as always, there’s no cover charge!
We’ll start out with sports and Eleanna Varangis with Get your Head [out of] the Game: How Sport Concussions Affect our Brain Health. Concussions frequently occur during participation in contact and collision sport from the youth through professional levels. As individuals with a history of multiple concussions enter retirement, we are learning more about the potential long-term negative effects of head impacts and concussions on brain health throughout the lifespan. We’ll talk about some of the potential benefits vs. risks of participation in contact and collision sports, how concussions affect our brain in the short- and long-term, and how we can potentially optimize the long-term benefits of sport participation while mitigating the long-term risks in current athletes.
Eleanna is an Assistant Professor of Movement Science in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Faculty Council of the Michigan Concussion Center. Her research focuses on the long-term effects of sport participation and concussions on cognitive function and brain health across the lifespan. Outside the lab/classroom, she loves watching football and baseball (Go Yankees!), cooking, traveling, and encouraging her 5-year-old and 3-year-old to please stop hitting their heads on things.
We’ll switch over to the sunnier side with Molly Jones and Machines Making Music? In 1842, Lady Ada Lovelace speculated that, in the future, analyzing machines would “compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity.” In 2025, AI is making music, and…it’s going. It’s up to you to decide how successfully. We’ll talk about machine learning basics and how they can be applied to music, listen to examples of the latest AI-generated music, and look at independent artists creating their own original machine learning based work.
Molly is an improviser, composer, and data engineer. Her tools include saxophones, flutes, found sounds, and machine learning models, and she is the founder of Chicago Creative Machines, an initiative promoting the original and ethical use of machine learning in the creation of art.
Now to the potentially darker side of AI with Take Me to Your Leader: How AI Will Shape Power and Politics in the 21st Century. The aliens are here, and they want to know who’s in charge. In this talk, Frank Murphy will look at how these inscrutable models will shape our conversations and thus our political reality. He’ll conclude with some warnings and key observations from philosophers, engineers, and historians. Wisdom and learnings will be shared by all.
Frank escaped the Land of Increasingly Hot (Florida) to study in the Land of Endless Snow (Michigan Tech). He stands before you today a fully naturalized Michigan transplant. One of his teeth is backwards, but he’s otherwise a relatively modern thinker. He works for an ML startup and resides in Ann Arbor with his wife Emily, who he definitely did not bribe to get a speaker slot for his talk.