CogFest Day 2

Film Screening

The CCBS, in collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts presented:

HER

Brief intro and full film screening of “Her” (Spike Jonze, 2013)
Wexner Center for the Arts, Film/Video Theater
 

In the futuristic romantic comedy Her, Joaquin Phoenix stars as a man whose romantic failures in the material world lead him to form an intimate relationship with his intelligent computer operating system, “Samantha” (brilliantly voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

"Her" has been selected as the feature film event of the 2018 Spring CogFest. "Her" embodies core themes of great interest to cognitive scientists, including artificial intelligence, human-computer interactions, technology and society, and the future of the mind.

More information about the film and CogFest's partnership with the Wexner Center for the Arts can be found here.

Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A

The audience participated in a discussion of the film with our panel of experts from diverse disciplines

Wexner Center for the Arts, Film/Video Theater 

Photo credit: Molly McKinney

Panel Moderator

Andrew Leber, PhD
Dr. Leber is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and associate director of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences (CCBS) at Ohio State.  He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.  His laboratory, currently supported by the National Science Foundation, has published numerous scientific papers primarily on the control of attention, using human behavioral techniques, eye tracking, and functional MRI.  Leber has co-organized the international meeting on Object Perception, Attention & Memory (OPAM), he is currently co-editing a special issue on Attention and Perception in Current Opinion in Psychology, and he serves several additional journal editorial boards.  

Panelists Include

David Staley, PhD
Dr. Staley is interim director of the Humanities Institute and director of the Center for the Humanities in Practice (CHiP) at Ohio State. An associate professor in the Department of History, he also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design and Educational Studies. His research interests include digital history, the philosophy of history, historical methodology, and the history and future of higher education. He has published widely on the intersection of technology and higher education, including Brain, Mind and Internet: A Deep History and Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Computers, Visualization and History, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2014), and History and Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future (Lexington Books, 2006). Staley also hosts the monthly breakfast lecture series CreativeMornings/Columbus.

Wei Xu, PhD
Dr. Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State. Her research interests include natural language processing, machine learning and social media. She received her PhD in computer science with a five-year MacCracken Fellowship from New York University. Before joining Ohio State, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Xu has spoken at Google, Amazon, IBM Research, and 30 other companies and universities and has held leadership roles in multiple international conferences on computational linguistics. Her current activities include organizing the annual international Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT) and designing a new course at Ohio State, “Social Media and Text Analytics.”

Richard Samuels, PhD
Dr. Samuels is a professor of philosophy and member of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ohio State. He has previously held appointments at King’s College London and the University of Pennsylvania. Publishing widely about the philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and the foundations of cognitive science, he is currently writing a book titled Descartes’ Challenge: Flexibility and the Architecture of Cognition and recently served as editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).