Galatea hosts talks on a variety of subjects.
To attend, please request an invite from a past attendee.
Computer-Generated Art (Aug 2019)
Speaker Bio: Emily Xie is a generative artist and software engineer. She currently works at Sotheby’s on the Thread Genius team, which is a group that focuses on automation, data insights, and machine learning for the art market. Other organizations she’s been involved with include Pioneer Works, where, as an Artist-in-Residence, she spent her days making art with code.
Outside of programming, Emily enjoys photography, good food, and lifting.
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Superhuman AI for Poker (May 2019)
Abstract: The field of artificial intelligence has had a number of high-profile successes in the domain of perfect-information games like chess or Go where all participants know the exact state of the world. But real-world strategic interactions typically involve hidden information, such as in negotiations, cybersecurity, and financial markets. Past AI techniques fall apart in these settings, with poker serving as the classic example. Libratus is an AI that, in a 120,000-hand competition, decisively defeated four top professionals in heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the leading benchmark for imperfect-information games and a long-standing challenge problem for AI in general. In this talk I will explain why poker was such a difficult challenge for AI, and the advances in Libratus that overcome those challenges. I will conclude by discussing what comes next for multi-agent artificial intelligence research.
Speaker Bio: Noam Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. His research combines computational game theory and machine learning to develop AI systems capable of strategic reasoning in large imperfect-information multi-agent settings. He has applied this research toward creating Libratus, the first AI to defeat top humans in no-limit poker, which was one of 12 finalists for Science Magazine's 2017 Scientific Breakthrough of the Year.
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How to Collect Art in the Post-Artsy Era (April 2019)
Abstract: What can the death mask of Tutankhamun and a polished stainless steel Balloon Dog teach us about collecting art today? What is it about art that makes us value these objects far beyond the material value of their parts? And, if I’m interested in collecting art, where do I even begin? Join Hannah Foster and Wright Harvey from Sugarlift, a New York-based art consulting agency, to demystify the elusive art market and give you practical tips on collecting art.
Speaker Bios: Wright Harvey is the President and Founder of Sugarlift LLC, an innovative art advisory with a mission to support emerging artists while engaging a new audience of collectors. Wright grew up on Florida’s southwest coast before studying studio art at the University of Virginia. The practice of printmaking opened his eyes to the infinite array of artistic techniques and processes. It wasn’t until meeting Calvine, his future wife, who is now a specialist in Sotheby’s Old Masters department, that he decided to move to New York to see and absorb as much art as he could (and wine, but that’s another bio). Wright spent his first decade in New York at J.P. Morgan, developing his love for business and entrepreneurship. Through Sugarlift, Wright loves to share his passion for the visual arts while making the industry more sustainable for all of the players involved.
Hannah Foster is the Gallery Manager at Sugarlift LLC as well as a freelance arts and culture writer. Before both, she was a professional ballet dancer. These seemingly disparate careers are connected through exploration of a single complex question: How and why do we engage with the arts? At Sugarlift, she gets to investigate and empower these relationships in intimate spaces, from the collector’s living room to the artist’s studio. Hannah’s written work on everything from perfumed plays to artist-flavored desserts has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Dance Magazine, and more. She’s forever fighting the assumption that “starving artist” is an acceptable trope. She also loves wine.
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Black Holes & the Limits of Computation (Feb 2019)
Abstract: Black holes are nature's most extreme computers. I will explain how black holes are nature's densest hard drives, fastest information processors, and most chaotic systems. More generally, we will consider bounds on the amount of information you can pack into a region of space. We use this insight to discuss the interplay between the laws of physics and the limits of computation. No technical background necessary!
Speaker Bio: Dan Roberts is a research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a co-founder of Diffeo. He did a postdoc in theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and received his Ph.D. from MIT in theoretical physics. Dan is interested in the interplay between physics and computation, and in particular whether the tools and methodology of theoretical physics can be applied to understand the models and learning algorithms used for machine learning. His work in theoretical physics has focused on the relationship between black holes, quantum chaos, computational complexity, randomness, and how the laws of physics are related to fundamental limits of computation.
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