Concept Note and Submission Details:
The blinding glare of AI makes us squint in a combination of hope and fear. We have to take pause and redirect the glare through the prisms of diverse domains and disciplines, to take advantage of the perhaps still-too-human ability to detach and reflect, immerse, and observe, both at the same time. The reflective part of the conference not only steers away from the enchantment of grand questions and grand paranoia, but invites the best combination of breadth and specificity, accessibility and depth, freedom and discipline. The immersive dimension, on the other hand, asks us to submit to the most eclectic manifestations of AI: whether it is about talking to a therapy bot, co-creating AI art, using AI mechanisms to generate historical narratives and research documents, using AI devices to encounter health and climate hazards, diving into an AI-generated metaverse, and many other aspects. Such immersions are meant to usher in new possibilities of reflection. While recent incarnations like ChatGPT force us to take stock of the disruption brought about by the generative paradigm, we will also acknowledge earlier inflections that AI brought about in recommendation systems, translation engines, image-processing, cultural understandings, socioeconomic growths, among many others. Are some of these inflections such as therapy bots and AI-driven media poised for their own respective singularities? Is there a possibility of building an intersectional alliance with AI so that the singularities do not emerge as all-pervading, imperial, and dictatorial entities around us?
What makes this collective exercise in contemplation unique is the meeting ground it offers for theorists, practitioners, critics, and enthusiasts. Located in Bangalore, which is India’s de facto AI capital, this is envisaged to be a one-of-a-kind exchange involving a thriving AI community of academic experts drawn from the world over. Slicing through the jargon of technological advances, the arcane dialect of academia, and the authentic vernacular of consumers and users, the conference does not presume a pre-existing language for communication, but instead hopes to arrive at one. Concerning these arguments, the conference invites Ph.D. scholars, postdoctoral fellows, independent researchers, and faculties from different educational and research institutions to contribute abstracts on the following sub-themes (but not restricted to):
• AI and philosophy
• AI and Cultural Studies
• AI and Political Science
• AI and Psychology
• AI, Science and Technology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS)
• AI and Media
• AI, Design, and Art
• AI, Translation Studies and Machine Learning
The range and scope of topics have been kept wide enough to enable conversations and inputs from actual stakeholders of AI (technocrats and policymakers).
₹1,600.00
Submissions should be able to underline why the research problems concerned matter beyond their sub-disciplines. Interested contributors need to submit an extended abstract of 800-1000 words and the timeline of submission is 31st January 2024. The contributors will be informed about the outcome of their submission on/by 15th February 2024.
After the conference, selected presenters would be invited to submit chapters for conference proceedings.
Please send the abstracts to both
Dr. Ravi Chakraborty (ravi.chakraborty@alliance.edu.in) and
Dr. Sayan Dey (sayan.dey@alliance.edu.in).
