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Hi. I'm Refik. I'm a media artist.
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I use data as a pigment
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and paint with a thinking brush
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that is assisted
by artificial intelligence.
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Using architectural spaces as canvases,
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I collaborate with machines
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to make buildings dream and hallucinate.
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You may be wondering,
what does all this mean?
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So let me please take you
into my work and my world.
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I witnessed the power of imagination
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when I was eight years old
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as a child growing up in Istanbul.
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One day, my mom brought home
a videocassette
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of the science fiction movie
"Blade Runner."
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I clearly remember being mesmerized
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by the stunning architectural vision
of the future of Los Angeles,
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a place that I had never seen before.
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That vision became a kind of a staple
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of my daydreams.
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When I arrived in LA in 2012
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for a graduate program
in design media arts,
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I rented a car and drove downtown
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to see that wonderful world
of the near future.
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I remember a specific line
that kept playing
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over and over in my head:
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the scene where the android Rachael
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realizes that her memories
are actually not hers,
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and when Deckard tells her
they are someone else's memories.
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Since that moment,
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one of my inspirations
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has been this question.
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What can a mission do
with someone else's memories?
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Or, to say that in another way,
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what does it mean to be an AI
in the 21st century?
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Any android or AI mission
is only intelligent
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as long as we collaborate with it.
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It can construct things
that human intelligence
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intends to produce,
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but does not have the capacity to do so.
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Think about your activities
and social networks.
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For example, they get smarter
the more you interact with them.
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If machines can learn or process memories,
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can they also dream?
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Hallucinate?
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Involuntarily remember,
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or make connections
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between multiple people streams?
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Does being an AI in the 21st century
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simply mean not forgetting anything?
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And, if so,
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isn't it the most revolutionary thing
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that we have experienced
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in our centuries-long effort
to capture history across media?
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In other words,
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how far have we come
since we discussed "Blade Runner"?
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So I established my studio in 2014,
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and invited architects,
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computer and data scientists,
neuroscientists, musicians
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and even storytellers to join me
in realizing my dreams.
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Can data become a pigment?
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This was the very first question we asked
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when starting our journey
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to embed media arts into architecture,
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to collide virtual and physical worlds.
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So we began to imagine
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what I would call
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the politics of data.
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One of our first projects,
Virtual Depictions,
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was a public data sculpture piece
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commissioned by the city of San Francisco.
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The work invites the audience
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to be part of a spectacular
aesthetic experience
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in a living urban space
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by depicting a ?? network
of connections of the city itself.
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It also stands as a reminder
of how invisible data
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from our everyday lives,
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like the ?? feeds
that are represented here,
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can be made visible
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and transformed into sensory knowledge
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that can be experienced collectively.
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In fact, data can only become knowledge
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when it's experienced,
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and what is knowledge and experience
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can take many forms.
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When exploring such connections
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through the vast potential
of machine intelligence,
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we also pondered
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the connection between human senses
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and the machines' capacity
for simulating nature.
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These inquiries began while working
on wind data paintings.
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They took the shape of visualized plans
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based on hidden data sets
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that we collected from wind sensors.
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We then used generative algorithms
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to transform wind speed,
gust and direction
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into an ethereal data pigment.
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The result was a meditative
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yet speculative experience.
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This kinetic data sculpture,
titled, "Bosphorus,"
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was a similar attempt to question
our capacity to reimagine
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natural occurrences.
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Using high-frequency radar collections
of the Marmara Sea,
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we collected sea surface data
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and projected its dynamic movement
with machine intelligence.
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We create the sense of immersion
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in a calm yet constantly changing
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synthetic serial.
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Seeing with the brain
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is often called imagination,
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and, for me, imagining architecture
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goes beyond just glass,
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metal or concrete,
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instead experimenting with
the furthermost possibilities of immersion
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and ways of augmenting
our perception in built environments.
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Research in artificial intelligence
is growing every day,
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leaving us with the feeling
of being plugged into a system
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that is bigger and more knowledgeable
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than ourselves.
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In 2017, we discovered
an open source library
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of cultural documents in Istanbul
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and began working on "Archive Dreaming,"
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one of the first AI-driven
public installations in the world,
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an AI exploring approximately
1.7 million documents that span 270 years.
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One of our inspirations
during this process
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was a short story
called "The Library of Babel"
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by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
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In the story, the author conceives
a universe in the form of a vast library
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containing all possible 410-page books
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of a certain format and character set.
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Through this inspiring image,
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we imagine a way to physically explore
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the vast archives of knowledge
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in the age of machine intelligence.
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The resulting work, as you can see,
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was a user-driven immersive space.
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"Archive Dreaming" profoundly transformed
the experience of a library
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in the age of machine intelligence.
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"Machine Hallucination"
is an exploration of time and space
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experienced through New York City's
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public photographic archives.
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For this one-of-a-kind immersive project,
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we deployed machine-learning algorithms
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to find and process over
100 million photographs of the city.
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We designed an innovative narrative system
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to use artificial intelligence
to predict or to hallucinate new images,
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allowing the viewer to step
into a dreamlike fusion
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of past and future New York.
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As our projects delve deeper into
remembering and transmitting knowledge,
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we thought more about how memories
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were not static recollections
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but ever-changing
interpretations of past events.
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We pondered how machines
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could simulate unconscious
and subconscious events
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such as dreaming,
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remembering
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and hallucinating.
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Thus we created "Melting Memories"
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to visualize the moment of remembering.
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The inspiration came from a tragic event
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when I found out that my uncle
was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
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At that time, all I could think about
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was to find a way to celebrate
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how and what he remembered
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when we are still able to do so.
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I began to think of memories
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not as disappearing
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but as melting
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or changing shape.
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With the help of machine intelligence,
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we worked with the scientists
at the Neuroscape Laboratory
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at the University of California,
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who showed us how to understand
brain signals as memories are made.
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Although my own uncle was losing
the ability to process memories,
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the artwork generated by the EEG data
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explored the materiality of remembering
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and stood as a tribute
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to what my uncle had lost.
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Almost nothing about contemporary LA
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matched my childhood expectation
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of the city,
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with the exception
of one amazing building:
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the Walt Disney Concert Hall,
designed by Frank Gehry,
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one of my all-time heroes.
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In 2018, I had a call
from the LA Philharmonic
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who was looking for an installation
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to help mark the celebrated symphony's
hundredth year anniversary.
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For this, we decided to ask the question,
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can a build learn? Can it dream?
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To answer this question,
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we decided to collect everything recorded
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in the archives of the LA field and WHC,
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to be precise, 77 terabytes
of digitally archived memories.
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By using machine intelligence,
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the entire archive going back 100 years
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became projections on the building's skin,
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42 projectors to achieve
this futuristic public experience
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in the heart of Los Angeles,
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getting one step closer
to the LA of "Blade Runner."
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If ever a building could dream,
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it was in this moment.
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Now, I am inviting you to one last journey
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into the mind of a machine.
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Right now, we are fully immersed
in the data universe
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of every single created TED Talk
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from the past 30 years.
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That means, this data set includes
7,705 talks from the TED stage.
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Those talks have been translated
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into 7.4 million seconds,
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and each second is represented
here in this data universe.
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Every image that you are seeing in here
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represents unique moments
from those talks.
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By using machine intelligence,
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we processed a total of 487,000 sentences
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into 330 unique clusters of topics
like nature, global emissions,
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extinction, race issues,
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computation,
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trust, emotions, water and refugees.
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These clusters are then
connected to each other
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by an algorithm,
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and generated 113 million line segments,
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which revealed new
conceptual relationships.
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Wouldn't it be amazing
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to be able to remember
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all the questions that have ever
been asked on the stage?
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Here I am,
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inside the mind
of countless great thinkers,
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as well as a machine
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interacting with various feelings
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attributed to learning,
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remembering,
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questioning
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and imagining all at the same time,
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expanding the power of the mind.
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For me, being right here
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is indeed what it means
to be an AI in the 21st century.
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It is in our hands, humans,
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to train this mind to learn and remember
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what we can only dream of.
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Thank you.