UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Ada and the Engine” for more information.

Join us Thursday, May 7 for a post-show conversation with Guitar Hero and Rock Band creator Eran Egozy.

Hear his perspective as a musician and technologist whose work dovetails with Ada’s dream of machines that could create music. 

Professor of the Practice in Music Technology, Eran Egozy is an entrepreneur, musician, and technologist. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of Harmonix Music Systems, the music-based video game company that created the revolutionary titles Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central with sales in excess of one billion dollars. Eran and his business partner Alex Rigopulos were named in Time Magazine’s Time 100 and Fortune Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40. Eran is also an accomplished clarinetist, performing regularly with Radius Ensemble, Emmanuel Music, and freelancing in the Boston area. Prior to starting Harmonix, Eran earned degrees in Electrical Engineering and Music from MIT, where he conducted research on combining music and technology at the MIT Media Lab. Now back at MIT, his research and teaching interests include interactive music systems, music information retrieval, and multimodal musical expression and engagement. His current research project,ConcertCue, is a program-note streaming mobile app for live classical music concerts that has been featured with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New World Symphony.

UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Ada and the Engine” for more information.

Join us Saturday, May 2nd for a pre-show conversation with artist Diemut Streb.

Hear about her work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Visual Art and how it examines the crossover between humanity and machines. 

Diemut Strebe is an acclaimed artist whose work often focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and more human qualities, such as speech and even biological entities. Her most recent work, The Prayer, focuses on the juxtaposition of timeless religious routines and concepts, such as “the divine”, with a self-learning software meant to mimic human brain patterns. Strebe’s previous work has also included close cooperation with scientists in the fields of synthetic biology, human and plant genetics, tissue engineering, quantum and astrophysics, chemical engineering and other fields of scientific research.

UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Ada and the Engine” for more information.

Join us Thursday, April 30 for a post-show conversation with two fellows from the Knights of Science Journalism. 

KSJ Fellows are experts at raising questions at the intersection of science, technology and our daily lives. 

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist, and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He writes regularly for New Scientist, Quanta, Scientific American, PNAS Front Matter and Nature, and has contributed to Nautilus, Matter, The Wall Street Journal, Discover and the UK’s Literary Review. His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by UK’s Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, was long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.  His most recent book,Through Two Doors at Once was named one of Smithsonian’s Favorite Books of 2018 and one of Forbes’s 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics.

Andrada Fiscutean is a science and technology journalist from Romania. She often writes about women in technology, Eastern European hackers, or journalists attacked with malware. Her work has been featured in Nature, Ars Technica, Wired, Vice Motherboard, and ZDNet. Passionate about the history of technology, Fiscutean owns several home computers made in Eastern Europe during the 1980s.

UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Ada and the Engine” for more information.

Join us on Wednesday, April 29th for a post-show conversation with Jim Cocola.

Professor Cocola will respond to the themes presented in Ada and the Engine in relation to digital humanities work. In particular, the application of artificial intelligence to poetry and music. Professor Cocola will also share the exciting insights from a program he built to analyze Byron’s poetry. 

Jim Cocola is associate professor and associate head for humanities at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he also serves as academic director and poetry instructor in the local branch of the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities. Author of Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (Iowa, 2016), his articles have appeared in College Literature, Discourse, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Past president of the Modern Language Association’s Forum on Italian American Language, Literature, and Culture, his honors include a prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and fellowships from The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center and The MacDowell Colony. 

UPDATE: This production has been cancelled due to recent advances with the COVID-19 Outbreak. Please see “Important Update About Ada and the Engine” for more information.

Join us Sunday, April 26 for a post-show conversation with Joe Bates Oliver Strimpel. 

Two computer scientists dig into the collaboration between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. Hint: it’s all about hardware vs. software.

Joseph Bates is a computer scientist and entrepreneur.  His technical activities have been varied, including artificial intelligence for automated mathematics, software tools for developing hardware, emotional interactive animated characters and computational drama, and approximate computing.  He was a professor and scientist for 20 years at Carnegie Mellon, the MIT AI and Media Labs, Cornell, where he received his PhD, and Johns Hopkins, which he entered at age 13.

Oliver Strimpel was curator and then Director of The Computer Museum in Boston for 14 years when the museum became internationally recognized for its collections and exhibits.  These ranged from the Cold War SAGE computer to the first microprocessors, and from the two-story Walk-Through Computer to the Virtual Fishtank interactive gallery. Prior to this, Oliver was curator at The Science Museum, London, where he created exhibits on computer technology and was responsible for the national collections of mathematics and computing including Babbage’s original Difference Engine No. 2 and a trial piece for the Analytical Engine.  Oliver is now a qualified patent attorney and Senior Patent Counsel at Avid Technology, Inc.

Oliver has a degree in physics, and advanced degrees in astronomy, astrophysics, and law.  He is a keen amateur geologist, visiting geologically unique corners of the planet, and pursuing research into the formation of the Himalaya.