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

Join us on Saturday, April 18 at 7:00pm for a pre-show conversation with David Unger and Dick Rubenstein. 

Historian of Science David Unger talks about the significance of the collaboration between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, and Computer Scientist Dick Rubenstein—who built a theatrical replica of Charles Babbage’s model of the Difference Engine —offers his insider perspective on the mechanics of what they imagined.

Dick Rubinstein works in a variety of technical areas in the theater, including props, set design and construction, lighting, and sound design. He’s delighted to return to Central Square Theater, where last he consulted on Breaking the Code, another play that focuses on people in the history of science and technology. Dick likes to make and fix things, and has a workspace at the Artisan’s Asylum, a maker space in Somerville. His degrees are in engineering and social science, a combination that led to a career in human factors and user experience. That’s not so different from designing sets and props: whatever the technology on the inside, how should the outside be designed to connect with the people who interact with it? 

David Unger is the Director of Administration at Harvard University’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and a lecturer on the History of Science. David wrote and produced “Restless Device: A Podcast About Extraordinary Technology” from 2015-2017 which explored past and present technologies and what they can tell us about large questions.

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 Saturday, April 18 for a post-show conversation with Carla Brodley on Artificial Intelligence.

Renowned computer scientist, Carla Brodley, will reflect on the performance from her perspective as an expert in Artificial Intelligence. 

Carla E. Brodley is the Dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University.  A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Dean Brodley’s interdisciplinary machine learning research led to advances not only in computer and information science, but in many other areas including remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, content-based image retrieval of medical images, computational biology, chemistry, evidence-based medicine, and predictive medicine. Dean Brodley’s numerous leadership positions in computer science as well as her chosen research fields of machine learning and data mining include serving as program co-chair of the International Conference of Machine Learning, co-chair of AAAI, and serving as associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. She is currently serving on the Computer Research Association Board of Directors, as a member-at-large of the section on Information, Computing, and Communication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as a member of the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

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 Friday, April 17  for a post-show conversation with David Kaiser.

Physicist and historian of science David Kaiser hosts an illuminating conversation about the play and about recent research on women in computing and the contributions they have made.

David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also serves as Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. He is the author of several award-winning books on the history of science, including How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), which was named “Book of the Year” by Physics World magazine. His latest book is Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Alan Guth in MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, and has also designed and helped to conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s recent efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement were featured in a documentary film, “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle,” which premiered on PBS in 2019. Inspired by the “Cosmic Bell” test, Underground Railway Theater and playwright Patrick Gabidge created Both/And, about particle entanglement, which ran for two summers at the MIT Museum. 

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 16  for our post-show Scholar Social with Woodrow Hartzog and Adriana Craciun.

Scholars Woodrow Hartzog, an expert on cyber privacy, and Adriana Cracuin, an expert on Byron and the cultures of science, discuss their interdisciplinary work and its relationship to the ideas raised in Ada and the Engine, in particular the moral culture surrounding technology. 

Woodrow Hartzog is a Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University School of Law and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is also a Resident Fellow at the Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC) at Northeastern University, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, a Fellow at The Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law at Washington University, and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. His research on privacy, media, and robotics has been published in scholarly publications such as the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and California Law Review and popular publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He has testified multiple times before Congress and has been quoted or referenced by numerous media outlets, including NPR, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies, published in 2018 by Harvard University Press.

Adriana Craciun specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with current research in Arctic humanities, exploration studies, science studies, historical geography, history of collecting, Enlightenment, history of the book and of authorship. Her most recent book, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge UP, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2016 Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, and uncovers a rich textual and material archive of Arctic exploration culture from the 17th century through to our own era of renewed interest in exploration’s contentious legacies. She is also the author of Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2003) and British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave, 2005), which focused on women writers’ significant contributions to Romantic-era thinking on the body, gender, revolutionary politics, and cosmopolitanism. She also runs the Cultures of Science interdisciplinary research seminar at BU, and serves on the Executive Board of the Center for the Study of Europe, and as Associated Faculty at the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

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 12 at 4pm for a post-show conversation with Sue Weaver Schopf.

Sue Weaver Schopf discusses Ada’s upbringing by Lady Byron—in light of her disastrous marriage to poet Lord Byron—and the opposing views Ada had of her father.

Sue Weaver Schopf is Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension at Harvard University, where she also served for over thirty years as Research Advisor in the Humanities, then as Associate Dean and Director of the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the Harvard Extension School. She holds the PhD in English from Vanderbilt University & is a recipient of post-doctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is a winner of the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Prize and the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award. Among the many literature courses that she teaches are English Romantic Poetry, Victorian Poetry, Darwin & the Victorian Novel, & Masterpieces of Western Drama. Her publications include articles on a variety of 19th-century literary topics. An ardent believer in the value of on-site literary study, Dr. Schopf has led her students on numerous walking tours abroad, including visits to the homes & haunts & landscapes that inspired the poetry of Lord Byron & other great writers.