About Feynman’s Purple Stylus

In this design fiction talk, a renowned theoretical phycisist collaborates with an AI system to remake his scientific diagrams in digital media, which transformed the field of theoritical physics in 20th century.

About the Speaker

Rubaiat Habib is a Research Scientist at Adobe Research. His research interest lies in developing tools, interactions, and frameworks that facilitate powerful ways of thinking, design, and communication. His research in dynamic drawings and animation turned into award winning products & features (eg, Autodesk Sketchbook Motion, Adobe Fresco, Adobe Character Animator) that reach a global audience. Rubaiat received several awards for his work including Apple App of the year 2016, three ACM CHI Best Paper Nominations, ACM CHI and ACM UIST Peoples choice best talk awards, and ACM CHI Golden Mouse awards for best research videos.

About AI and the New Information Age

In 2019, GPT-2 could not reliably count to ten. Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots. As AI developers scale these systems, unforeseen abilities and behaviors emerge spontaneously without explicit programming. Progress in AI has been swift and, to many, surprising.

— Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress, Bengio, Hinton, et al.

Along with rapid advancements in AI research, there are increasing concerns. Many concerns stem from a growing disconnect between the technology-centric approach to the creation of AI technologies and their inextricable embedding into complex personal, social, and cultural contexts. The theme of the Spring 2024 Design@Large is AI and the New Information Age. A primary focus is designing information spaces, places that foster thinking, in this new information age.