In terms of my qualifications for engaging with the Creative AI track, I currently serve as Assistant Professor of AI & the Arts at the University of Florida, where I am also Director of the Florida Electroacoustic Music Studios (FEMS), affiliate faculty in the UF Informatics Institute, and affiliate faculty in the UF College of Medicine’s Intelligent Critical Care Center (IC3). In both my scholarly and creative work, I study the myriad ways in which artificial intelligence influences how artists engage with society, and how AI can shed new light on what it means for humans to create and collaborate – and ultimately, how we can engage AI in reparative ways as opposed to harmful ones.

As an independent creative technologist, intermedia artist, and composer, I have had the privilege of working with some of the world’s preeminent presenters, artistic research institutes, and performers, including the Venice Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the LA Philharmonic, and IRCAM, among many others. My creative work has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in the arts, including a Radcliffe Fellowship from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. My collaborators have ranged from jellyfish to poets, and from particle physicists to Marvel Studios: earlier this year, I contributed elements to Laura Karpman’s award-winning score for The Marvels, which I made by sonifying stellar spectra and data from the Large Hadron Collider. I also have a background in biological engineering and frequently work at the intersection of machine learning, music, and medicine; I currently consult for a startup that is developing computer vision interfaces for a generative music neurorehabilitative platform that aims to use physically-intuitive music creation to stimulate cortical plasticity and improve cognition, emotional regulation, and fine and gross motor skills in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. The vast majority of my creative work involves multimodal technologically-mediated interaction design, and by engaging with computers in ways that question the agency of those creating, structuring, and consuming the data, I use technology to explore societal power structures and their impacts on human behavior. Ultimately, I am interested in the ways that those structures control whose stories and told and how, whether in home studios, films, video games, hospitals, the media, or the concert hall.

I have also worked extensively in artistic event production for over 15 years, and deeply understand the logistics of supporting exhibitions of large numbers of artists in multimodal capacities. I have produced, documented, and/or teched over 1000 concerts, art exhibitions, music festivals, workshops, and conferences for acts ranging from Tony Bennett and the Commodores to experimental noise and performance art shows in grain silos and caves. I am passionate about helping *all* artists realize and communicate their creative visions, regardless of their experience level, their aesthetic, or their access to resources. (I’m also very good at thinking on my feet and MacGyvering solutions, so if you need someone who can make incredible things happen with duct tape and paperclips, I’m your girl.)

In regards to my prior relationship to NeurIPS, despite having worked in computational creativity and machine learning since 2011, this was the first NeurIPS that I could attend, and I just want to say how incredibly positive my experience was. I only knew three attendees prior to arriving, but immediately found community and had at least two buddies at every event and session that I attended. That is incredibly rare at a conference of this size, and I just wanted to congratulate everyone in years prior on all of the hard work that they have put in to make it such a welcoming place. Especially as a woman, that feeling of safety cannot be overstated, and I know that it has taken an enormous amount of effort by many people to make sure that that’s the case.

That said, part of the reason that this was my first NeurIPS is that as someone who makes a living from my art (and makes a living teaching other people how to make a living from their art), this was the first year that I had the relative stability of a tenure-track academic position to help fund my attendance (and even at that, I had to cobble together funds from 3 different sources, and *still* had to pay for some of the costs out-of-pocket). There are so many incredible computational creatives whose work would have been amazing to see exhibited this year, but I can guarantee that 1) they didn’t even know that NeurIPS had a creative AI track (I did not – I only found out about it when applying to the ML for Creativity and Design Workshop, at which point the deadline for submission to the Creative AI track had passed), and 2) they wouldn’t have been able to afford to come even if they did have work accepted. To put a finer point on it: I didn’t even know about *this form,* and wouldn’t have even known that I could apply for this position had Jiahao Chen not sent it to me (he is the person who encouraged me to apply for the one of the Creative AI chairships). I think that there is so much more than can be done in terms of outreach. I have an enormous number of connections all across the computational creativity scene, and there are so many pockets of people who have a lot to contribute who I know are not being reached. I absolutely understand that the reason you have such a wonderful community is that people have worked very hard to vet those in positions of leadership, and that allowing someone new into the fold is a huge risk to the inclusive and supportive community that you’ve created. That said, I do think that having the perspectives of relative “outsiders” can be extremely valuable, and that as someone who had *not* been reached out to until very recently (despite having worked in these spaces for over a decade), my own experience could be informative in terms of figuring how to expand the network of people who feel welcome at NeurIPS.

On a very specific note, I also have a lot of connections in the arts scene in Vancouver; I am friends with Barrie Mowatt, the founder and president of the board of directors of the Vancouver Biennale, and while I know that NeurIPSes are booked many years in advance, he could certainly help us find spaces for performances and exhibitions of work (I understand there are issues of budget, liability, etc. that would need to be ironed out which may not be feasible for next year, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make those connections for future years given that Vancouver is a frequent location for NeurIPS). I also have a number of ideas about special events and initiatives – for instance, as someone who works with haptics, wearables, and interactive installation art, I would love to see a genAI design and fashion show (whether that involves the physical construction of clothing or XR). There are so many creative communities and practitioners that we could engage, and I’m sure that we would have a very robust and enthusiastic response if only we reach out. (And regardless of whether or not I end up in any sort of leadership role, I’ll absolutely be inviting them to apply in future years!)

There are so many discussions about how the AI tools that many companies and academics are creating will affect artists, but there are very, very few of the artists who will actually be most affected in the room. (I understand and fully appreciate that many people from the corporate or academic side of things either love art or have a lot of experience making it, and I would never deign to be the arbiter of who gets to identify as an artist, but I do want to acknowledge that one has a very different relationship to creative technology when they pay their rent and buy their groceries based upon their creative practice, and I didn’t see many of those people in the room during either the Creative AI track events or the ML for Creativity and Design Workshop (again, no shade to the organizers – I am so grateful that these spaces exist, and everyone benefits from having people with a wide array of experiences and perspectives on the field being in the room! I just want to advocate for more inclusivity).

I also applied for outreach chair, as that’s something I’m incredibly passionate about. I’ve been an educator for 16 years, and am especially passionate about addressing pipeline inequities in both tech and the arts. I’m currently a mentor in UF’s chapter of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC), and am working to start a summer program for electronic music in Gainesville. As an undergraduate, I ran MIT’s no-to-low-cost SAT prep program designed to provide 8-week SAT prep courses to underresourced communities in the Boston metropolitan area, which served over 400 students per semester (most of whom had full scholarships thanks to our fundraising efforts). I also have volunteered with the Boys and Girls Club, Community Music Center of Boston, and High School Composers Intensive at the Boston Conservatory to provide electronic music and composition education to K-12 students. I’m so grateful for the educators in my life who fostered my interest in STEAM, both in secondary education and throughout my higher ed career, and I hope to continue that legacy.

In any case, I know this was rather long, but if you took the time to read it, thank you for reading! Ultimately, I just want to express my gratitude that people have made space for the arts to be taken seriously and for inclusive environments (both this past year and in all the years prior), and I look forward to seeing how the creative track continues to grow and develop in the coming years. But even outside of the arts, at the end of the day, I was so invigorated by the community that I found, and would be happy to help out in whatever way I can, whether or not I’m some sort of chair!