Rebecca Fiebrink
Rebecca Fiebrink is a Professor of Creative Computing at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. Together with her students and research assistants, she works on a variety of projects developing new technologies to enable new forms of human expression, creativity, and embodied interaction. Much of her current research combines techniques from human-computer interaction, machine learning, and signal processing to allow people to apply machine learning more effectively to new problems, such as the design of new digital musical instruments and gestural interfaces for gaming and accessibility.
She is also involved in projects developing rich interactive technologies for digital humanities scholarship, exploring ways that machine learning can be used and appropriated to reveal and challenge patterns of bias and inequality, and advancing machine learning education.
Data as Dialogue: Beyond Ground Truth in Creative ML
Machine learning practitioners often think of training data as “ground truth,” a fixed reference point for what a system should learn. But in creative practice, data can play a very different role. This talk explores how training data can facilitate a dialogue between people and machines, acting as a medium through which artists, musicians, and designers communicate intentions, practices, and values.
I’ll discuss how small, personal datasets can be powerful creative tools; how “bias” can become a way of steering models toward desired behaviours; and how curating and labeling data can act as a form of close reading. Thinking about data in this way opens up new possibilities for building creative machine learning systems: tools that are more personal, participatory, and reflective, and not limited to the large-scale models that dominate the headlines.
Framing data as dialogue invites us to imagine machine learning as more than generation on demand. It provides a foundation for new ML tools for creativity—including tools that support reflection on our own practices—and helps us question whose values are encoded in the systems we use.
