January 14|25 2018
The future of blurred boundaries between humans and machines is a recurrent theme in science fiction. This future is today.
Join us for two weeks of discussions, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and cultural and recreational events that will inspire our shared vision for a brighter, human-machine future.
Is the future human?
Sensors monitor our state, health and behavior, relaying this data to configure a digital signature that is as much part of us as our biometric traits. Fed at petabyte levels, our digital signatures allow increasingly powerful machine learning algorithms to learn from the continuous data streams we generate and anticipate our needs and behaviors as consumers.
Machine learning algorithms can increasingly mimic the function of our brain and will soon establish a direct interface that allows for the seamless control of robots. Robots are endowed with powerful sensorial capacities in order to interact with other humans, as well as their robotic avatars, through virtual networks that may eventually replace much of our human-to-human interactions.
While this human-machine future offers to bring about unlimited potential, it also creates risks—of losing our privacy and the social traits inherent to our human nature. We live in a world where machines are increasingly embedded in our everyday lives. Machines shape our individual identities, social interactions, and society as a whole. During the 2018 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP), we invite you to immerse yourself in a diverse and stimulating program, touching on the opportunities and risks of a future where the boundaries between machines and humans will become even more diffuse.
Present your best research during this year’s WEP KAUST Poster Competition. *This event is open to graduate students and postdocs. Interested in sharing your research with the grea ... more
Cornell Entrepreneurship 13/14
Location: Building 19, Level 3, Conference Hall 1 & 2
KAUST Cornell Entrepreneurship Program KAUST is pleased to announce a partnership with Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management to offer a certificate program in entrepreneurship. Thi ... more
Make. Working with CNC Machines 2
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
At the heart of modern machine automation Computer Numerical Control (CNC), the execution of pre-programmed sequences of machine control commands, is the technology at the heart of modern machine aut ... more
Visualizing the Human Machine Future Exhibition - JAN 22
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
About this Exhibition This exhibition will focus on visualization from the viewer’s perspective and will showcase photographs and scientific illustrations. It will be dispalyed from& ... more
Knowing How to See Exhibition - JAN 22
Location: Al-Khawarizmi East (Bldg. 1), Entrance Hall
Photography is a Bridge Between Art and Mathematics The starting point of this exhibition is to translate the language and the insights of mathematics into photographic images and vice versa. ... more
Facebook On-Air Interview with Yves Agid
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
The KAUST Facebook On-Air Series with Yves Agid *Speaker to be confirmed Yves Agid is a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, cell biologist, neurochemist, academician, university professor, hospital doct ... more
VR Lounge is Saudi Arabia’s first virtual reality (VR) gaming hub and lounge. What is VR? Well it’s rather quite simple; it’s a simulated environment in which a user is immersed thro ... more
Interactive Virtual Reality Art Exhibit: Google Tilt Brush - JAN 22
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
Paint Inside a Virtual World with Google Tilt Brush Virtual reality is at the frontier of novel human machine interfaces. At this interactive exhibit you can paint inside a virtual world. By e ... more
Tilt Brush Instructor Workshop JAN 22
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
Paint Inside a Virtual World with Google Tilt Brush Virtual reality is at the frontier of novel human machine interfaces. At this interactive exhibit you can paint inside a virtual world. By e ... more
How AI Turned the Chess World Upside Down
Location: Bldg. 20 Auditorium
Man vs. Machine! In 1977 an IBM supercomputer 'Deep Blue' beat the reigning World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in a 6 game chess match played under tournament conditions. This was the first tim ... more
The Iris Project - JAN 22
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
The Iris Project, a contemporary variant of a humanistic photography The Iris highlights the infinite beauty and diversity of people all around the world, as a human prism. Two ph ... more
A lecture by Pierre Magistretti and Yves Agid about the forgotten half of the Brain. Yves Agid will speak in particular about the role of GLIAL cells in normal and abnormal behaviors. We ... more
Make Your Stuff Talk: Workshop & Hackathon 5/5
Location: University Library, Level 3, Computer Lab 3134 ≤ 33
Workshop & Hackathon The modern interface between humans and machines is rapidly changing with new developments such as voice control, conversational user interfaces, as well as networked haptic ... more
Cornell Entrepreneurship 14/14
Location: Building 19, Level 3, Conference Hall 1 & 2
KAUST Cornell Entrepreneurship Program KAUST is pleased to announce a partnership with Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management to offer a certificate program in entrepreneurship. Thi ... more
A Human Brain or a Supercomputer, Better Together?
Location: Bldg. 20 Auditorium
A human brain or a supercomputer, better together? Sunway TaihuLight is the fastest supercomputer in the world today. It can perform calculations at a rate of 93 petaFLOP/s where each 1 petaFLOP/s is ... more
Facebook On-Air Interview with Margaret Livingstone
Location: WEP HUB (University Library)
The KAUST Facebook On-Air Series with Margaret Livingstone *Speaker to be confirmed Margaret Livingstone is Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Facebook On-Air consists ... more
What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain
Location: Bldg. 20 Auditorium ≤ 912
What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain Artists have been doing experiments on vision longer than neurobiologists. Some major works of art have provided insights as to how we see; some of these insights ... more
About this event - four mandatory sessions plus a perfomance: This course will train a Festival Chorus for a short, on-campus performance during WEP 2018. The Festival Chorus will be prepared i ... more
About this Movie * This movie projection is offered exclusively to KAUST community members and is rated PG-13. A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to ... more
