Apoorv Agarwal is a fourth year doctoral student in the Computer Science department at Columbia University. His areas of interest and specialization are Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He has interned at IBM Research, working with the DeepQA team that built Watson, a machine capable of answering Jeopardy! questions. Apoorv believes that the arts may provide a fertile ground for thinking about scientific ideas. Every form of art provides a different meaning representation for concepts. "The next step," during ideation, may be obvious in one form (of meaning representation) and not the other. As a first step to explore this hypothesis, he recently collaborated with choreographer Caitlin Trainor to create Artificial IntelliDance, a dance presentation that explains how machines learn to "think" like humans.
Caitlin Trainor is the artistic director of Trainor Dance and a lecturer at Barnard College/Columbia University. Originally from Rhode Island, Trainor has taught, choreographed, and performed on both sides of the Atlantic. She enjoys using dance as a playground for ideas, particularly in collaboration with other artists and thinkers. Her latest partnership with computer scientist Apoorv Agarwal, Artificial IntelliDance, uses dance to explain a relatively new machine learning paradigm.
Trainor's performance career includes appearances at Lincoln Center, onstage with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and on the walls of the building itself with site-specific choreographer Stephan Koplowitz. She has danced with and acted as rehearsal director for Sean Curran Company, and performed in numerous productions ranging from experimental downtown work to a recent appearance in a music video for Diehard. She has created new work on dancers from Nacre Dance Company, Murray State University, Providence College, and Northumbria University (Newcastle Upon Tyne, England). An alumna of Skidmore College (B.S.) and Mills College (M.F.A.), Trainor is the grateful recipient of an education grant from New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) and appreciates ongoing production support from Barnard College/Columbia University. Visit her on the web at www.trainordance.com.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations). …...more
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