New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Wonder or Worry? Google has a new human-sounding Assistant!

We can see AI at work everyday in the form of virtual personal assistants, which are embedded in almost any smartphone today. Whether its Alexa, Siri or Google Now, these virtual assistants have made our everyday lives simpler and...

By Sohini Goswami on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Artificial intelligence for everyone: indico.io

Image: Still from Amazon Machine Learning introduction video Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed alongside with computing since its earliest days. Today when thinking about AI the famous Kasparov beating chess computer Deep Blue, smartphone personal assistants like Siri or the...

By Clemens Buchegger on 09/14/15 Comments Off

App review: Sleep as an droid. Or as a cyborg?

I love to sleep. So much that waking up early on Monday for morning classes is a hard and laborious task. I always set my alarm clock about half an hour early to compensate for the time spent snoozing...

By Renoud Netjes on 10/12/11 1

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...

By Kendall Grady on 10/10/11 2

For the Love of Material!

Posthumanism, Protocol and Techno-Craft at Mediamatic’s Ignite Amsterdam 10 If androids dream of electric sheep, we posthumous dream of the Jetson family’s flying car. “Posthuman” because, as foreseen by early prostheses now as natural as eyeglass, human identity consciousness...

By Kendall Grady on 09/29/11 Comments Off

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken...

By Kendall Grady on 09/25/11 Comments Off

The (Dis)Appearance of Purpose

"The (Dis)appearance of Purpose” is dedicated to the significance of teleology in the study of human-computer behaviour by tracing the disappearance of the concept purpose. To demonstrate how we can think of purpose in order to understand our contemporary...

By Inge Ploum on 09/06/09 1

Cybernetics in the Lowlands

Although the place to be for technological dreams is, or was, Silicon Valley in the United States, the Lowlands have their own valley: Eindhoven. In the seventies and the eighties a museum called the Evoluon exposed modern technology that...

By Arno de Natris on 10/04/08 Comments Off