Tickets are now available for the CTW 2020 Festival on April 29, 2020 at SVA Theatre. Availabllity is limited, so please register as soon as possible for your tickets. Our theme is The Future of Music and Art.

*** Get your CTW 2020 Tickets here! ***

The 2020 Festival Schedule will be published shortly. For reference, here’s the schedule for last year’s CTW 2019 Festival. Our theme was AI and Creativity. [View/Download Show schedule PDF.]

CTW 2019 Conference Show Schedule:
NYIT Auditorium, 1871 Broadway NY NY 10023
Isabel Walcott Draves, Master of Ceremonies

Friday, May 10 – Day 1

9:45 AM-10:30 AM – Attendee Check-in & Reception, Breakfast, Explore the Art Installations
10:30 AM-10:45 AM – Introduction and Welcome – Welcome! Isabel Walcott Draves, Founder, Creative Tech Week & Nada Anid, PhD, VP for Strategic Communications, NYIT
10:45 AM-11:10 AM – Keynote: Noelle LaCharite, Microsoft – AI and Creativity
11:10 AM-11:35 AM – Keynote: Josh Haftel, Adobe – AI in Image Processing
11:35 AM-11:55 AM – Fireside Chat and Q&A: RLab’s Future Focus – Adaora Udoji, Director of Corporate Innovation at New York City’s RLab and Dawn Barber, Co-Founder, Creative Tech Week
RLab is the nation’s first city-funded center for research, entrepreneurship and education in virtual and augmented-reality, spatial computing and other emerging media technologies. The new multi-university center is critical to the City’s plans to establish New York City as the next global leader in VR/AR and related technologies and will create hundreds of new jobs in the field.
11:55 AM-12:30 PM – Introductions and featured speakers
– Sebastian Oddo, Octagon: AI in Sports
– Turi McKinley, Frog
– Claire Mitchell, VaynerMedia: Content and Creativity in the Age of AI
12:30 PM-12:45 PM – Jacqueline Tsekouras, Snapchat: Augmented Reality
12:45 PM-12:50 PM – Lunch Announcements
1:00 PM-2:20 PM – Snapchat Lens Studio AR Workshop and Lunch
Lens Studio invites artists, students, developers, animators, and more to unleash their creativity! Since the launch of Lens Studio in December 2017, millions of people from across the globe have played with augmented reality made by the Snapchat Lens community. Now, it’s your turn. Come join the Snapchat team as they host a hands-on Lens Studio workshop, where they’ll take attendees through the basics of the program and then open it up to a working session assisted by Snapchat lens experts. Lens Studio welcomes all levels of expertise, whether you have no previous experience or consider yourself an AR pro, this workshop is open to all. In advance of joining us please be sure to download the latest version of Lens Studio here. We can’t wait to see you there!
12:50 PM-2:30 PM – Have lunch at the workshop or on your own nearby
2:30 PM-3:05 PM – Introductions and featured speakers
Carla Gannis, Artist: AI for Humor
Jesslyn Tannady, CTRL-Labs: Neural Control of Interfaces
LaJuné McMillian, Artist: Black Movement Project
3:10 PM-3:55 PM – Lightning Talks
Lily Su, Machine Learning: Urban Data for Urban Living
Hugh McGrory, Datavized: Music from Data
Andrew McWilliams, Technologist: EmoPy
Anne Hiatt, Opera on Tap: Tech operas
Claire Jervert, Artist: Sittings with androids
Brandon Powersm, Choreographer and Artist: Frankenstein AI
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Artist
Gene Kogan, Artist
3:55 PM-4:30 PM – Break
4:30 PM-5:30 PM – Panel: Making Machines Creative
Can machines ever be as creative and artistic as humans? It’s been said that creativity is one of the aspects that makes us human, and that it’s unachievable for computers. Is it justifiable to view creativity as a delineating boundary between humans and computers? If so, when will that boundary be crossed – or has it been already? What processes are today’s artists using to make machines creative, and what joys and hazards do they encounter with their efforts? Should we be looking out for any potential pitfalls as machines learn to make and identify art? How can AI and machine learning help us as art-viewing humans?
Panelists: Scott Draves, Gene Kogan, Kat Mustatea, Mauro Martino. Moderator: Noelle LaCharite, Microsoft
5:30 PM-5:45 PM – Wrap-Up Day One: Isabel Draves

Saturday, May 11 – Day 2
10:00 AM-10:35 AM – Attendee Check-in & Reception, Breakfast, Explore the Art Installations
10:35 AM-10:45 AM – Introduction and Welcome: Isabel Walcott Draves and NYIT
10:45 AM-11:10 AM – Keynote: Sarah Vick, head of Business Development, Intel Studios
11:10 AM-11:25 AM – Presentation – Creative Tech Innovation Council Prototype Presentation
11:25 AM-12:00 PM – Introductions and featured speakers
Hika Nishimae, Future Colossal: A Strategist’s Guide to Impactful Experience Design
Tomas Laurenzo, Artist
Jeanne Angel, Local Projects: The Making of Experience
12:00 PM-12:55 PM – Panel: The Ethical Impact of AI on our Future.
Intelligence, and how we apply it, will determine our future. Climate change, corruption, poverty, health care, education and pretty much everything else, will be exacerbated or enhanced by what we know, what we can learn, and how we apply that knowledge. Natural intelligence has gotten us this far, but is having trouble getting us to the next level or even sustaining this one. Will Artificial Intelligence lead to Hollywood’s dystopias, dreamers’ utopias, or somewhere in between? Can we stop AI if we wanted to? Can we direct it toward ethically beneficial outcomes for all? This panel of experts will reveal the possibilities. We either choose wisely or lose the ability to choose.
Panelists: Susan Epstein, Hunter; Kevin LaGrandeur, NYIT; Kris Skrinak, Amazon; Shweta Jain, John Jay and eWitness. Moderator: Christopher Fry, MIT
1:00 PM-2:00 PM – Robotics Demonstration and Lunch in the NYIT Library
Kent Gilson, Founder/Inventor, Haddington Dynamics; Aleks Vasilyev, Ph.D. M.D. NYIT; Matthew Cornelius Director of the H.I.V.E. and Motion Capture Lab, NYIT; Robert Smith, Associate Professor; NYIT, Randy Stout, Ph.D. NYIT. Kent Gilson, Presentation – A Call to Arms. Can self-replicating robots democratize production? The big picture of Haddington Dynamics with a motion-control system with optical encoders. This demonstration offers a preview of NYIT’s non-credit certificate program in AR/VR/MR: Unity, which is available through the Office of Extended Education and Department of Digital Art and Design.
1:00 PM-2:00 PM – Have lunch at the robotics demonstration or on your own nearby
2:00 PM-2:10 PM – Erin Ko, Tech Artist: AR and art
2:10 PM-2:20 PM – Raphael Palefsky-Smith, Artist: Chip Implant in Arm
2:20 PM-2:30 PM – Alex Lopez, NYIT: VR for autistic children
2:30 PM-3:10 PM- Lightning Talks
Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Artist: Adventures in Creative Technology
John Misak, NYIT: Hamlet in VR
Ray LC, Creative Tech Artist
Michal Finegold, Shmonster: Animation app for kids
Matthew Cornelius, NYIT: Gestural Robot Arm
Cynthia Gayton, Lawyer: Copyright and Art
3:10 PM-3:20 PM – Danielle Baskin, Artist: AI and Art
3:20 PM-3:30 PM – Ahmed Elgammal, Rutgers: AI and Art
3:30 PM-3:50 PM – Fireside Chat and Q&A – AI and Art, the Politics of Creation
Who gets to claim creation credit for artworks made with AI? Are any pieces made with AI “original”? When machines programmed by humans are trained on artwork made by humans, and then produce artworks with the input of other humans, of which a select few are chosen for public display by still different humans: who “made” those works? A conversation with the leader of one of the teams that is programming and training an art-making AI, and an artist that has used an art-making AI to make art. With: Ahmed Elgammal, Danielle Baskin
3:50 PM-4:00 PM – Wrap-Up Day Two