About Now

Turning the page on another year at Colby. I taught three courses this term — one weaving together classical philosophy of mind foundations with questions about embodiment and AI, one exploring the philosophy of dance -- meaning of movement, aesthetics, politics of the body -- with movement practice a part of every class period, and one in philosophy of science from traditional epistemology to situated knowledge and scientific values. I learned a lot from each of them, and now I'll have a year of sabbatical to let the teaching percolate and focus on research. Excited to dig into some work on the moving mind and philosophy of AI.

On the research front, a big collaborative paper — Use and Usability: Concepts of Representation in Philosophy, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science — is finally out at Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory. It grew out of a Generative Adversarial Collaboration at CCN and is co-authored across philosophy, computer science, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The paper organizes existing views on neural representation into three levels: representations as carrying information, as usable, and as actually used.

I've also started collecting markerless motion-capture data in the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and in parallel have been building self-supervised models of movement from existing 3D pose data — with some exciting early results. More on that soon.