News & Press

For our next “Cocktails and Conversations”, Rafael Alvarado, anthropologist and Program Director at UVA’s Data Science Institute, will lead us in a conversation to consider a new phase of Artificial Intelligence, taking seriously the possibility of regarding AIs as members of society. Having survived many “winters” of neglect, the new AI aims to be more human-compatible and less threatening, even as human fears of being replaced by AI grow.

Free! Thursday, September 26, 2019 at 7PM in our tasting room.

Rafael Alvarado, Ph.D. received his B.A. in Philosophy (1983) and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (2000) at the University of Virginia. He served at U.Va. (1995-97, 2009-present), Princeton University (1997-2005), and Dickinson College (2006-2009), teaching and publishing on topics in digital humanities, developing software, building digital collections, and establishing programs in the field. He has been with the Data Science Institute at U.Va. since its founding, and now serves as Program Director. His research area is in text mining and cultural analytics, which extends his digital humanities work through the application of machine learning and other computational methods applied to text corpora.