People
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal is the founder and director of the Art & AI Lab. Dr Elgammal is a professor at the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is also an Executive Council Faculty at Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science. Prof. Elgammal has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and digital humanities. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. Dr. Elgammal research on knowledge discovery in art history received wide international media attention, including many reports on the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC News, the Daily Telegraph, Science News, and many others. Dr. Elgammal received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000 and 2002, respectively.
Professor Marian Mazzone is an associate professor and Chair of the Art & Architectural History Department at the College of Charleston. Her focus is contemporary art, new media, and how computation is impacting both art and art history. To that end she participated in the Humanities High-Performance Computing Collaboratory, NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois in 2012. She also presented a computational analysis of Andy Warhol’s many flower paintings at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the 2015 Southeastern College Art Conference. She is the co-founder of the Computing in the Arts major at the College of Charleston. She regularly teaches courses on contemporary art and new media art.
Prof. Elizabeth Demaray (Faculty and Fine Arts Advisor) is head of the sculpture concentration at Rutgers–Camden, is an advisor at the Rutgers Digital Studies Center and is a work group advisor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. As a fine artist, Demaray’s research area is the interface between the built and the natural environment. Working in sculpture, digital media and eco-art, she designs listening stations for birds that play human music, cultures lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and manufactures alternative forms of housing for hermit crabs out of man-made materials. With the engineer Dr. Qingze Zou, the computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal, and the biologist Simeon Kotchoni, she is currently creating the IndaPlant Project: An Act of Trans-Species Giving. This project entails building light-sensing robotic supports for houseplants. These moving floraborgs utilize machine learning and allow potted-plants to roam freely in a domestic environment, in search of sunlight and water. Professor Demaray is the recipient of the National Studio Award at the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited at New York MOMA / P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the New Museum (New York), DADAPost (Berlin, DE), the Lloyd Digital Lab (Amsterdam, NL), the Center d’Art Marnay Art Center (Marnay-sur-Seine, FR), and the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum (San Francisco, CA). Demaray received a BA in cognitive psychology at UC Berkeley, an MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley and studied art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is on the board of the College Art Association’s New Media Caucus and is a member of the Leonardo Education and Art Forum.
Shahrzad Ziaee is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers, New Jersey where she is pursuing her degree under supervision of Dr. Ahmed Elgammal. Her main area of interest includes computer vision and machine learning. She has conducted research projects on the intersection of computer vision and art where she studied patterns between artistic handedness and art creation process on the level of formal attributes. She presented her work in Inaugural Symposium of Institute for Visual Intelligence. Ms. Ziaee was a reviewer for VISART2016 workshop - Where Computer Vision Meets Art. Her current project involves application of deep learning to knowledge discovery in works of art. Ms Ziaee is a member of Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling center and Art and Artificial Intelligence lab (DigiHumanLab) at Rutgers. She was a recipient of a two-year Microsoft Fellowship for her first two years of PhD study at Rutgers. She received a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2014. She is a bronze medalist of National Mathematics Olympiad in Iran. Ms. Ziaee was awarded with a Four-Years National Elite Foundation Fellowship, Iran, 2009-2013.
Diana Kim is currently in M.S program in Computer Science Department of Rutgers University. She has conducted a research project about semantic features defining fine art painting styles through deep learning methods under supervision of Professor Elgammal since 2015. She has been interested in computational modeling of biological vision system and its applications, so her future research will focus on visual neuroscience study, mathematical modeling of human visual perception, and its implementation with state of art frameworks such Machine Learning methods. Especially, she want to analyze the relations between human visual perception and its expression as fine art paintings based on objective computing methods, and then apply them to Artificial Intelligence Art applications. Her earlier interest include information and communication theory in Electrical Engineering. She earned M.S degree in Electrical Engineering department of University of Southern California in Los Angeles in U.S.A (2009), and bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering department of Ewha Womans University in Korea(2003). She was software engineer in Mobile communication department of Samsung Electronics(2003-2006).
I graduated from Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt with a BSc degree in Computer Engineering. I worked in industry as I pursued my MSc in the same school. I also worked in University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida as a Visitor Scholar for few months. It was then that I decided to pursue a career in academia and here I am, a PhD student in Rutgers University - Computer Science. I recently joined Art&AI lab after I experienced the capabilities Computers have been gaining, making semantic sense of digital images, using recent advances in Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision.
Bingchen Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science department at Rutgers University with specialization in computer vision and machine learning. Started from his undergraduate study, Bingchen has participated in different research projects fall into the intersection of computer vision, deep learning, and human perception. These including designing and constructing of an efficient deep artificial neural network for artistic style classification, semantic features defining and understanding through various deep learning methods, and design and training of the novel Creative Adversarial Models that can let machine produce creative contents by itself. Mr. Liu is a member of Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM) and Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (DigiHumanLab) at Rutgers. He has works and publications presented at the Inaugural Symposium on Institute of Visual Intelligence and ICCC-2017. Mr. Liu received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University in May 2017 before his Ph.D. study.
Srishti Sardana is a third year Undergraduate in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Delhi Technological University. Since her undergraduate, Srishti has done projects which include machine learning, computer vision, robotics, deep learning and their respective applications. She did a research project, Neural Image Caption Generator for Art dataset of 70K images, through deep learning methods under supervision of Professor Elgammal and Diana Kim. This included working on Tensorflow, Convolutional Neural Network, Alexnet, Word embeddings, LSTM (RNN) model, Beam Search. She has interned at Computer Science department of Rutgers in the Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling center and Art and Artificial Intelligence lab (DigiHumanLab). Her research interests includes computer vision and machine learning.
Former Members:
Emily L. Spratt served as the Chief Curator of the AICAN Art Collection and a researcher in the Art and AI Laboratory. Trained as an art historian at Princeton, UCLA, and Cornell, her current research as it relates to computer science explores the philosophical implications of the use of vision technology to interpret and generate art. In the spring of 2016, Spratt taught the pioneering course “Preserving the Past in the Digital Age: Art, Artifice, and Artificial Intelligence” in the Department of Art History and the Program in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, where she has taught as a visiting lecturer. Spratt also teaches courses in Byzantine and Renaissance art, museum studies, and heritage management, and has experience working at the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, the Benaki Museum, the former Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and the Frick Collection. Spratt was the curator of the exhibition Unhuman: Art in the Age of AI, which will take place in Los Angeles and Frankfurt in October of 2017.
Babak Saleh received his PhD degree in the department of computer science at Rutgers University working under supervision of Dr. Ahmed Elgammal. He has accomplished projects in computer vision, machine learning, statistical pattern recognition and multimedia. His primary research interest is on inferring the high-level semantics in images, which falls in the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and human perception. Toward this goal, he conducted projects on a wide range of areas, including crowdsourcing, graphical models, visual attributes, scene understanding and modeling the contextual information.
Mr. Saleh is a member of center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM) and Digital Humanities Lab (DigiHumanLab) at Rutgers. He was a research intern at Disney Research in Pittsburgh and Adobe Research in San Fransisco. He has publications in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, GI, VISAPP and journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications.
Mr. Saleh received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Rutgers University in May 2013 and is pursing a M.Sc. in Statistics at Rutgers University. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.
Kanako Abe received her B.A degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science and a B.A degree in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers University. She received this degree in September, 2013. Her primary interest in her undergraduate studies was the combination of Computer Vision and Fine Art. She is currently working in NYC at Sailthru, Inc., and hopes to contribute future research to the field of Computer Vision and Data Science. Ms. Abe is currently at Artsy.
Ravneet S. Arora. M.Sc. in Computer Science, graduated in 2012.