Panel members: Birk Schimthüsen and Antonio Bahamonde

Birk Schmithüsen is an audiovisual artist born in 1986 in Germany.  In his work he explores new technologies and their effects on our daily existence. He is interested in the real functionality that is hidden in a black box behind the simple and intuitive user interface. To this growing complexity, which feeds the alienation that occurs between the people and the services they use, Schmithüsen responds with aesthetic experiments consisting in the opening of these black boxes. The creator bases his research on and uses as artistic creation material such abstract and imperceptible concepts as Artificial Intelligence (AI), macro-data or Artificial Vision, combining installation, sound, and visual and conceptual elements. His artistic practice can be defined as “intermedial” and immersive, and Schmithüsen carries it out individually or in collaboration with musicians, performance artists and researchers.

Antonio Bahamonde is President of SCIE (Sociedad Científica Informática de España). Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oviedo. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Santiago de Compostela University.

He has held the following management positions: Director of the Artificial Intelligence Centre of the Asturian university since 1986, President of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA) from 2007 to 2013, Secretary of the Scientific Committee of the ECSC (European Centre Soft Computing) from 2010 to 2016, Coordinator of the ANEP of the area of Computer Science from 2013 to 2016. Since September 2016 he has been the President of the Sociedad Científica Informática de España (SCIE).

His research focuses on  Machine Learning. He has spent time at the American universities of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA) and Cornell (Ithaca, NY).