Etic Lab

Partners

Alex Hogan has a BSc in Physics and research interests in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Reasoning, Propaganda and Online Communities. He has almost a decade of experience in managing and contributing to data and software development projects. His recent work has been in creating tools for collective action, the ethics of augmented decision making and modelling online tracking networks. In the COMPROP project at the Oxford Internet Institute Alex has built automated Social Media accounts and contributed to analysing the political economy of the manipulation of Social Media algorithms. He tweets at @AKHogan

Christian Tilt has a BA in Art and Design and a strong commercial track record in developing and implementing technically demanding commercial websites and software systems interfaces.

Kevin Hogan Kevin is an Applied Psychologist with a BSc and PhD in psychology. He is a published researcher with significant project management experience. His interests include Organisational Development, HCI and Health Services research. He also has contributed to many data science projects and has a background in statistics and experimental design and a knowledge of the Google Big Query toolset.

Stephanie Moran is a cross-disciplinary researcher with a background in contemporary art and libraries. She has a Postgraduate Diploma in Art from Cyprus College of Art (Cyprus), and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College (London). Her AHRC-funded PhD with Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University uses gaming and AI as research methods to examine representations of nonhuman lifeworlds. Stephanie has over ten years’ experience of arts project management, art organisation leadership and librarianship in academic, specialist and public libraries. She most recently managed the library of Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation Iniva (Institute of International Arts), dedicated to challenging conventional notions of diversity and difference. She is Art Editor at peer-reviewed open access journal The Ecological Citizen and Art Advisor for GENIE: the Global Ecocentric Network for Implementing Ecodemocracy. Stephanie is currently serving on the Innovation Advisory Council of Wales.

Alex Darer holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and is completing a PhD in Cyber Security at the University of Oxford. His peer reviewed research has been published in the fields of Internet Censorship and Anomaly Detection. Alex is a CHECK qualified penetration tester and has developed training courses in ethical hacking and secure programming. His recent projects include the development of social engineering tools for a cyber security security consultancy and a web application firewall that uses machine learning to detect incoming attacks. He has several years experience in team management and has lead numerous projects from concept to prototype to product release. Currently, his interests lie in financial modelling, data mining & analysis and behavioural psychology.

Associate Partners

Beth Barker –  is an award-winning serial entrepreneur in the Tech Space and has 15 years experience organising large-scale Arts Events. In 2019, she partnered with Birmingham Museums Trust with support from The National Lottery Trust, Heritage Fund and Arts Council England to produce the blockbuster, immersive exhibition Home of Metal: Black Sabbath 50 Years. At Etic Lab she has been a lead partner in our Creative Sector consulting division, responsible for designing and publishing the Culture Index. Having consulted the UK Government, Welsh Government, and major public arts institutions, her current interests lie in the perfect alignment of Big Data and mathematical techniques to map, understand and support the evolution of creative technologies at this critical juncture.

Casper Drake has a BA in Political Science and a passion for technology, particularly its social implications. He writes software with Python, Lua and Go, and has experience of Linux systems administration and full stack development.

Rich Woodallis a writer and researcher whose interests include the history of media, the political economy of digital technologies, and culture and aesthetics. His work at Etic Lab is currently focussed on the use of federated learning and similar techniques to facilitate digital collaboration in situations where conventional data sharing is difficult or impossible. In 2019 he completed a PhD thesis on the relationships between visual technologies and the human face at the University of Sheffield.

Sean Coutts – is an accomplished software engineer and enterpeneur with roots in engineering and construction. He holds a BEng in Materials Science and Engineering and an MSc in Computing. Sean began his career in Project Management in the construction industry before ultimately pursuing his passion for technology and completing his Masters in Computing. Following on from this Sean went on to co-found a research analysis technology start up as its Director of Technology. Now working with Etic Lab Sean brings his expertise in designing and building innovative and effective software with specific interests in Natural Language Processing, Interactive Data Visualisation, DevOps and Graph technologies.

Mara Elizabeth – is a researcher, entrepreneurship advocate and innovation strategist specialising in macro-and micro development strategies across tech and creative entrepreneurship. As founder of House of SweetWaters, she has previously supported individuals to transition into tech, win grants and develop products. At Etic, she is focused on commercial development and research at the intersection of digital entrepreneurship, neuroeconomics and the digital occult.

Collaborators

Maggie Roberts – is an increasingly research based artist working across multiple media. She exhibits partly as an individual but always aligned to 0rphan Drift (the collaborative artist/hive mind she co-founded in 1994). Her practice has always involved creating immersive environments, excessive detail and feedback circuits of image content, rhythm and texture across screen, collage, digital and textural mediums. She is interested in manifesting invisible currents and currencies that affect the visible – expanding cosmic, geological, biotechnical and cultural time scales; machine vision; interspecies communication; uncertainty; fictioning and collaborations across disciplines that intervene to destabilize the agendas of Capitalism, and liminal and virtual energies.

All these she sees as forces for change.

She has participated internationally in over two decades of exhibitions, screenings and performance, most extensively in the UK, Europe, Canada and the States. Recent exhibitions include Miasma, Chrominance at Res., London; Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, 2018.

Maggie also teaches with the Critical Studies department at Central St Martins and as a visiting studio tutor at many UK art schools.

She hopes for distributed consciousness sometime soon and believes that collaborating with EticLab on developing a cephalopod AI will definitely increase her chances of achieving this.

www.orphandriftarchive.com

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