We are delighted to announce a series of 4 public seminars taking critical and creative perspectives to the current state of AI in music and related arts. The seminars air the work of the research programme ‘Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’ (MusAI). The MusAI research team is an international one and the programme is based at the Institute of Advanced Studies <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/> and Department of Anthropology <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/ucl-anthropology>, UCL, with links to the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics <https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/the-institute/people/owen-green.html>, KTH Royal Institute of Technology <https://www.kth.se/profile/bobs>, the University of New South Wales <https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/oliver-bown>, Carnegie Mellon University <https://lti.cs.cmu.edu/people/222228444/fernando-diaz>, the University of Birmingham <https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/music/haworth-christopher.aspx>, City, University of London <https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/aaron-einbond>, and Kings College London <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/darci-sprengel>. *Date of the first seminar:* Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm UK Time *Location: *The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd., London NW1 2DB *Title:** Re-Engineering Recommendation – Prototyping Radical Interdisciplinarities* *Presenters: * *Georgina Born, PI (UCL) *Fernando Diaz (Carnegie Mellon University, formerly McGill University, Mila, Google) *Jenny Judge (University of Melbourne) *Abstract: * Scholars in the critical arts, social sciences and humanities have long sought greater collaboration with computer science and engineering. In this seminar, anthropologist Georgina Born, computer scientist Fernando Diaz and philosopher Jenny Judge present experimental work embodying this vision. The project focuses on reinventing recommender systems curating music and other cultural content by translating principles derived from public service media into sociotechnical design. This entails a methodology akin to Agre’s ‘critical technical practice’: sustained, critical interdisciplinary dialogues between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. If recommendation is a key public interface with AI, existing research on recommender systems neglects their aggregate influence across populations and over time. Tackling this challenge, the project identifies universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as goals for recommender systems curating cultural content. To advance these goals the project develops a metric, commonality, which measures the degree to which recommendations familiarize a user population with diverse cultural content. The seminar probes the challenges of translating normative principles into sociotechnical design, as well as the project’s philosophical implications. Envisaging a new paradigm, this work contributes to the increasingly urgent concern with developing public good rationales for machine learning systems. ** This is the first of 4 seminars organized by the MusAI research programme between January and March 2024, with each seminar hosted by one of the contributing projects. The dates are as follows, and please NB: the times vary – *Seminar 1, *Friday January 12 2024, 3-5pm – ‘Re-Engineering Recommendation–Prototyping Radical Interdisciplinarities’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London *Seminar 2, *Tuesday February 6 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Music and Copyright after Generative AI: Social, Ontological and Legal Perspectives’: hosted by Inspace, Edinburgh University *Seminar 3, *Friday February 23 2024, 3-5pm – ‘AI and Practice-Based Research in Music and the Arts’: hosted by PRiSM <https://www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-activity/research-centres-rncm/prism/>, Royal Northern College of Music & Manchester University *Seminar 4, *Friday March 1 2024, 4-6pm – ‘Towards Radically Interdisciplinary AI Pedagogies’: hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London https://www.turing.ac.uk/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/research/music-and-artificial-intelligenc... https://musicairesearch.wordpress.com/