COSA x NYU: Global Dialogues on Creative Tools

March 12th through March 15th, ACCAD Director Chris Coleman co-organized a series of events and conversations at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University in NYC. The work emerges from the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA), an organization that Coleman created in 2018 and has brought with him to OSU. With the help of COSA’s Associate Director, OSU Professor of Art Laleh Mehran, he works to support the health and sustainability of free and open source tools for creative people. The multi day event at NYU brought together scholars and contributors from Shanghai, Paris, and South Africa to focus on easy to use tools for Machine Learning. Co-organizer Dan Shiffman, Professor at ITP, has spent more than a decade supporting creative coding software and has some of the most successful YouTube tutorials about it in the world. The event encompassed numerous workshops about different Machine Learning Tools, Lightning Talks, training for new open source contributors, and many conversations about how to support educators around the world who want to teach Machine Learning. Some of the key tools in the discussion were P5.js, ML5, and Transformers.js – all with contributors invited to the event.
