The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
LiKaShing building - Room LK101
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
This is two LASERs in one. The online portion will take place at lunch-time and will host speakers from the East Coast.
The in-person portion will take place at the Stanford LiKaShing room LK101.
Register here for the online LASER: 12pm California time.
Program for the online LASER:
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Paul Gifford (St Andrews) on "Paul Valery and Poetry"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Program of the in-person LASER, not necessarily in this order (no need for RSVP - just show up at the venue):
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Suzannah Wistreich (Stanford) on "DexSkin, a Robotic Skin for Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Jodi Lomask (Choreographer and Sculptor) on "Motion Sculpture: Designing Forms That Think with the Body"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Melanie Swan (University College London) on "Galois Smartnetwork Field Theory, a Framework for Unifying A.I. and Physics"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Paul Gifford is Buchanan Chair (emeritus) of French Language and Literature, at the University of St Andrews (Scotland); where he was for ten years Director of the Research Institute of Cultural Identity Studies. He has also taught at the universities of Toulouse (France), at which he gained his Doctorat dEtat-čs-Lettres; and Ulster (N. Ireland). His experience of N. American Universities includes a Summer Semester teaching at London (Ontario); and a semester at Stanford, California as Invited Scholar working collaboratively with Franco-American fundamental anthropologist and culture theorist Rene Girard. He has conducted research on modern literature and ideas, particularly in relation to the changing scientific, philosophic, religious and cultural context of the period 1870-1945. He is the author of critical studies in French and English of the poet and thinker Paul Valéry, has edited collections of essays on the problems of personal identity (self and subject) and collective identity. He has also written books on the problems of love and desire in twentieth-century French writing; and on textual genetics (the study from author manuscripts of the creative process behind major works of art). Future research will be in the field of René Girards Mimetic Theory, particularly as it relates to neo- Darwinian evolutionary theory and to its implications for anthropology, theology and culture theory. Please see Co-edited proceedings of international symposia organised at the Universities of Cambridge and Stanford, California. Antonello, Pierpaolo and Paul Gifford (eds) (2015a). Can We Survive our Origins? Readings in Rene Girards Theory of Violence and the Sacred. Forward by Rowan Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Antonello, Pierpaolo and Paul Gifford (eds) (2015b). How We Became Human. Mimetic Theory and the Science of Evolutionary Origins. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
- Jodi Lomask is a choreographer, sculptor, director, and founder of Capacitor, the San Franciscobased arts company she launched in 1997. Her work explores the intersection of science, environmentalism, and new technology through dance, sound, and motion sculpture. She designs motion sculptures that are only complete when activated by the human body, creating performances and environments that allow audiences to experience ideas physically. With Capacitor, Lomask has created evening-length works inspired by the deep Earth and ocean, forest ecology, flower reproduction, outer space, early childhood, and creativity in the brain. Her projects are developed through collaboration with scientists, engineers, designers, dancers, circus artists, and composers, and she has toured internationally presenting this work. She has been commissioned to create original works for Apple, NASA, TED, SFO, the Discovery Channel, and the California Academy of Sciences. Lomask later founded Creative Journey, expanding her practice into guided experiences, workshops, and creative-process work focused on embodied intelligence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personal transformation. She has also spoken widely about creative problem solving and the generative exchange between artists and scientists. She has held residencies at UCSF Neuroscape, the Kennedy Center, Yaddo, Djerassi, CounterPulse, The Lab SF, and SHACK15, and is the recipient of an Isadora Duncan Award for Sustained Achievement. Her work has been covered by Nature, Wired, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Dance Magazine, and The New York Times, among other outlets. She has also directed award-winning 2D and VR180 films. She is a member of the NSF-funded project ACCELNET-Building Reliable Advances and Innovation in Neurotechnologies. Across her work, Lomask approaches performance and installation as ways of reorganizing perception, inviting people to sense their bodies, minds, and nature in new ways.
- Suzannah Wistreich is an incoming PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University where she researches multisensory learning, robotics, and computer vision advised by Professor Jiajun Wu. Her work centers on developing robust robotic perception systems that integrate senses such as touch, vision, audio, and 3D structure in a more intuitive, human-like manner, with the goal of achieving the same reliability humans exhibit when navigating noisy or incomplete sensory environments. She received her Bachelor's in Computer Science from Stanford (2025), where she was advised by Professor Jiajun Wu and Professor Hyo Gweon, working on robotics and human cognition. Wistreich currently conducts research at the Stanford Robotics Center, where she works with humanoid robots to study behavior generalizability in real-world, domestic settings. Her work has been published at leading venues such as the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) and the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).
- Melanie Swan is a Research Associate at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London, and Founder and Research Lead at DIYgenomics.org. She has a PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University, an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an undergraduate degree in French and Economics from Georgetown University. Her research focuses on conceptual frontiers in science, technology, and mathematics as applied to improving human well- being. Her latest book, "Cryptoeconomic Theory", is appearing with World Scientific in May 2026 . Symmetry (long a foundational concept) is increasingly emerging as the core principle shaping aesthetics, design, agentic AI, mathematics, physics, and even humanitys future. Symmetry-driven mathematics and physics are becoming essential components of both agentic AI and foundation-model development. Novel overarching symmetry theories, such as Galois Smartnetwork Field Theory, are seeking to unify both mathematics, computation, and physics, and also aesthetics, identity, and subjectivation in the human-AI collaboration age.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest books of poems and meditations are "Synthesis" (2009) and "Dialogue of the Lovers". As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book on technology are "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011, revised edition in 2022) and "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013, expanded edition 2019). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. "A Cultural History of California" appeared in 2026. He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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