Speaker: Simon Billinge, Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and Professor of Materials Science at UCSB.
Monday March 30th, at 1pm via Zoom. Location: Elings Hall room 1601.
Research
Professor Billinge has more than 25 years of experience developing and applying techniques to study local structure in materials advanced x-ray and neutron diffraction techniques to study local-structure property relationships of disordered crystals and nanocrystals (https://thebillingegroup.com/), and their role in the properties of diverse materials relevant to, for example, energy, catalysis, environmental remediation, and pharmaceuticals. He also employs neutron and electron-scattering methods, as well as advanced computation and analysis, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graph theoretic methods. https://video.wordpress.com/embed/IOJ9lvJw
Bio
Simon Billinge is a USCB Materials Science Professor and Director of California Nanosystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara. He got his BA in Metallurgy and Materials Science at Oxford University, followed by his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Billinge spent 18 years as a professor of applied physics, applied mathematics, and materials science at Columbia University after 13 years as a professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Billinge has published more than 350 papers in scholarly journals.He also held a joint position of Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow and has earned a number of awards including, in 2025, the Gregori Aminoff prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of sciences, and the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award of the Materials Research Society. He was honored in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
March 25th, 2026
12pm
Location TBD.
Abstract
Despite rapid advances in multimedia computing, targeting audio visual channels -- such as the quick sharing of photos or videos, watching a livestream from across the world, or experiencing an immersive virtual reality video game -- a "haptic digital divide" persists. Haptic technologies cannot yet capture or reproduce the rich, whole-hand touch experiences of daily life, such as shaping a piece of clay or hugging a friend. This limitation stems from the biological complexity of the human hand, which serves as a simultaneous sensory organ and a highly-dexterous manipulator.
Our sense of touch is an inherently active and exploratory modality: we must move our hands to contact objects in order to perceive or manipulate them. Perception is therefore a product of inherently coupled sensory streams, where information is simultaneously received from receptors in the skin, joints, and muscles, elicited via deliberately-coordinated hand movements and mediated via internal predictive models of the sensorimotor consequence. Thus, it has proven difficult to record, isolate, and reproduce touch outside of the context in which it was originally experienced. This dissertation builds upon prior research on haptic perception and action to investigate the above challenges preventing the sharing of haptic experiences between people.
The dissertation presents two haptic devices for sharing touch experiences. The first device is a smart-bracelet, worn at the wrist, to address a current gap in accessibility of digital transcription methods for language that is communicated in the tactile domain. People who are Deafblind and use tactile sign languages to communicate have no methods for the digital transcription of communication in the tactile domain; this is imperative for important matters such as court proceedings or occasions where in-person translators are unavailable. Chapter Three presents a wrist-worn smart bracelet that can capture skin oscillations, extract salient spatiotemporal features, and accurately classify (>90%) the 26 letters of a tactile sign language alphabet. Here, the hand remains free and unoccluded for natural signing. The results indicate that tactile communication can be sensed and accurately classified with current technologies, moving us towards a future where real-time digital transcription of tactile sign languages is possible.
The second device is an inter-manual exoskeleton that enables one person to guide the kinematic postures of a second, compliant person. The device partitions control over movements (i.e. kinesthetic agency) from incoming cutaneous sensation across two people through a shared, guided experience. The device enables research investigation into the necessity of self-directed movement and direct cutaneous feedback on haptic perception and functional manipulation. Chapter Four presents results from grasping and manipulation of objects in such guided conditions, indicating that functional manipulation of small objects is possible even when the motor-controlling hand is deprived of direct cutaneous sensation from the object. Findings from Chapter Five show that haptic perception of three-dimensional shapes remains significantly above chance under guided movement conditions, demonstrating that internal predictive models for motor planning are not strictly required when discriminating between object shapes.
Collectively, these findings contribute to a deeper scientific understanding of the sensorimotor system and provide a technical foundation for future haptic technologies capable of sharing and reproducing complex touch experiences.
Thursday, March 19th, 2026
10am
Location TBD
Abstract
With haptic technologies increasingly embedded in commercially available devices, vibrotactile feedback is now appearing in streaming music platforms, gaming environments, VR/AR systems, and assistive devices. Haptic feedback has been shown to enhance the music listening experience [1], and recent musical haptics research has pursued greater tactile specificity and multi-feature extraction [2]. Despite these developments, relatively few musical works are composed specifically for audio–haptic realization.
The research undertaken in this Master’s project is a practice-based exploration of musical composition for coupled audio–haptic media through a multimodal gallery installation, Feel4UTM. The work renders music simultaneously as acoustic sound and distributed bodily vibration through three stereo haptic stations—two wearable systems and one handheld device. Haptics and sound were developed in tandem, with each modality mutually informing the content and structure of the composition. All synthesis, sequencing, and signal processing were custom designed for the installation. Filtering and transient detection are used to derive the haptic signal directly from the audio, allowing harmonic, rhythmic, and textural decisions to shape both sound and vibration. The composition unfolds across five large-scale sections, each oriented toward a distinct affective direction. The installation was presented in an open gallery setting where visitors engaged with the work independently over extended exhibition hours, introducing practical constraints distinct from a traditional seated concert performance.
As vibration becomes an increasingly common component of mediated listening, compositional methodologies must expand to account for how musical structures translate onto the body. This project presents observations from the process of creating an audio–haptic composition and installation. Musical, technical, and interaction design considerations are discussed, and several preliminary compositional guidelines for audio–haptic media are proposed.
Speakers: Cactoid Labs, an experimental artist-driven blockchain consultancy specializing in bridging Web3, Digital Art and Museums - Lady Cactoid and Crypto Cactoid.
Monday March 9th, at 1pm via Zoom.
Abstract
This lecture will explore Blockchain’s origins and its role as an artistic medium and distribution tool. Furthermore, how has blockchain catalyzed art markets and museological practices? How has it revitalized an interest in the broader history of digital art and what are its limitations?
Bio
cactoidlabs.io, is an experimental artist-driven blockchain consultancy specializing in bridging Web3, Digital Art and Museums lead by Lady Cactoid and Crypto Cactoid. _______An artist and co-founder of Cactoid Labs, Crypto Cactoid is a Full Stack developer specializing in blockchain, Solidity, Ordinals, Machine Learning and APIs, with 15 years experience working with metadata at scale, engineering SAAS systems that operate billions of API calls per month, as well as Merkle Trees, ERC721A, ERC1155, and L2s. He has built Contracts and Full Stack Web3 for leading artists and institutions including 0xDEAFBEEF and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art._______Lady Cactoid (a.k.a. Yael Lipschutz) is a curator, art historian and co-founder of Cactoid Labs. She holds a PhD in Art History and has organized large-scale exhibitions at institutions such as the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the and The Getty. She works as an independent curator and scholar, specializing in art and technology. She is the Artistic Director of the Digital Leaders Circle at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the author of numerous books and articles, including Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada (LACMA, Prestel), Cameron: Songs for the Witchwoman (The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles), and World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project (Hirmer, forthcoming 2026).
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Antonis Antoniades, Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind (Gemini Agents) & PhD '26 in Computer Science (NLP Group), UC Santa Barbara.
Monday March 2nd, at 1:00pm in Elings Hall room 2611 and via Zoom.
Abstract
In a world where human-level intelligence may soon no longer be limited to humans, one is compelled to ask: what is our purpose? I suggest that the only thing left for us is to simply be — human. To contribute our own unique perspective, unencumbered by concerns of health or resources.In this talk, I'll offer a window into my own worldview and how it shaped my work in industry and academia. I'll then cover the state of the art in AI, where things are heading, and how I think AI can be used in new ways to inspire human creativity.
Bio
Antonis Antoniades, PhD ’26, is an incoming Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (Gemini Agents) and is completing his PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group. Some of his past work includes building multi-agent systems using reinforcement learning at Leela AI, Neuroformer, the first multimodal generative model for neuroscience and SWE-Search, a software engineering agent utilizing a search approach designed to emulate a human software engineer. He is also a passionate Guitar and Bouzouki player.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Curtis Roads, Professor Emeritus of Media Arts and Technology & Music Affiliate Faculty, UC Santa Barbara.
Monday February 23rd, at 1:00pm in Elings Hall room 2611 and via Zoom
Abstract
This lecture begins with a brief history of music and AI. A personal journey, it traces my earliest encounters with AI in the 1960s and 1970s, including encounters with Iannis Xenakis and my student research in algorithmic composition. In the 1980s at the MIT AI Lab I began to develop LISP software for an intelligent composer's assistant. I recollect several disillusionments with AI and describe my current position on algorithmic composition. After this historical account, I describe recent forays into music and AI research and more disillusionment. I briefly examine the drive to commercialize the products of musical AI. Current AI technology is quickly evolving. It has many deeply negative implications for society. The conclusion ends on a hopeful note about potentially useful musical applications of AI as assistants to composers.
Bio
Curtis Roads creates and pursues research in music technology. He is Professor Emeritus of Media Arts and Technology (MAT) and in Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Gene Coleman, Composer, Artistic Director of The Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics, and a member of the META lab at UC Santa Barbara.
Monday, February 9, 2026 at 1pm via Zoom.
Abstract
In the lecture "Music Mirrors Mind," composer and director Gene Coleman explores the concepts of Neuroaesthetics and Neuro Music. Coleman defines Neuro Music as an area of research and composition based on the study and application of models and concepts from Auditory Neuroscience. He gives an introduction to his methods to compose Neuro Music, using examples from his recent works. He makes a case for why artists should understand how perception, cognition and thinking work and how they are the basis for creativity. The emerging fields of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics in conjunction with new technologies have the potential for enormous impact on the way musicians and artists think about and make their work. Coleman will talk about the influence of architecture and visual art on his work, his experiments with the Neurodata technology called "The Source," the creation of the Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and the Neuro Music ensemble CONJURE.
Bio
Gene Coleman is a composer, artistic director of The Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and a member of the META lab at UC Santa Barbara. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, The US-Japan Friendship Commission and the American Academy in Rome. He has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 his work has focused on the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with neuroscience, video and architecture. His most recent research and compositions explore the concepts of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics. He studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his teachers included experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, composer Robert Snyder, and visual artists Barbara Rossi and Oliver Jackson. In 2024 his album of Neuro Music called Exploratorium was released on the UK label Falls Walls.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Iman Djouini, UCSB College of Creative Studies.
Monday, February 2nd, 2026 at 1pm via Zoom.
Abstract
This talk will present a selection of artworks produced over the past six years. Djouini will discuss the research and processes informing her practice, with particular attention to her current and ongoing series Rendre, which will be shown in an upcoming solo presentation at the Venice Art Biennale as part of the Personal Structures exhibition.
Bio
Djouini, is an interdisciplinary artist. Her primary mediums include print media, book arts, typography, placemaking, and hybrid‐forms (including print + digital / emerging technologies).
Current research draws from ancient North African folktales, recounted over generations through oral traditions by matriarchs, using printed typographic compositions and sound to explore the evolution of language across the region and its diaspora. Djouini explores ancient women’s scripts, blending computational linguistics, art, and women’s perspectives. The works examine how linguistic characters such as sinographs travel, transform, and mutate across multiple languages, time and cultures. Typography becomes both a visual and conceptual tool, investigating how typographic characters form spatial relationships, and digital manipulation generates layered meanings.
Thematic concerns: Structural and conceptual connection between pattern and linguistics. Language as a System of Pattern, Visual Patterns in Written Languages, Patterns in Computational Linguistics, Pattern in Oral Traditions and Folklore.
Work fits into genres: New Media, Contemporary Art& Linguistics, global issues.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Rachel Armstrong PhD, practitioner, theorist, Professor of Regenerative Architecture at KU Leuven
Monday, January 12th, 2026 at 1pm via Zoom
Abstract
My practice is driven by the ambition to design life—a synthetic, bottom-up pursuit of liveliness itself. This talk traces a research trajectory that builds on origin-of-life sciences, orchestrating three core agencies to prefigure a future artificial life form: AI ontologies (‘soft’ ALife) to model intelligence; electroactive microbes (‘wet’ ALife) to provide a metabolic, communicative ‘flesh’; and dynamic mineral substrates to form resilient, structural ‘bones.’ Such a pursuit demands a foundational ethic: to take full responsibility for the designed entities. Following Latour, this means learning to love our monsters. The ambition is not spectacle, but to forge mutualistic relationships with constructed life—relationships as demanding and creative as those with nature. The result is architectures that counter an extractive industrial logic by contributing through their day-to-day existence to the overall liveliness of the world. Expanding the potential of life is an Earth imperative. While autonomous artificial life remains the horizon, the urgent work is to build its ethical, material, and intellectual prerequisites. I will present this work, arguing for a future where our built environment is not just sustainable, but constitutively alive.
For further reading, you can download a PDF of her book "Liquid Life: On Non-Liner Materiality"
Bio
Professor Rachel Armstrong, PhD, is a practitioner and theorist whose work establishes a new trajectory for architecture: the design of artificial life. With a First Class Honours in medical science (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Architecture (UCL), her practice is a synthetic pursuit of liveliness grounded in origin-of-life sciences. Her designs and prototypes are vibrant, metabolic systems that host, support, and propagate life, transforming architecture's role from creating static spaces to cultivating dynamic, living ecosystems.
Professor Rachel Armstrong's current roles also include:
Project Coordinator: Microbial Hydroponics (Mi-Hy)
Microbial WiFi Project
Exhibitor: Spika
EIC Ambassador
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.
Speaker: Professor Yon Visell, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MAT affiliate faculty
Monday, January 5th, 2026 at 1pm. Elings Hall room 2611 and via Zoom
Abstract
I will present recent and ongoing work in the RE Touch Lab on emerging haptic and robotic technologies. Modern computing and AI operate at extraordinary speed over vast, high-dimensional data spaces, but their agency in the physical world is sharply constrained. Haptic and robotic systems provide this agency, but with constrained physical output bandwidth: they provide few degrees of freedom, and operate at far slower speeds than is feasible in computational domains. I will describe ongoing research in my group that is directed at alleviating such bottlenecks and at enabling computational systems with greater physical agency. A logical extension of these ideas: computationally authorable physical reality, an unmapped possibility whose territory and implications are compelling, if unclear.
Bio
Visell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MAT Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Visell directs the RE Touch Lab, where they pursue fundamental and applied research on the future of interactive technologies, with emphasis on haptics, robotics, and electronics, including emerging opportunities in human-computer interaction, sensorimotor augmentation, soft robotics, and interaction in virtual reality.
Dr. Visell’s research has been generously supported through multiple awards from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, tech industry companies, and philanthropic foundations. He has published more than 75 scientific works, and served as editor and author of two books on VR, including "Human Walking in Virtual Environments" (Springer Verlag, 2013). His work has received four awards and more than a dozen award nominations at prominent academic conferences. Dr. Visell is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), of a Hellman Family Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2017), and a Google Faculty Research Award (2016).
Dr. Visell spent more than five years in industry working at technology companies. He was the digital signal processing developer at Ableton from 2001 to 2003, where he wrote algorithms that have shaped music produced by artists ranging from The Roots to Deadmau5. Previously, he was a research scientist working on speech recognition at Vocal Point (now part of Nuance, makers of the Siri voice assistant). Prior to that, he designed auditory displays for underwater sonar at ARL, Austin, Texas. Dr. Visell later worked in interactive art, design, and robotics research at the University of the Arts Zurich, at FoAM, Belgium, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and at the art-architecture-technology group Zero-Th, which he co-founded in 2004. His creative works and activities have been presented at cultural venues including Ircam / Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), SIGGRAPH, Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), the Oboro Center (Montreal), and the Biennale of Design St. Etienne (France).
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to: seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
For previous seminars, please visit our MAT Seminars Video Archive.