ASA Winter Symposium

We welcome you to join this event with one of our experts, Joanna Ng. Please read the announcement from ASA:

We are delighted to announce that registration is open for the ASA fifth annual Winter Symposium featuring ASA member Joanna Ng and Rosalind Picard. We invite you to join us on Saturday, January 25, 2025, at 1 pm EST for “AI & Christianity.”

Joanna Ng is a former IBM-er, pivoted to a start-up founder, focusing on Artificial Intelligence, specialized in Augmented Cognition, by integrating with IoT and Blockchain, in the context of web3, by applying design-thinking methodology. With forty-nine patents granted to her name, Joanna was accredited as an IBM Master Inventor. She held a seven-year tenure as the Head of Research, Director of the Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Canada. She has published over twenty peer-reviewed academic publications and co-authored two computer science books with Springer, The Smart Internet, and The Personal Web. She published a Christianity Today article called “How Artificial Intelligence Is Today’s Tower of Babel” and published her first book on faith and discipleship in October 2022, titled Being Christian 2.0.

Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory; co-founder of Affectiva, which provides Emotion AI; and co-founder and chief scientist of Empatica, which provides the first FDA-cleared smartwatch to detect seizures. Picard is author of over three hundred peer-reviewed articles spanning AI, affective computing, and medicine. She is known internationally for writing the book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name, and she is a popular speaker, with a TED talk receiving ~1.9 million views. Picard is a fellow of the IEEE and the AAAC, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and a Masters and Doctorate, each in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from MIT. Picard leads a team of researchers developing AI/machine learning and analytics to advance basic science as well as to improve human health and well-being, and has served as MIT’s faculty chair of their MindHandHeart well-being initiative.

This free 75-minute virtual symposium is open to ASA members and the general public alike. It includes key elements of the ASA approach — an opening talk on a vital science-faith issue of the day followed by Q&A. We are delighted that ASA Fellow Derek Schuurman will be facilitating this important conversation.

Register in advance for this webinar here.

Come join us for this annual public-facing event and help us spread the word. This is an excellent opportunity to invite your church, pastor, friends, family, students, and colleagues to engage in this relevant topic.

The ASA Team