In her presentation, Dr. Noa Yaari will explore Microsoft Copilot’s visualization of past and future cities responding to her written prompts. This exploration shows how she approaches urban history from a personal point of view while blending it with others’ experiences and scholarship, as well as Copilot’s rendering of words into images. She will give attention to urban aesthetics and dynamics, their changes over millennia, and their possible impact on cities’ inhabitants.
Will Copilot find ways to convey human experiences in different cities and eras? Will it help us learn something new about cities’ history and future? Will multimodal dialogues with Copilot and other GenAI tools lead us to new ways of thinking and working? At the end of this presentation, we will be able to ponder experimental methods of storytelling and knowledge mobilization and Copilot’s text-to-image capability considering its training data and real urban experiences.
About the Speaker
Dr. Noa Yaari is an artist, entrepreneur, and a Communication Instructor at the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), the University of Toronto. She specializes in knowledge creation and mobilization through multimedia, especially combinations of words and images. She also explores generative AI tools for her art and pedagogical work. In her teaching, she promotes creativity, problem solving, and entrepreneurship.
