Speakers

Video Contributors

• Mark Fettes

  Mark Fettes is Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Associate Director, Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG). He is also the President of the World Esperanto Association, an organization that works to promote the Esperanto language while also stimulating discussion of the world language problem and to call attention to the necessity of equality among languages. He has previously worked with First Nations organizations around issues of language maintenance and revitalization. This in turn is related to his long-term interest in cultural diversity and intercultural communication, and particularly the management of multilingualism in a globalized world.

• Emma Ramadan

  Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended Brown University and later earned her Master’s degree in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris. She specializes in translating French to English, and has received various honors and awards for her work, having been the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright scholarship. In 2015 she completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Marrakech, Morocco, where she catalogued and translated the archives of the late Moroccan author Ahmed Bouanani.

• Karthik Dinakar

  Karthik Dinakar is a research scientist and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT who started the Applied Machine Learning and the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org interest groups at MIT and Harvard. He is interested in large scale bayesian data science - scalable machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, human-in-the-loop computation and fail-soft computing. Before his work at MIT he ‘machine learnified’ large scale query-entity relationships for the Bing search engine’s knowledge graph Satori. He has previously held positions at Deustche Bank and at Yahoo R&D, where he worked with a team on the Enthusiast Platform. At Carnegie Mellon University he studied human-computer interaction and machine learning.

• Shigetaka Kurita

  Shigetaka Kurita is an artist and designer who created the first emoji in 1999 for the Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo. While the system offered emails, they were restricted to 250 characters, so emoji were a way to say more in a limited space. While emoji were immediately copied by other Japanese telecoms companies, the symbols were not standardized, meaning they could not be used across different networks. Additionally, they stayed fairly limited to Japan until 2010 when they were incorporated into Unicode, the standard that governs the software coding of text. That year, 722 emoji were released on both iPhone and Android. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired 176 miniature drawings of faces, objects, and abstract places, etc.

• Janice Kamrin

  Janice Kamrin is an Associate Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janice holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Middle Kingdom tomb art and the archaeology of Thebes. Before coming to The Met, Janice lived in Egypt, where she directed several projects at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and worked with the head of the Antiquities Service.

• Sara Bodinson

  Sara Bodinson is Director, Interpretation, Research & Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art. She joined the Museum in 2000, coordinating internships for college and graduate students as well as programs and web initiatives for teens. In 2009, she began to oversee the Museum’s interpretive planning process and the development of resources including labels, audio, apps, games, and participatory spaces, as well as qualitative visitor research and evaluation. In 2015, her responsibilities expanded to oversee digital learning initiatives, including online courses and podcasts. Bodinson holds a BA in art history and film studies from Smith College and an MA in art history from Hunter College, where she wrote her thesis about the Arab Image Foundation. She is a member of the executive committee of the Professional Organization of Women in the Arts and the Smith College Museum of Art Visiting Committee.