Les valeurs de l'olympisme dans tous les domaines mises à l'honneur par le Sommet Européen annuel à Paris au Palais Brongniart cette année

Interview Francophone. How could be resumed your career ? 

Anca Goron: I’m a former Academic Researcher and entrepreneur from Cluj-Napoca Romania. I hold a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and devoted over a decade of my life  to academic research in Romania and Argentina. Over the past 20 years, I have been working with pioneering technologies across diverse fields, including IoT, astronautics, smart cities, data security, space, medicine, education, and neural AI. I founded two AI startups, an assistant for residential buildings and a hospitality context driven AI agent, the last one I  successfully sold after receiving an award from the Dubai Ministry of Tourism in 2017. In 2018, I got a recognition by Forbes US Magazine, which named me among the Top 100 Female Founders to Follow. As a very enthusiastic advocate for women empowerment, education and inclusiveness, I dedicate my time mentoring young female entrepreneurs and students in data science and AI through organizations like Women in Tech, Women in AI USA, SDGCoLab, and the edu Think Tank 360. In 2023 I served as a member of the Romanian Scientific Council for Artificial Intelligence Ethics and I am contributing editor and speaker on topics such as AI in governance and community co-design. In 2018 I founded AVA Research, a creative AI company, with the scope of making AI easily understood and applied by companies, startups and government and non-profit organizations.  I gathered a team of remarkably talented AI specialists and continued to drive innovation and challenging the status quo with unique projects and ideas. The application of AI in art came naturally due to my long passion in art and creative ADHD mind looking for connections in everything. 

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Interview Francophone: What means for ypu AI and how you use it in arts

Anca Goron: To put it in simple words, AI refers to making machines mimic human thinking and behavior, while technology refers to the set of tools and systems that enable us to do that. Examples of tasks would be:  including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, autonomous decision-making. There are two approaches in AI: top-down: going from defining abstract universes and using logic, mathematics to make sense and use it for specific scenarios in finite worlds and a bottom up approach that uses data to find connection and patterns to make sense and apply in more general scenarios. Art has long been a reflection of human emotion and imagination, materialized through objects, sound, or form. Now, if we try to find a direct connection between AI and art, it is actually looking into understanding what drives human creativity and understanding the mind, which ultimately it is very subjective. This is exactly what is debating at the moment and together with scientific experts and artists are going to present and delve upon in a round table organized by the Ministry of Culture during the Weekend Culturel de l’Ia in the preoopening of the AI Action Summit . 

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But to get back to your question, people and artists perceive mostly generative AI as the ultimate form of creating Art using technology. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) describes algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos.  Basically, they can learn patterns in things and generate new data that reflect such patterns. If we think of creativity as creating new objects from modifying existing ones and finding patterns then we can say that AI is creative. But I do dare to believe that creativity is ultimately something ethereal, something unexplainable and unpredictable that we had the privilege to possess. Yes we can mimic creativity, but at the moment there is no possibility of actually making AI fully creative. I would say that the best we could do is using AI to enhance creativity. However, the infusion of vastly greater intelligence into the world isn’t just going to transform the gadgets at our disposal; it’s going to transform the way we think, the way we are, inside our heads, moment by moment and ultimately also the way we create and perceive art.

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Interview Francophone: How could yu describe your innovation at DANAE? 

Anca Goron: I think that all of us have at some point wondered what is happening inside the mind of other people, whether a friend, a family member, a child, a lover, a husband. There is always this captivation with what can actually be achieved. With my team at AVA Research we dedicate one day a month to brainstorming and coming up with new ideas to innovate, to stand out, to present to our customers and help. At some point,about  two years ago, we were checking this technology called Brain Computer Interface and how scientists managed to tap into the minds of people and perform brain fingerprinting. Basically,  Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are computer-based systems that acquire signals generated on the surface of the brain through invasive or, in our case here, non-invasive methods (electrodes). These electric signals are different in magnitude and frequency. However, the brain is incredibly complex and there are certain limitations to consider. At that time, our CTO was experimenting with BCI devices in a medical research project. I still remember how we were discussing the subject of LLMs and how amazing it would be to combine with other technologies. This is when we started looking into existing experiments and my colleague tried this theory we were discussing in a use case to translate thoughts into speeches and treat communication disorders. After a few months first results came in and they were promising and this is how we acquired our own headsets and started to apply a similar approach in developing a tool that we can use for our clients first in creative fields like fashion and media. 

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Interview Francophone: Tell us more about your work and research ? 

Anca Goron: I have been working closely with my company team of scientists and a university LAB  and one of my colleagues became part of a group of BCI experts trying to develop a new headset for a medical research project. We experimented with different devices and use cases. For example, we analyzed brainwaves and what they can tell us about the capacity of a person to relax or to focus to perform a certain task. We even connected the tool to the lighting system in the room, which was dimming when the person was becoming more relaxed and brightening when he/she became focused. Also we played a bit and connected the headset to a platform for delivery and tried ordering things directly with our thoughts. It was really fun, but maybe not so safe at the moment so we just left it aside. We also approached different fashion brands and media companies and worked on different concepts to implement based on this technology. We are at the moment involved in a series of initiatives and we are also excited about what the future will bring. 

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Interview Francophone/ What artists inspired you in your innovation project? 

Anca Goron: Mostly the Surrealists movements, for example - Salvador Dalí. I remember I have even inserted in the preamble of my PhD Thesis a picture with his famous painting - the Persistence of Memory. I think that as humans we get consumed by this fight between logic and emotions and deep down we need a universe that makes sense logically, we need to understand our minds, the darker corners and the different levels of our subconscious and ultimately of the universe. That is why I also chose the path of becoming a scientist.  Tapping into our thoughts and mind might be a way to achieve this whether through art or through science. Then of course, there is always this complexity of the mind that fascinates me. René Magritte managed to capture this in his work or Yayoi Kusama, who once during an interview describing how she gets her inspiration described her own experiences with hallucinations and mental illness which altered states of consciousness and her mind percepting the world. Art ultimately is an outside expression of an inner world, a compound of sensitivity, emotions, intelligence, luminosity, emptiness. By having the chance to glimpse into this miraculous world using AI will ultimately allow us to experiment with new forms of creativity. Abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko managed to express so much more through the power of thought and reflection. As Wassily Kandinsky said, "Everything starts with a dot." The dot serves as the foundational starting point of artistic creation, well here we start with a thought. 

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Interview Frabcophone: How did you succeeded to mix research and arts? 

Anca Goron: I was always a creative person and even though somehow science and mathematics was forced on me during my upbringing in Eastern Europe, while embracing an artistic career was mostly regarded as a childish caprice, I always managed to bring art at the center of my work. Even when I first started interacting with AI almost two decades ago, I was intrigued by how it can be applied to enhance human creativity and artistic expression. Through the years,  I interacted with different artists and slowly the dots started connecting until last year, when finally, attending the preopening of the Venice Art Biennale, I had the chance to meet and further to collaborate with a very talented London based artist Aziza Kadyri, the representative of the Uzbekistan National Pavilion. As an artist using technology to bring to life cultural heritage and traditional crafts, she was embracing AI as the tool that enabled her to conceptualize all her creative ideas. Together with my team, we helped her using advanced AI image analysis tools to implement the idea of having the unique and harmonious movements of a professional dancer encapsulating centuries of Uzbek tradition and heritage brought on stage in KINDL Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin. It was not about artificial intelligence copying human creativity as we currently see with GenAI technology, it was a masterfully orchestrated dance of artistic reinterpretation of human essence metamorphosed into a mesmerizing earthly creation with algorithmic precision by AI. The emergence of AI-image generators, such as DALL-E 2, Discord, Midjourney, and others, has stirred a controversy over whether art generated by this non-sentient artificial intelligence is a creative expression, lacking surprise, emotion, and even silence. This led me to explore new ways in which AI can enhance this ultimate expression of art as an outside representation of human consciousness and create a direct liaison between our internal subjective world with an objective outside immortalization and that is where BCI technology came in handy.

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Interview Francophone: Could ypu explain us how it works your innovation based on AI? 

Anca Goron: You see, for a long time, attempts have been made to decode the human mind, and researchers have put significant effort into this topic since the 1980s. However, a non-invasive process was challenging because signals are not as qualitative as an intrusive solution. The truly innovative part is the merging of Brain-Computer Interface with AI, more precisely Machine Learning & Classification techniques and Large Language Models (LLMs). In a primitive stage, a BCI system may not precisely decode every signal, but a LLM can function as a supervisor, efficiently translating signals into natural language through specific prompts. First, we train the system with a dataset of decoded words, then we extract the data needed from the preprocessed brainwaves, then with the help of LLMs we identify sequences of words that we map into commands.  

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Interview Francophone: How did you succeeded to overcome barriers for this innovation 

Anca Goron: We are using different headsets and a lot of them come with limitations. Besides this, also the fact that in comparison with Neuralink and Blackrock Neuronal, which use invasive methods, our non-invasive approach is again a bit more restricted. Of course there are more advanced helmets but at the moment we are still in the beginning and we self-fund the research so we are using the available hardware the best that we can. We do hope to be able to find some partners and advance our research further. 

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Interview Francophone: What are the limits in this kind of innovation? 

Anca Goron: At the moment we can read thoughts but only those thoughts that are formed before speaking, at a conscious level. Also, we are still in the beginning of being able to identify contexts, sequences of words or sentences.. Regarding the ethical and juridical implications, this technology is advancing very fast and at the moment there are no specific standards and regulations put in place. That is why, we are using this project to raise awareness about the implications, to make people think and question potential usage outside the creative space. Just as this technology can illuminate the depths of human creativity, it also carries the potential for exploitation and control. The duality of BCI lies in its promise to heal and enhance, but also to surveil and manipulate. 

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Interview Francophone: What message would you like to give to artists? 

Anca Goron: My personal belief is that AI, even with all the advancements will still be inferior to human creation. Ultimately art is something very subjective, it is an outside representation of an emotion or vibrancy of the Universe, which AI although it manages to mimic the artistic act, it cannot create something that expresses an idea, an emotion or, more generally, a world view. But what it can do and should do is actually augment and enhance creativity and originality . With my Creative AI company AVA Research we made a mission in making AI and innovation easily accessible to everyone and we are working with artists and creators in this sense. Innovation in AI is reinventing the way we invent. The infusion of vastly greater intelligence into the world isn’t just going to transform the gadgets at our disposal; it’s going to transform the way we think, the way we are, inside our heads, moment by moment and this will change the way in which we perceive and create art.