Events
We partner with research institutions, universities, and initiatives from diverse contexts to explore critical issues with far‑reaching societal impact. These collaborations create space to develop new ideas, ask challenging questions, and exchange perspectives across disciplines. Supported by shared expertise, each project generates valuable insights into today’s most complex subjects, fostering sustained collaboration and innovation.
2025-2026
Discourse in the age of political upheaval and artificial intelligence
A two‑day conference that brings together graduate students, scholars, and faculty to examine how political discourse is being reshaped by contemporary media systems, artificial intelligence, and moments of global crisis.
The conference is supported by UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies, UCLA Political Science, CERS (Center for European and Russian studies), UCLA Slavic Department, the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and NNAI Livescu.
Prompt Hunters
NNAI Livescu, AIRES and SGUO are partnering to organize a social event at UCLA to test your generative prompt guessing and have insightful discussions about AI creativity and tech with other undergraduate students.
Empire of AI: Karen Hao with UCLA Professors Safiya U. Noble and Julia Powles
Award-winning AI reporter Karen Hao, author of the bestselling book Empire of AI, in an in-depth conversation on power, politics, and the future, with leaders in tech justice and policy, UCLA Professors Safiya U. Noble and Julia Powles.
Sponsored by UCLA DataX, UCLA Center for Resilience and Digital Justice, UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy, UCLA Livescu on Neuro, Narrative, and AI, UCLA CSW | Streisand Center and UCLA Department of Communication.
the Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats
Daniel Scott Snelson presents a book talk on his recently published The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). Snelson explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how these transformations might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.
This event is sponsored by: DataX, UCLA Livescu on Neuro, Narrative, and AI, Program in Digital Humanities, and Text/Tech Lab.
GOOD vibes only
We collaborated with the UCLA Political Science Department, UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory, and the UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies to host a talk by renowned independent scholar and editor Dr. Robin James about her upcoming book, “Good Vibes Only“.
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: AI in the University – 2nd Edition
the Secret agent
NNAI Livescu and AIRES are partnering to organize a social event at UCLA to rise awareness on AI use at the university. Participants will be playing an interactive game inspired by “Is it cake?” where participants will be tested on their skill to identify AI material. Come share your perspective, connect with other students, and enjoy pizza while learning more about AI models use on campus!”
Winter 2026 Faculty Seminar
Faculty Seminars to discuss the latest research in AI, neuroscience, and sociology.
NNAI Livescu faculty seminars are designed by faculty around specific topics. We meet regularly over lunch to discuss a set of recommended literature pieces about a topic of interest.
Psychological Warfare, Psychiatric Violence, and the Prison Industrial Complex
We organized with Dr. Danielle Carr (UCLA) a workshop on Psychological Warfare, Psychiatric Violence, and the Prison Industrial Complex, as part of her research project: Material Intelligence as Historical Problem.
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: AI in the University
NNAI Livescu and DataX hosted a seminar where teachers and researchers across disciplines/schools share both the horror stories and the revelations, as well as the tricks, tips, warnings, confusions about what AI is doing in our classrooms and labs through real examples, and what we want it to do.
Data equals: Democratic Equality & Technological Hierarchy.
Joint book presentation with with the UCLA Political Science Department to host a talk by renowned political theorist Prof. Colin Koopman (University of Oregon) about his latest book, Data Equals: Democratic Equality & Technological Hierarchy.
This event was part of the 2025–26 UCLA Political Theory Workshop, coordinated by Tejas Parasher and Natasha Piano, and reflects our ongoing commitment to fostering interdisciplinary conversations that challenge and enrich political thought.
2024-2025
Let AI Drive the Future of Urban Mobility – Pint of science 2025
We partnered with @pintofscience.us through an NNAI Livescu collaborator, Wayne Wu, who gave a talk at #Pint25 festival.
Ghostwriting: A Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write
A talk by Emily Hogdson Anderson, University of South California (USC).
What is ghostwriting? Understood broadly as the act of one person writing in another person’s name, the practice has—according to many ghostwriters—been around since written language itself. And yet the implementation, and acknowledgment, of this practice have varied greatly over time. Who are these invisible figures? Why do they do what they do? And why do they remain disembodied—behind the scenes?
THE no-body problem
Workshop organized with Sarah Kareem (UCLA), which gathers a group of scholars working broadly in eighteenth-century studies under the heading of what we are calling “The No-Body Problem,” the long history of thinking about the yields of—and yieldings to—disembodied media.
Confronting the Crises of AI Through Research
A series of seminars organized with Shazeda Ahmed (UCLA) around the applications of AI to both studying AI as an object of inquiry and discerning the inherent trade-offs in uses of machine learning in research.
Why Turing Was Wrong: Machines, Language and Citizenship
A talk by Joshua F. Dienstag, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The challenge that talking machines pose to traditional conceptions of the human is profound. If language activity is crucial to human status, then why should we not include talking machines in our community? What are our grounds for distinguishing computer-generated language from human language?
Natural Sociability & Political Association
We organized a two-day workshop with Peter Stacey (UCLA) on December 2024, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’. The aim of the workshop is to subject various parts of the conceptual framework which often underpins contemporary responses to this challenge to serious and sustained intellectual scrutiny. It will do so by digging deep into the intellectual history of a succession of theories about society and the state whose terms demonstrably continue to structure the terms in which we currently construe the problem.
Fall 2024 Faculty Seminar
Faculty Seminars to discuss the latest research in AI, neuroscience, and sociology. NNAI Livescu faculty seminars are designed by faculty around specific topics. We meet regularly over lunch to discuss a set of recommended literature pieces about a topic of interest.
Material Intelligence as Historical Problem
Workshop on September 2024 organized with Danielle Carr (UCLA) on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences?
2023-2024
CAN HUMANS THINK? INAUGURAL NNAI LIVESCU EVENT
Inaugural talk by Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, authors of “How Data Happened”, titled Can Humans Think? Philosophy, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Humanities