The Turing Test: #PepperatIE
I first met IE Business School Big Data & Analytics lecturer Ms. Christina Stathopoulos in June last year at an IE faculty reunion, during which I told her about some of my communications initiatives, such as IE Humanities in @ minute, The other side of IE alumni, The other side of IE professors, and so forth. A few days later, Ms. Stathopoulos contacted me via Linkedin to explore the possibility of shooting a video. We then initiated a long-distance conversation that led to any number of postponed meetings due to Ms. Stathopoulos’s extremely busy agenda: apart from her IE duties, she has a demanding job at Google and keeps busy with myriad other projects. Eventually we were able to meet again a few months later: on October 29th to be precise.
When we finally sat down to discuss her video, I discovered that Ms. Stathopoulos is among many things, a bookworm, so we automatically connected and had soon agreed on doing something about the thorny issue of the dialogue between the worlds of technology and the humanities, or as Scott Hartley describes it, between the fuzzies and the techies.
That was the easy part, but from that initial agreement to getting round to filming took a while longer, but we persevered and managed to shoot the video on March 15. I hope you enjoy it. I think the wait was more than worth it.
Please let us know which of the three poems #PepperatIE is reading in this video you think were written by the robot. And if you want to see part of what keeps Ms. Stathopoulos busy, check out her #bookaweekchallenge
P.S: this video wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable help of Carlos Ernesto Muñoz Sanz, a data specialist at IE, and who programmed #PepperatIE to read the poems and move around…
