Open Learning Talks | Hip Hop, Technology, and Narrative

Welcome, everyone, to Open Learning Talks. Thank you all for joining us. Please do put on the chat where you're tuning in from. We're always interested to know. I'm Janine Liberty. I'm head of communications at Open Learning. And it's my pleasure today to introduce Professor Fox Harrell and Rocky Bucano, who are here today to talk about hip hop, technology, and narrative. They work together on an amazing project for the Universal Hip Hop Museum where Rocky is the director called "Revolutionizing

Hip Hop Breakbeat Narratives." It's an art installation that takes museum goers on an interactive, personalized journey through hip hop history. They're going to walk us through the project and talk about the technology, the cultural context, the museum itself, their background, and a lot of other topics. First, a little bit more about our speakers. Rocky is Executive Director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which is a cultural arts and educational institution dedicated to the preservation and

celebration of hip hop culture. Rocky began his career in the music industry as a teenage DJ during the early years of hip hop in the '70s. And in a long and varied career in music and public service, he's worked as a club and concert promoter, a producer, and as executive director of New York Gauchos youth basketball program. Fox is the director of the MIT advanced-- Center for Advanced Virtuality here at Open Learning. And he's also a professor of digital media and artificial intelligence in

the Comparative Media Studies program and the Computer Science and AI lab at MIT. His work explores how computers can be used for creative expression and social empowerment and involves developing new forms of virtual reality, computational narrative, video gaming for social impact, and related digital media forms. I'll turn it over to Fox and Rocky to get started really in just a moment, but first just a couple of housekeeping notes. Fox and Rocky are each going to talk about their work and the

ir backgrounds and then chat together for a while. And then for the last 15 or 20 minutes, we'll open it up to questions from the audience. So as we go, at any time, you can submit a question by putting it right in the chat. You can put a question in as it occurs to you or when we open up the Q&A. My fellow moderator, Kate, and I are going to collect all of these and read them to Fox and Rocky during the Q&A. Or if you are not camera shy and you'd like to ask your question aloud and speak direct

ly to Fox and Rocky, use the Raise Hand feature at the bottom of the screen. And then when the Q&A starts, we will make you a panelist so you can ask your question on screen. If you have any questions about any of this, please just put them in the chat, and Kate and I will respond. And with that, I will hand it over to Fox first to talk a little about his work and the Breakbeat Narratives project-- Fox, over to you. Thanks, Janine, for the gracious introduction. And just really pleased to be her

e with all of you and just to, again, convene with Rocky. So I want to share a few images so you can visualize the project and learn some about what we do in the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality and what our collaboration was. So just to begin with, I'm the director of the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality. It's situated here within Open Learning at MIT. And to know what we do, you might even ask, first of all, what is virtuality? So some people think that virtuality is just the experience yo

u have through headsets like this, the kind of virtual reality headsets, augmented reality, and so forth. And it certainly includes those kinds of technologies and experiences that block the world and replace it with something else an immersive environment. But also, we use virtual selves in technologies like this in social media. In video games, we have virtual experiences with avatars and immersive worlds and so forth. But for the purposes of today, I didn't want to only talk about the technic

al platforms but a different cultural dimension of what, I think, that we address through this kind of work. So I mean this, too, the kind of worldbuilding that's done through literature, where people create new worlds as metaphors to talk about our own world. As Ralph Ellison did in Invisible Man, where invisibility became a metaphor for racialized experience in the world, or Octavia Butler's work, where she talks through speculative fiction about experiences of gender, power relationships, and

so much more. But I'm also interested in the power of digital media and other forms to transmute political and social agency into change. So someone like Nina Simone is just as much of a inspiration for our work as new artificial intelligence technique that we might deploy. And hip hop, too, is one of the amazing places where this kind of transmutation takes place. I chose this image on purpose because it, on one hand, will resonate with people that are used to engaging with computings, this ki

nd of a series. But what this actually is, it was a mixtape that was produced for Project Blowed, which I'm sure Rocky is quite familiar with. So this, starting in 1994 in Los Angeles, this was open mic. So it's a community-based workshop that's been in existence continuously since 1994 in Los Angeles. People like Aceyalone, Abstract Rude, the Freestyle Fellowship, all coming together to pioneer new forms of expression involving improvisation and creating new cultural opportunities. And even rec

ently, my colleague Nick Montfort is hosting Lupe Fiasco as a visiting artist, so award-winning and majorly influential hip hop artist, and not only hip hop artists but also thinker and creator in the world. So we've had the opportunity to collaborate, as well. And there was, under the auspices of an organization he has called SOSA, Society of Spoken Arts. And so some people are used to the idea of artists coming into a university like MIT as a visiting artist. But I'd had the experience of bein

g a visiting academic at this guild of rappers where we can provide information such as, about semiotics and metaphor and so forth, just to enhance the kind of skill and impact as much as we can for rappers who want to push their art forward. And so I think that it's such an important and seminal kind of organization. And these are the kind of intersections that I think of that are possible we create new kinds of technologies in virtual spaces. More specifically, though, besides our inspirations

, we pioneer new experiences of technologies of virtuality. Those are computing systems that construct imaginative experiences atop our physical world, so again, ranging from interactive stories, the kind of kiosk-based work we did with the Universal Hip Hop Museum, augmented reality, and more. So now the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx, Rocky will say a lot more about this. But its aim is to celebrate and preserve the history of both local and global hip hop music to inspire, empower, and

promote understanding. And these are a few images. It's just recently broken ground. And so you can imagine, this is a world class, technologically advanced, and forward conception of a museum. And you can just see what the space looks like in terms of exterior space, interior space that's planned and under development just now. And in the meantime, there is perpetual exhibit space that will continue that, in the Bronx terminal market, which is where we have the honor of working with Rocky to e

xhibit. So what we did as a collaboration with the Universal Hip Hop Museum, Microsoft, and a group called the TunesMap Educational Foundation and artists called Black Kirby was this, building a novel, interactive narrative exhibit, educating the public about hip hop culture. And some of the key elements of this-- one is hip hop is an oral culture. It's a participatory culture. We wanted to celebrate this, as distinct from other forms of cultural expression. And because of that, we wanted to pre

sent it using oral culture-based model. That is, using a conversational interface to help bring people into the experience and personalize the experience. So this is getting more into the underpinnings of the work. It's a system that personalizes stories for users by categorizing them based on their input in light of a model of musical identity theory. And so that is, in terms of people's preferences, there are a few different types of music and musical categories that people tend to fall into,

whether that's campestral rural music, or more rhythmic music, or experimental art music, and so forth. And our system has a series of conversational questions to help understand what people's preferences are. And it exposes them to rap lyrics to help to understand what themes they're interested in, like the self-representation of women in hip hop, or the complexities around violence and anti-violence in hip hop, and entrepreneurship in hip hop, and so much more. So some people say this. But if

it is dope, then there is a reason why. And it's because of our collaborators. So hip hop, so Microsoft, on one hand, we work with their team, who does conversational AI along with our own platform to do this customized categorization and personalization in order to really help bring this experience to life. Course, the Hip Hop Museum, that's the catalyst. That's where we all come together and where this expansive vision of hip hop comes from. And then we brought in our know how around AI produc

tion, digital media art, and storytelling. But also, Black Kirby, these are world class Afrofuturists, artists, and professors, and bestselling graphic novelists who I work with to develop the characters that are the ones that escort you through the experience. And so hip hop is not just some subgenre of popular music. It's an entire culture, as people know. So it's been theorized by a number of people, from PRS1 to many others, that hip hop has five elements. That is, DJing, emceeing, graffiti

art or aerosol art, breakdancing, and knowledge-- knowledge of self, knowledge of history, knowledge or culture. And so in a style inspired by Marvel Comics, with celestials or their characters like the Watchers, we created the elementals for the five elements of hip hop. And here you see DJ and emcee, and knowledge. This is what it looks like within the space. You walk in. It's a flagship exhibit. It's the first thing you see on these large Microsoft Surface Hub 2 kiosk touch screen devices the

re. This is just to give you a sense of what the exhibit space looks like. And now I also just want to give you a sense of what the actual experience is like. And so remember, this is optimized for a very large touchscreen, not for your computer screen. But I think you can get a sense of it regardless. And I'm just going to scrub through the video, but I want you to get a feel for it as I do so. [HIP HOP BEAT PLAYING] So as you come into the experience, then you're asked a few questions about yo

ur relationship to hip hop music, like whether you're a fan of hip hop music. Here, we're talking to graffiti art and what our preferences are in terms of genre and subgenres of hip hop and other sorts of music. We're asked about questions such as, what our preferences in terms of lyrics? [HIP HOP BEAT STOPS] And so we'll be given some set of lyrics, such as here. [HIP HOP BEAT STARTS] And we can play a snippet of it. So this is between Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z or Tupac Shakur. (RAPPING) This

is trouble season, time for tuxedos with no reason. All saints for my angel, Alexander Wayne, too. [SONG CHANGES] (RAPPING) And still I see no changes. Can't a brother get a little peace? It's war on the streets and a war up in the Middle East. Instead of war on popsi, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me. So the system processes all of that information to create a custom narrative and soundtrack for you. And so in this case, based on the choices made, the narrative is what moves

a crowd and as a social issue. And the soundtrack is a mellow hip hop soundtrack. And so you can just get a sense of that. It's a carousel style narrative. (SINGING) Duh, duh, doom, duh, duh, duh, duh (REPEATING). Set adrift on memory bliss of you. [PERCUSSION PLAYING] [MUSIC - SPANDAU BALLET - "TRUE"] [MUSIC STOPS] [BASS PITCH REPEATING] And so I really just wanted to give you a feel for it. But it uses a lot of archival footage from our collaborators from the Hip Hop Museum. It goes into the

history of African diasporic forms of communication, like call response or playing the dozens and so much more to describe all of the backstory, the theory, and the experience of what really moves a crowd. And then at the very end of the experience, it also provides a narrative, counternarrative. It doesn't just give one point of view. It gives multiple points of view on the issue. And then finally, in terms of hip hop culture, you get your own mixtape but you can take home with you in the form

of a QR code that gives you what the system determined was your musical preference. And so that's just an example of what we did together. There's so much more in the future that's possible. But I look at this as a type of work that's guided by the powerful cultural traditions of technological innovation, storytelling, resistance, imagination, and so much more. And I think that we can come together when we bring together these kinds of institutions to build an empowering vision in which the con

sideration of technology's social impact is intrinsic to the act of inventing them, which is what I was really pleased to do in collaboration with Rocky. And so let me stop there and then hand over to Rocky to tell you a little bit about the tale of the Universal Hip Hop Museum. Thank you, Fox. And I want to thank the MIT School of Open Learning, Sanjay Sarma, who was the person that actually connected us to the brilliant Dr. Fox. So the journey of the Universal Hip Hop Museum began 10 years ago

. I've been on this journey from day one. As they said earlier, I started as a teenage DJ. I became a club promoter, concert promoter, and then a record label owner. So I've worked in pretty much every aspect of the music industry. And I've seen hip hop from the very beginning, even before hip hop was actually a thing. I'm close friends with all of the early pioneers, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Africa Bambaataa, Grandmaster [INAUDIBLE] of the theater was the inventor of the scratch, who al

l are going to be celebrated and honored in the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which basically is going to be the most advanced museum in the entire world, in my opinion. We've worked with some great partners like Microsoft, as Fox has mentioned. And the original intent was to create a museum that was unlike any other. I've gone to many museums as a child in the past. And I'm always fascinated by how the exhibits are set up and all the wonderful artifacts. But hip hop, in its root essence, has been v

ery innovative since the very beginning when hip hop was just starting. Think of the idea of turning a turntable into an instrument where, instead of blending and mixing records like the disco DJs would do, the hip hop teenagers said, no. We don't want to play the records, the whole record. We just want to play a sample called the breakbeat or the get down. So they figured out a way to chew it up, scratch it up, cut it up without having to play the whole record and go from record to record back

and forth using this new style of what's called turntablism. So from that very initial creative expression of using a turntable that was just meant to play records in a traditional fashion, they said, no. We don't want to do that. We want to spin the record backwards. We want to cut and scratch and create our own style of music using this hardware. And ever since then, hip hop has been on a very steep incline in terms of global acceptance and adoptance. Hip hop is now seen in basically everythin

g and is heard everywhere. You see it in television, you see it in film, you see it in the style of clothing that people wear, you see it in the forms of dance, and you see it in language. You see it in language that has been adopted in other countries where they have used their own native language for expression to talk about social issues and inequities. Hip hop has been at the center of social justice from inception. The first record by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the message spea

ks to that. And then you have groups like Public Enemy and X-Clan and NWA and on and on and on. But that's just the music side. Hip hop is more than just music. It's a culture. It represents the five elements that Fox spoke about. So there's the B-Boys and B-Girls, the breakers or what's called breakdancing. There's the writers or aerosol artists that was known as graffiti arts. Now they call themselves gallery arts because they've ascended and their work has ascended. And now with NFTs, there's

a whole new revolution happening in hip hop to take hip hop to even another level. So as the director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, I've always been fascinated by technology. I've always wanted to see a museum that was able to tell the complex stories of the evolution of hip hop history. There are some things that people are quite fascinated by, and there are things that trouble a lot of people by. But how do we bring those stories and those complex issues together without having to create a

museum that felt stale and stagnant that kids would not even recognize nor enjoy? And the best way to do it, in my opinion, was to use the latest technologies, not as a vehicle simply because of what the technology does, but to retell the story in a way that becomes more imaginative, using holograms and virtual reality, and using AI and other new technologies that are now emerging. How do we incorporate that into the storytelling process? So that when people come into the museum, young or old,

they walk out with a different-- they walk in with one set of expectations, but they walk out with a completely set of new realities, understanding that hip hop is more than just the music and the art that they have come to know. And that's the purpose of the Universal Hip Hop Museum. And we're such fans of Dr. Fox and his team and our friends over at Microsoft because they are the ones that are helping us to bring this to life. The Breakbeat Narratives has played such a big role in that first p

hase of understanding what the museum's mission and vision is. When people came to the "Revolution of Hip Hop" to see the sneak preview that Fox helped produce, the Breakbeat Narratives became a favorite destination, for not just the people who know hip hop but for the people who don't know hip hop. Because as they use the Breakbeat Narratives, it forces them to think about their understanding of their own personal interests. And then it creates this narrative that they may have expected or did

not even anticipate with a curated playlist that I'm sure they were not even thinking of. And because Fox and his team were so brilliant at really understanding how to create the combination between a known technology of AI and use and research to understand the musical, different types of music genres and how they may be merged in together to create the storytelling process, was fascinating to watch. And then with Black Kirby adding their illustration on top of it, that was just the icing on th

e cake. So many kids look at that artwork, Fox, and they like, are these new cartoon characters? Are these on television? Are these on-- and I like, hopefully they will be one day because I could actually see them being utilized on a television episode to help kids get more in tune to what hip hop culture and hip hop history is all about. So without me rambling anymore, I hope I gave everyone a pretty good understanding of where we are with this project. It's wonderful. Thank you, both of you. T

hat was a fantastic bit of intro and background on the project. I'm going to transition over to a conversation between you two now. And I want you guys to just talk freely about anything that comes to mind. But just to kick us off, I'd love to know a little more about how you work together. Rocky, you mentioned that Sanjay introduced you. What was your first meeting? How did you decide to work together? How did you land on this project? So very interesting story, MIT and the Met and Microsoft ha

d teamed up together to open up the Met's amazing artifacts to make it public. And they used a new platform to make that possible for the Met. So Ryan Gaspar, who's the director of strategic partnerships at Microsoft and is our biggest champion within the company, invited myself, Kurtis Blow, and Ed Young, who's one of my senior advisors of the museum, to come see what they produced for the Met and to meet some folks from MIT. And he introduced me to Sanjay. I quickly introduced myself. I introd

uced Kurtis Blow to Sanjay. Sanjay is a big fan of Kurtis Blow. And I told him what the vision was with this museum. And he's like, oh my God. You have to come up to the school. And you have to meet Dr. Fox Harrell. And I am sure that Fox is going to be fascinated by your museum. And I think that there are big things that we can work on together. So he invited us up to the school. Myself, Kurtis Blow, and Ed Young, we flew up to Cambridge. And we sat down with the incredible Dr. Fox. And he didn

't even have to go two minutes into his presentation. We were sold because we had already read about his amazing background just as a visionary and a professor at the school. And he is one of us. He's a brother. And so he's our brother from another mother. And we love him dearly. And that's how we connected. Fox, anything to add on your end? Sure, I can because I remember that day really well and because I love to take the work outside of the lab into the world. So that was one of the things tha

t excited me. I'm someone that, I listen to all types of music voraciously, say from before the days of Afropunk, a lot of the kind of punk rock music that is being produced by African-American people but also hip hop music, experimental music, jazz, and so much more. And so I'm someone that when I was in college, say, taking my differential equations and linear algebra class, was listening to music like Legend of Liquid Sword by GZA or Freestyle Fellowship or groups like Hobo Junction in Oaklan

d. And so all of that was a full circle moment when Rocky, Ed Young, and Kurtis Blow came into the office. I know there was a buzz, too, among the staff to know that the Universal Hip Hop Museum along with Kurtis Blow were there. And then as I heard the vision that they had and how they wanted to make it a technologically forward museum, and they're very interested in telling stories that adapt to different cultures, and not only adapt but are actually grounded in those cultures as a means of ex

pression. Just began thinking even then, how can we tell a story about hip hop in a way that is based in the language and nature of hip hop? And the idea of telling it as an oral storytelling form that is conversational, I think, was sparked even from that very first meeting. Sounds like you guys were in tune from the start. So you're both working at the intersection of all these different things, of art, culture, social consciousness, and emerging technology. Can you talk each a little bit abou

t your perspectives on the work that you do and the pressures that you feel and what's most exciting about it that keeps you driven? Rocky, particularly, the museum was originally announced two years ago. This is a project years and years in the making. What keeps you excited about it, particularly in the current cultural landscape? Do you feel like you're fighting against forces, or do you feel like your work is more important than ever? And how did that inform the way you work together? Oh, wo

w, so listen. I'm always battling different forces with this project. There has not been a day where different pressures arise that makes us take a step back and think about other people's perspectives and viewpoints about what this museum should or should not be like. But like I said, I've been an architect of hip hop from the very beginning. I've been around it. I understand it. So my own personal pressure's to make sure that we are creating the most authentic museum that is built on complete

integrity and transparency. We want to make sure that all the stories are told accurately. But how do we fit that all into a museum that is only 52,000 square feet? How do we create these stories that are important to New York City and the Bay Area and San Francisco and the folks in Cleveland and Detroit and Japan and Korea and South Africa? How do we bring all these cultures together under one roof and deliver the most amazing museum experience possible? So that's the pressure. And making sure

that we have the right partners to execute this grand vision is the other side of the equation. And that's why teaming up with institutions like MIT and technology partners like Microsoft is so important because it allows some of those complex issues to be solved with the very best in the business. We've got the best architects with the SmithGroup. We have the best exhibit design team with Ralph Appelbaum Associates. We have an incredible visionary as a design lead with Michael Ford. He's known

as the hip hop architecture. And I have an amazing team of volunteers, Martha Diaz, who's head of education, and a new possible board member that Fox knows, Stephon Alexander, who is the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. And bringing together all these brilliant and talented individuals who are like-minded, in the sense that we all want to see this culture preserved and celebrated in the right way. And I think that's what Fox is helping us achieve. And we're just delighted t

o be part of this journey. And now that we have broken ground, now that construction has started, now the pressure is, let's finish the job. Let's get it done. Absolutely, yeah. Fox, same question. Sure, yes, so the question had two parts. The first part of the question was how do I describe the kind of work that I do and how would I explain it. And the second part was what pressures I feel. And so the first part, I have to answer it a few different ways. So first let me describe the team that I

have, both in my research group, the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory. And in MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality. We have computer scientists. So we have electrical engineering and computer science. These are the CCL PhD students within the group. We've had postdocs that come from social sciences or from computer science. We have also a broad international representation in terms of our team. If we have a gender imbalance on our team, it's been towards the side of more women

than fewer within the kind of work that we do, which is, I think, by virtue just of who has been interested in the kind of work that we are doing. And the kind of aims that we have are using computer science that's subfields like AI, especially modeling and simulating cultural and cognitive phenomena in order to create new forms of expression that can spark conceptual change, can help people to take new perspectives on the world, and can even spark social change ideally. So that ranges from coll

aborating on a VR piece that is, with Karim Ben Khelifa that was called "The Enemy." This is bringing people together with combatants in a VR space from multiple sides of the world, from Gaza to gangs of El Salvador, and understanding perspectives from either side. Like why do we fight? Have we killed before? Where do we see ourselves in 10 years? Systems like interactive narratives or games to address sexism in the workplace, my PhD student Danielle Olson who is soon to finish up is creating th

e art to understand racial and ethnic socialization and how people respond to pressures. Like if you are socialized to see the world through a colorblind lens or if you understand that there's discrimination, the same exact scenario can be very different. So that's just to give an example of some of the kind of works that we are doing now within the group. But besides that, I can say a little bit about my biography that led me there. Because although my PhD came from computer science and enginee

ring department, before that, I was in fiscal arts at NYU focused on arts oriented degree. As an undergrad, I was doing my BFA in art focused and digital media at the same time as my Bachelor's of Fine Arts in art focused-- my BFA in art focused on digital media and my Bachelor's of Science focused on logic and computation. That's AI, machine learning, philosophy of AI. And thinking all the time, how do we put all these together to create new forms of expression and social change? So that's just

to say that all of that goes far back to my roots and DNA. And now I'm just trying to create the kind of cultures and opportunities where you can put it together. So the second part about pressures, so I guess the pressure, it's something internal or even part of your emotional makeup. So what I want to do there is, I think, change the emotional term that is used. Because I think probably more in terms of issues like being both galvanized to make change within the world, being motivated to be d

riven through my research, not just by intellectual curiosity but by compassion, and then also sensitivity to the kind of nuances of the phenomena that are going around in our world. So that's just to change the language because a place like MIT often has this idea, the education drinking through a fire hose. You should be constantly under pressure and so forth. And I think not about it in that way, like pressure. And I feel like we need to change that dialogue. And bringing it back to hip hop,

it makes me think about when hip hop artist Tricky was asked to be on the cover of a magazine, I know that I read this story that people said, we need to think about how you look. How are you carrying yourself? You need to look hard to be on the cover? And he said, I don't feel hard. I feel vulnerable and confused. And so in his case, he changed the dialogue. You don't have to be hard to be a hip hop artist. And so I'm saying, you don't have to be under pressure to be at MIT. You can be self-mot

ivated to make change in the world through the angle of compassion. And a lot of people like to say empathy, as well. So I'm going to open it up to the audience, too, in just a couple minutes. But I want to ask you, at the center of both your work, both at MIT and at the Universal Hip Hop Museum, it's about education. It's about helping people learn and expand their minds in new ways. Can you talk a little about the ways technology can help create these inclusive spaces and immersive educational

experiences and how you keep education at the center of what you do? Yes, so at the Universal Hip Hop Museum, we constantly think about, how do we engage different types of audiences, whether it's kids in kindergarten or research students working on their PhD? And through technology and through storytelling, we can create new forms of understanding of what the culture of hip hop actually is and how the culture and the history of the culture has evolved to take on new forms of consumerism and de

velopment over the years. When hip hop first started, the kids have no understanding who were born just in the past 10 years or 20 years ago or even 30 years ago because hip hop is now entering its 40th year this coming August. So how do we use hip hop to inspire development in the classroom? So we have a group of educators being led by Martha Diaz. And we're working on curriculum. We're looking at machine learning, something that Stephon Alexander and hopefully Dr. Fox will be part of so that w

hen people come into the space and they see the music equipment that was used to create drum machines and produce beats and samples, that we can transform that thinking of just production and use it to show how physics and hip hop are correlated and actually work hand-in-hand. You have to know mathematics in order to create sound frequencies, and so on and so forth. So we're using hip hop as a catalyst to inspire thinking. When you see a story, there's so much more to that story that the kids ca

n learn from. And we work with the teachers in the classrooms, and we work with other people, so that they can turn that into a learning experience when the kids come and make their visits, or when the PhD these students come and seek more information about their own understanding of what hip hop is. So I think the museum, we are chartered by the New York State Department of Education, is a great source of learning and information. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we will do. And w

e're going to do it in a completely unique way that makes learning happen without even the rigors of having to figure out equations and study, whatever it is that they're doing in school. It will be automatic because people will understand. They'll see something, they'll get it, and the light bulbs will go off. And they'll say, oh, I didn't even think of it that way. I didn't realize that story was connected to social justice issues in America or how entrepreneurialism is manifested within the c

ulture, how to start your own business. So all these different touch points will be incorporated into the learning experience at the museum. And related to that, I can say a few different ways our work relates to education. So one side of it breaks down to some of the way it's divided here within Open Learning and J-WEL, where they describe pre-K through 12 education as well as higher ed education and workplace learning. We've done some work that fits into those categories, including with a J-WE

L. So that ranges from pre-K, 12, understanding how youth-- and this is the work, again, I mentioned with PhD student Danielle Olson, looking at how bias is implemented within classrooms. And then using VR as a tool for training not just teachers to avoid bias but for students to understand how to cope with bias and navigate it within the classroom through workplace learning, so building a system around sexism in the workplace. That should do much better than the kind of typical training tools w

e have around those issues because it's engaging, narratively oriented, doesn't only measure whether we completed it but measures whether we actually reflected or changed our perspectives through using the experience. And also, in higher education, issues like educating people about issues from our time like deep fake technologies and how can we be aware of them, and so forth. We've also done work that relates to STEM learning, so science, technology, engineering, and mathematic, as well as STEA

M, when you put arts into the mix as well. So we took our work into public schools within Cambridge and Boston and looked at the way-- this is going back to virtuality. When you have an online learning platform, you often have a virtual identity, like some kind of character or avatar or account that's between you and whatever you're learning. And we thought, when you're learning in that way, how does that change your learning experience? Because we know who you are in the physical world changes

how you learn. If you are a girl doing mathematics in an environment where you're told that this is not the kind of subject matter that's for you, people like Claude Steele have proven that people live up or down to the stereotypes about them. That's called stereotype threat. And so we thought, how does that impact people online? So we went into classrooms. We built a curriculum to teach core computer science concepts. We aligned it with progressive, in terms of learning computer science curricu

lum, exploring computer science. By "progressive," I mean it's not just a dill and kill. You have principles of human-computer interaction and design and understanding issues like privacy and surveillance, the technical issues as well as the sociopolitical issues around computing and design issues. And we created a workshop to get kids excited about that area. At the same time, we had our own custom learning platform where they will play games in order to learn key computer science concepts. The

y'll make games as well. And then they create avatars of themselves where they can be bridges for them to see themselves as learners and doers in computer science. Not only that, they can see who they are and their background, their ethnicity, their gender, their neighborhood, all of those different aspects of who they are, as a positive resource for doing creative work in that domain, not as some kind of a deficit. We want them to see who they are as something that can bring innovation and new

ideas to all of these kind of technical ideas. And then the final place beside STEM learning, I'll just say, is the kind of social learning I mentioned. So that's just another lens on the examples I gave, where you're not just thinking about the, it's called a banking model, like a professor lecturing as if it's depositing it in the head of someone like a bank, but the 21st century skills that are interactive and collaborative and reflective and all those sorts of things. And that's the other le

ns that we're trying to build in through technologies of virtuality. And the hip hop museum collaboration is a great place where this comes together because it really amplifies that cultural aspect. That is, who you are, what you care about can be connected to all of these types of topics, whether it's in AI or other areas within STEM, programming, design, and so much more. Amazing, thank you both so much. I think the audience will agree with me that you guys could maybe open up another museum r

ight after this one on cultural context and empathy. [LAUGHING] And how to be better people. We've got a whole bunch of questions coming in from the audience. So I'm going to start reading questions aloud. So I'm going to keep my video off so you guys don't have to watch me read aloud from the screen. [INAUDIBLE] asks, I'm curious about the extent of AI behind the series of systems. She said, she loved the demo that you showed Fox of Breakbeat Narratives. Sure, so there are multiple components t

o it. A lot of the kind of work that we do within my research group is finding a social science model that is a big current vanguard within that domain, so whether it's musical identity or racial and ethnic socialization, and then figuring out how to simulate and represent it on the computer. And there is a challenge in doing that kind of work. And that challenge, some people would be familiar with this term. But if not, I'll say something about it, which is "reductionism," oftentimes, scientifi

c reductionism. That is this idea that you can take any phenomenon out there in the world, no matter how subjective, sociological, and so forth, and then represent it in a way that is formalized, mathematical, implementable in the computer, and so forth. So that's a form of reductionism that says, you can model every nuance of social phenomena on the computer. And we don't start with that as our beginning point. So we have to say, what are the salient features of that phenomenon that we want to

represent? And in this case, it was musical identity and certain themes around hip hop. And so I have an approach that, in some ways, was pioneered by my own PhD advisor, who took mathematical formalizations from category theory, universal algebra, and so forth, and then thought about ways to structure this kind of knowledge and then represent that in an interface. So that's work that I've continued. Like in my book Phantasmal Media, I sketch out this process. So there's a part of it which is ab

out structuring information domain and coming up with appropriate mechanisms for simulation. Then after doing that work, which you can say from some points of view is AI, some points of view is knowledge engineering. There's a lot of ways to look at it. It certainly is part of HCI, as well. And then we also work with a conversational AI engine that was produced by Microsoft already. So in that case, that is from Microsoft research. There are some tools that have been produced to develop conversa

tional models. We have done conversational models in the past for computational models of narrative. And so we thought, this is a great place where this can all come together. So that's just giving a sense of how it worked with that particular kind of system. What that means in practice, and Rocky alluded to this. If you are someone who comes to the museum and you listen to country and western music and you answer all the questions in that way, your final playlist will be one that is hip hop son

gs but have samples from Bluegrass, country western, and so forth. So it's not going to be something you've necessarily heard before, but it's something that's taking your interests into account. So yeah, I'll stop there for that question. I saw one question, too, from Phillip Tan, too, which is why we use that particular song. [LAUGHING] And I'll just say, that particular rendition. And there's a lot of issues around Spotify API, the Soundcloud API, what we have access to, licenses, all those s

ort of things. So anyway, that's just a shout out to Phillip. Amazing. This, I think, is a question for both of you from Kyler. Have you considered any ways you can advance to Breakbeat Narrative project? Interesting, I'll let Fox answer that one. I think we can continue to evolve the project. It's something that is, it lends itself to continuous development because music itself continues to evolve. So I look forward to working with Fox and Microsoft to keep pushing it even further. I would say

that because this project required us to not just delve into our own areas of expertise but to realize the ways that we've been engaged in the kind of work each other are doing. And so there were some times where I had to delve through my memory banks to think about, what are ways to help the system to find these kind of songs and play the kind of songs that fit what our computational model will produce? And so that we required a certain amount of hip hop knowledge. And I'll say that inverse, wh

ich is that after using the system, Rocky asks really strong and stark questions about the system and how we explain it to people. So people would ask questions like, they would think that it was supposed to be like a collaborative filtering recommender system like Amazon. Hey, we know you want to buy this, and here it goes. Actually, it's meant to be a kind of collaboration. It's what you like, but also you might not know about hip hop. So how can we blend those together? And I think that's whe

re the action was where it's really exciting. And so having the rhetoric to convey that to the audience so they didn't come in and think that, oh, if it doesn't give me my top five favorite songs, then it's not working. It would be totally uninteresting. If you want your top five favorite songs, you can enter your top five favorite songs. We want you to discover something new that's connected to your interests and background. And that's what made it exciting. So Rocky was the one that pointed th

at out to us. And then there's always a tension when you have some pre-existing model, like the models from psychology we used that had certain formulations of what musical genres were that we disagreed with. They had notions like "sophisticated" music and so forth that I felt were highly culturally suspect and biased in a lot of ways, in terms of the language that's used. The structure of the music, maybe they described that accurately. But the label they put on it had a lot of problems. And th

en also looking for subgenres of hip hop that could fit this, not just really broad genres. So hip hop was just one genre. So that's one of the ways that Rocky pointed out. And so we were able to work with a student here, Megan [INAUDIBLE],, and were able to, who's an MN student at CSAIL, who were able to revise the system and have a number of hip hop subgenres and other subgenres from Latinx and African-American history and culture within the system. So that's just one way we've already expande

d it under the wisdom of Rocky's guidance. Fantastic. I'm going to combine a few questions here now from Alicia and Yvonne and Louisa and a couple of other people who have a lot of questions for Rocky about the Universal Hip Hop Museum. Turns out, this is a very popular idea. People are into it. So a few questions rapid fire, one wants to know, will Breakbeat Narratives only be available at the UHHM? Somebody else wants to know, have you considered a traveling national exhibitor roadshow? And an

other person wants to know, the original opening of the museum was scheduled for 2023, and has that been pushed back due to the pandemic? And do you know what the future might hold for the museum? All great questions, I'll start with the latter. So because of the pandemic, the official opening date is now 2024. We were originally supposed to open in 2023, which is the 50th anniversary of hip hop, but the project got delayed because of COVID. And fortunately, the project is now on track to open i

n 2024, so we're very excited about that. In terms of the traveling exhibit, we most certainly will have a traveling exhibit once the museum opens. We don't intend to do that before the museum opens. But we will. People want us to have satellite installations all around the world with this particular museum. So we're exploring all different types of options. And then the first part of the question was, will the Breakbeat Narratives only live at the museum? And actually, it's already been redesig

ned for mobile applications. So you can now actually get the Breakbeat Narratives on your mobile phone. If you go to our website, uhhm.org, and go under Revolution of Hip Hop, you'll see the Breakbeat Narratives there. And click on the link, and it will open up either on your web browser on your desktop, or you can do it on your phone, as well. So that's a great thing because with the pandemic, unfortunately, we had to shut down. And not as many people were able to actually come experience it in

person. So I spoke to Fox and the folks over at Microsoft and convinced them that we needed to create a mobile version of it. And that's what we did. So now you can actually enjoy it right on your cell phone. Fantastic. And if I can, I see a couple of questions from Baba Israel in the chat. So one earlier was about beatboxing. Certainly, beatboxing should be included, too, as another element. There are some models that are already out there that people have theorized. But hip hop continues to b

e described, theorized, and so forth. And so everyone should be a part of that process. And so I certainly think that beatboxing should be included because some people leave knowledge off. And so how can knowledge of self, knowledge or history, knowledge of culture be left out, in terms of where hip hop has been and where it can be? So there's just a lot of different breakdowns. I just used one of the really popular ones that's out there. And then bias in AI, I just wanted to get to that questio

n, too. Because one of the reasons why people are been so focused on bias in AI is because deep learning systems that are based on artificial neural networks have become so prevalent and ubiquitous within the field these days, which obscures some aspects of their mechanism of operation because of the way that they implement statistical models and so forth. So basically, it's hard to see how that system, it's hard to explain in human terms why the system is making the judgments that it is. And th

at's one way you can hide a lot of bias. But certainly, those aren't the only kind of systems to have biases. So in my book, Phantasmal Media, that we mentioned earlier, I didn't use the term "algorithmic bias." But I described how worldview is built into computational systems and how we can build systems that are based in, a lot of times, cultures that are often excluded from computer science. So we worked with a group in Liberia at one point to do work that was grounded in Liberian models of s

torytelling and much more. And one of the other things we do, people often think that AI can only implement bias that can be built into systems. What we've tried to do in the lab is turn AI's lens around. So build AI systems, whether we're using deep learning or other statistical techniques that may not be called AI, but to provide useful insights to reveal biases. So looking at bestselling computer games or other kinds of media and showing that there's gender bias that's baked into the data str

ucture of the system. And so I think that's just one great possibility with AI if we can show those kind of biases. And maybe there's possibility to do that with hip hop, too, to find trends that exist within the music, and then also pockets where there are new revolutionary ideas where people didn't expect them and other sort of things. So I just want to also not say that AI can only be used for bias. AI can be used for improvisation, creating new types of narrative, and revealing bias, too. Fa

ntastic, I think we've got time for just one more question before we hit the top of the hour. And a couple of people have asked this. So this is for both of you, really. But one person wants to know, will the UHHM partner with other hip hop ed programs around the country? And are there opportunities for collaboration with other higher ed institutions, as well? So the answer to that is yes, yes, and yes. We are working with all types of higher learning institutions. Martha Diaz is the director of

the Hip Hop Education Center. And she has an amazing group of organizations that she works with and cultural institutions and universities. And Cornell University is a organization that has their own archive. And we will be collaborating with them to share and exchange information. Working with the folks across the street from MIT over at Harvard, they also have a hip hop archive, as well. And working with folks on the West Coast at UC Berkeley and Stanford and University of Southern California

on different curriculums. One of our advisory board members, DJ Cli N Tel from the world class record group, is a professor at one of the colleges out there. So we're working with all kinds of higher learning institutions. And we're open to working with more. Fox, any parting words before I thank everyone? No, my parting words will just be words of gratitude. And thanks to everyone for giving us your ears and attention for this time. And then just, Rocky, it's just been so wonderful to be able

to collaborate with you, Ed Young, Renee, Paradise, everyone there. I don't want names off, Ryan Gaspar over at Microsoft, and so many others. So I'll just not go down the list of names, but everyone that's there. And just say, I look forward to continuing and exploring, building together for new possibilities. Awesome, same here, Fox. We love you. [CHUCKLING] Wonderful, well, thank you both so much for all the work that you do and for joining us here today.