Artificial intelligence at DSPCom: an ethnography of development processes and potential of the methods

• Grant number: 20/09716-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2020
• End date: September 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Daniela Tonelli Manica
• Grantee: Mateus Vicente
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project is a continuation of ethnographic research for scientific initiation entitled: Technoscientific logic and the production of artificial intelligence at Unicamp: Agents and processes. Its objective is to monitor the process of construction, development and production of artificial intelligence from a research project in BCI at the Laboratory of Signal Processing for Communications (DSPCom), of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC) of Unicamp. In order to understand the process of producing artificial intelligence in the laboratory - its influence on the definition of problems, the design and creation of solutions and its methodological potentials explored - I will select and monitor more closely the production of research done in the laboratory, observing its stages, processes and the discussions mobilized for its construction.I intend to enter and ethnograph the coded and technical universe of artificial intelligence in this selected project, in order to monitor how its methods are mobilized and what they inform. In addition, I seek to observe more closely relations of analogy and potentialities between the brain and the machine, the relation between productions considered to be "purely academic" and those specifically aimed at the "market", as defined in the field in the first phase of the work.