 Right, we've got a brilliant talk coming up next. I'm really looking forward to it I hope you all are too It's called the singularity classical ballet computing in digital Essex So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Genevieve and Alex Give him a nice round of applause everybody So it is a little bit weird to talk about classical ballet and it's computing education and The digital ethics includes bio digital ethics But before we get that I can explain why I'm doing this because it makes a little bit more sense for you So so this is me and all of the things that I do in an infographic by a really wonderful artist called Annalise Lim So apart from running ready-salted code, which is a not-for-profit creative computer education CIC I also am a lecturer at Roehampton in computing education So I kind of come from from the classroom teaching GCSE in a level Computing computer science software development games design into Now teaching new teachers and developing the creative computing So when I was teaching there was only me as the female in the classroom So I wanted to find a way of getting more girls interested in computer science as well as Being a little bit more creative and not just doing you know Python and the magic April that we all have to teach these days So I went to dance in school when I was very little And that's my passion along with the dragon 32 and ice castles. That was my favorite game But unfortunately, I had a condition called spondylolis thesis. So I have Multiple spondyl fusions. I ended up leaving my walking stick on the drive So I've had to Result to use in a golf umbrella this weekend. So yeah so so that's where my kind of passion for classical ballet comes from and I now use classical ballet as a medium for teaching computer science theory I've produced three ballets along with Alex and also our choreographer Camilla and that is a Florescape of my spinal implant and I use classical ballet Because how it lines with computer science theory So if you don't know anything about classical ballet, it is very very strict and rigid like a programming language So for example, I'll sort of half demo here So you have positions of your feet which also correspond to positions of your arms And there's only certain ways that you can combine them to be correct motifs So if you think about how you might position your foot and there's certain steps that you're allowed to do Are a very rigid and very strict the same ways you might get with Python or JavaScript or whatever language that you want to use I'm very language agnostic And that is why we use it is a way to sort of show that the language can be Algorithmically created for the ballet Our ballets use Secondary school students that are not computer science students nor are they professional dancers? I don't dance. I just choreograph some of it and enjoy it because it's kind of cool So it was a really really good way to create different elements that you could use in for teaching computer science theory not only can you Manifest or use classical ballet as the narration and the data as the storytelling We can also create workshops and resources for teachers for all the wearables that we do We did projection mapping and Alex also built our connect server So if you ever want to just grab some Jason data from a connect We've got a brilliant one that just literally you just type in how many key frames you want and it'll just slap up the data So yeah, I need easy stuff I'm a kind of a mediocre programmer. So the very first ballet we did we coincided with the introduction of the new computing curriculum and it included five different elements so bullying in binary computational thinking debugging big data and algorithms and we use projection mapping live weather data and Also, lots of wearables. So that was a way that we could teach students arduinos and it's a really really good way Electronics are really good way to introduce coding as well so there's a couple of we use torches and This is a picture of the connect and just when we were doing binary tree structures Just to show you what it looks like. It doesn't have to look like stickman. It can be really beautiful And what's interesting for me is I know that that's Kate I can tell how she dances. So that was quite interesting from our from our perspective So we did a lot of different things. So the very top one with the circles is a hundred years of rain data Then one next to it is signal processing Where the dancers are using different motifs to represent the signal single processing algorithms the one at the bottom with the connect Stick figure is for debugging. So that's where you have all this trace and errors in it And the one at the very bottom represents networks and viruses We use a lot of wearable technology in the ballets and these initially where I'm just Electronics wearables and pointe shoes are not friends. I'm just saying they do not like each other at all So every single performance they always break. So the perfect perfect rehearsals absolutely no problem One little test up go live all the connections snap and it's literally is it every performance? Yeah So we're kind of needing to find a new way. So this is using the Adafruit Gemma and it's another Gemma the flora Neopixels and the little inside bit that looks like a piece of black plastic is Velostat So it's pressure sensitive plastic looks a bit like a bin bag, but it it's pressure sensitive plastic And that's how we use that as a trigger in the pointe shoes so we could minimize risk to the actual dancers We did our latest ballet is called pain bites That was released last October and that was about chronic pain and biomedical engineering So the dancers represented pain signals and we had some dancers representing the biomedical engineering technology my implant And then we went through and did what the pain pathway system looks like and how we can modify it and use in Art features to create imagery. So audience could understand the hidden nature of chronic pain We also created a VR experience and then turned that into workshop. So this is the the technologies that we use and So the daydream Alex built using lots of different stuff and the co spaces is a education platform for building VR Experiences using co spaces blocks block Lee and JavaScript, and it's really really easy to use I just had 60 kids build it Up in Shaffield having fun, and it just works with a Google cardboard But it's a really good way to introduce coding for students before you might want to move on to build VR experiences in blender or or unity So it's nice to do lots of different things So so our fourth ballet that we're producing is called the singularity And this is about so from a computer science perspective. We want to talk about latency Communication and augmentation of the human body So that's why we're boldly going into space So how can we communicate when we travel into space or go to colonize and what will we need to do in order to? Facilitate the human body to do that. Do we need to augment it and then this is where the challenge comes in if We are going to do that. What are the ethical considerations that we need to look at? So should we augment people or should we just send robots? What are the ethical decisions of who owns that data if you have a have a biomedical implant? So that's one of the things that we want to think about with the students when we do when we're teaching the digital ethics is What data are you sharing when you have your fingerprint to get your lunch or book your library book? Which is fine. It's perfectly acceptable, but they need to understand what's going on So the reason why we're using we're going to be using the emotive headset Alex has gone and that captures your brainwave data Alex is going to model the emotive headset everybody a little catwalk for you everyone And so this has a five-point Connection and the emotive do another one called the Epoch which has ten points It's obviously no way near as good as what our neuroscientists would use But obviously we need one that you can use when you're dancing It's very noisy the signal. It's not brilliant, but you know, it's better than nothing This is just an anime and an animation of kind of what brainwave signals might look like in a pretty way So when you get the emotive headset, it gives you an app like this that you can use or or Couple of pieces of different software to download either Mac or Windows and you can get the raw data out Unfortunately, I don't have that one because that's too expensive As everything everything's too expensive But but they're brilliant. They're really helpful as well the staff and And then I've got a little video that I recorded of my brain yesterday panicking about this workshop This talk sorry So you can see it gives you like a little kind of animation of how your brain might light up It's obviously not accurate. It's a representation of the signals coming from the brain And we want to use this particular data to create Biofeedback so they will this data that's coming out. So it's in a format called OSC You can use that with many different things. So including things like sonic pie So you could control the music using the brainwave data. I don't really know how well that would sound But it might be okay So that's one of the things that we're looking at we want to create our own music using all of our bio data for the classical ballet so that we can also Minimize the sort of copyright of the music that we're using we also want to show how students can code their own music and Create their own music But all with the understanding of this is someone's hidden brain data What does that mean to show this data to other people? What are the ethical considerations when you're working with that? So I'm going to hand you over to Alex because Alex built the scratch Plug-in that we're going to be using in the workshop later And how you can use the OSC data from there eat from their native headset to control scratch So I'll hand you over. Thank you Oh, so, yeah, I'm Alex. I've been Genevieve's technical technical provider so whatever it's called for ages and I'm a software developer by trade so For me, this is a really cool opportunity to do stuff that is not like regular programming Programming for performance is nothing like day job programming with a day job You're gonna have to support it in six months time You get hopefully gonna be supporting it in two years time and still have a job Whereas with a performance. It's like develop develop develop gone So there's a lot of hacking. There's a lot of just do it with whatever weird technology you can find Fortunately for this project. We saw it had an OSC interface to The brainwaves and I was like I've done OSC before OSC is really simple OSC is It's kind of it was invented for control. It's open sound control If you want to Google it, it was it was invented for replacing midi, which was rubbish. That's great But it wasn't detailed enough. So it's basically a way of passing strings and numbers fast across a network And in this case the strings and numbers are bits of brainwave information so you'll get There's lots of facial recognition stuff as well. I don't know like quite how it knows what You know whether I'm smiling or not, but it does So it's kind of cool and winking and blinking But you can also send mental commands so you can train it to pull and push and things so we're picking those things up and Sending them to a little server that's part of our project And then next slide you yeah We goes into scratch and you can have this data and you can use it to move things around with your mind in scratch It gives you control over Well, typically that cat is it called scratch it's called scratch isn't it? Yeah and Yeah, well as I come with that So It's about making it simple. It's about giving you control over it Scratch has had three iterations. It's currently in beta for its third Which is big relief to me because I didn't want to ever program in flash ever again So it's now available in HTML and that's much nicer so we downloaded that forked it and Added in some bits to allow us to connect our module to the rest of scratch and it's just very you know the OSC comes in it's just numbers and strings and The our little server just pokes it into scratch and then it's just like writing a page It's just a bit of JavaScript that connects to an API and says What's this number and it says five So really really simple, but it's very very nice that Scratch has Enabled this and made it simple and like it's just just like a little green one the orange bar This is a thing for moving the the cats when Whenever you will it to go I think left left. Yes, it makes it walk, but Just an example you could do anything you can visualize your thoughts There's obviously as Genevieve was saying we use the cheap version of the license So we don't get all the really detailed data of like this is going boom and this is going boom. We've kind of got You know what you saw in the previous slide, but it's still a lot to show You know how you can use your brain and how you can use that data yourself as somebody who's maybe Not particularly familiar with computers So scratch fees and beta system of is not fully working So when you come to the workshop do be prepared for it to be a little bit broken I'm just preparing myself basically yet And then the other thing that we're going to have a try with is sonic pie So if any of any of you interested in coding coding music, that's a really really good platform to do that so And this is only just started because scratch 3 was only released in August And so it's only been released to other developers and it's still in beta and there's still a few things So you can't you can't save any of these files that you create Because they are just live running on a on a beta server just so you know that when you go online But it's much better now that it's HTML 5 and not flash anymore Obviously the we're sharing the scratch run here because we want to Introduce digital ethics to students but for us when we're using it in the ballet We'll probably be controlling using the RSC data to control the the stage lights But you is using an aggregate score of the wearers so that nobody's data is shown or nobody's data is Available to other people So we won't record anyone's data at all only my own and probably Alex's In order to use the headset as well you officially have to be 16 But obviously if there's some parents in the workshop and they sign a waiver they can put it on But we won't record anything, but it's just you might want to try it. It's incredibly uncomfortable It's really tight on your head and you get divots in your head, but that's quite useful when you're dancing Because obviously you move around a lot even in ballet you even if you're not jumping around There's still quite a lot of head movements and stuff and it does stay on if you do like a pirouette or a spin If you don't know what one of those are and that was really important for us to find a way that we could record the Dancers data while they're doing it Then and then use them for the visualizations the wearables and any other projections that we might do We've only just started on this we haven't quite kind of formulated how the ballet will finally be But it's most likely be sometime next October To December when we do the live performance so I Just have some links that you might be interested in we have all of our resources and GitHub so for all of our ballets all of the wearable code the connect server code Whatever code we've used They're all in GitHub. Do not judge my programming. Do not judge mine either. Oh my god And also it's so messy Also the The ballets are on data driven dance. So the three that record it. I say three the last one isn't quite up yet And if you were interested in the emotive headset, there is other headsets that you can use it was just this one was Had enough points on it to get enough data whereas a lot of the others only have one or two that are Within my price budget. So it's $300 For one And when you're doing a so a classical ballet for one performance So what Alex was saying from start to development to do on a single performance is round about 20,000 pounds because if you've got eight dancers eight sets of pointe shoes my eight sets of costumes a Billion and one neopixels because obviously girl loads of neopixels. I'm surprised. I don't have any on me I'm normally just walking around in hundreds of lights But yeah, so it and obviously the development cost of all the software that we use the hiring and stuff. So It's important that So that's why it takes a lot of time because obviously I have to get the funding for that But yeah, so ballet is quite inexpensive thing to do if you're interested in that But mainly to do the costumes and things like that. That's where it comes from but yeah, so I hope you found the talk really interesting and If you we're all good if you hope you enjoyed it Oh So I was gonna say we've got ten minutes if you any of you want to ask questions But before we do that you mentioned that you're gonna be doing a workshop later. Yeah, do you know when and where that is? Yeah, so it's 6 30 in workshop two There you go So do we have any questions from the floor? No, oh one there. Oh, I'm on there. I'll come back to you Can you stick your hand up again? Can you can you support multi-player type experiences with this sort of headset as well Or is it solely one headset per computer? so the the OSC Protocol is completely network agnostic So even if you only have one plugged into one computer You could certainly then take that data and glue loads of it together Anymore for any more. Oh one here Could you demo the thing with scratch? Yeah, that's what we're doing at the workshop later on. Okay. Yeah. We just can't do it now because it's the different laptop What do you think is the most interesting thing you found from using the headsets on the dancers and So we haven't used it on the dancers yet Because I only just got it But I'm I use it on myself and I have ballet lessons and I think the thing I found Was actually the other dancers so I go to a dance class which has everyone's over 60 doing it and So the other dad the other ladies were watching my brainwave data And they found it absolutely fascinating how that you can see what you're because we were learning new stuff So we could see what you were doing and how it kind of affected The visualization of what's going on in your head just the fact that you could see it And that was one of the things that we were talking about the fact that you can see this There is an ethical issue of it because like you can imagine if you in the future if like if they use Your brain waves to decide what job you're gonna have or whatever, you know that kind of thing. So yeah One over there. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's right Where are my manners? Why did you choose to? Do the brainwave stuff thingy? Why did I choose brainwaves? And basically a little bit came from the previous ballet where we had chronic pain and the hidden nature of chronic pain The fact that you don't see that I'm in chronic pain So we're trying to expose it and then to be trying to find different ways that you could Expose other data that might help you understand ethical decisions and things like that. Thank you Thank you There was one over there. Yes. So are you aiming to get Data from the way their dancers dance in any case or to give them something they can Consciously affect and control We that's what one of it's one of the things where we work with our dancers as well So they're part of the whole development process So what we we kind of want to look at what the when you're learning the classical ballet like what do the brainwaves look like and Then kind of once you know it is there a difference and can it work? Can we affect the wearables or the lights or the projections basically? So they may want to be interested in how it does the element that you were talking about the kind of the kind of learning Feedback system. We wanted to look at it as a as a sort of a biofeedback Maybe but we haven't quite got there yet. So it's still decided, but that's a brilliant idea. Thank you. Thanks Oh one over there I know you've not had it long, but how accurate do you find there? You know the brainwave Hmm, I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm assuming they're not that accurate Is there any neuroscientist in the room? There is one Ben Ben could probably help us They're not oh you can play with it later Excellent. I'll see for that. Yeah, so you can't you can't get the raw EEG data off it But it does require you paying for another piece of software And obviously one of the things that we try and do is do free and open source stuff So this is kind of limiting when we want to try and put this out into a classroom learning situation But what I'll do is I'll maybe do a comparison with a proper EEG headset and Treat it like get some and do a post on it so we can see the comparison between the data sets There is another headset, which is more accurate, but again That's double the price or triple the price. So yeah Oh one over here, and I think we'll make that the last one Hi, there's really good talk. Thank you very much. Um, so my question is What have you considered so putting possibly the ethical side or coming up with a way to aggregate it So you you can't look at an individual Putting the headset on audience members or the people are watching or experiencing the ballet because I think that would be a Very interesting thing to add into the performance. Yeah, that's what we that's what we're going to do But we won't be where we're talking about the recording That's only on us externally and we will share the only data that we'll share publicly is mine because that's fine But we're looking to use the audience's Aggregated feedback to control some element of the live performance Obviously, that's just gonna go terribly wrong But you know, it'll be fabulous But yeah, no brilliant. Yeah brilliant idea. Thank you. Thank you Okay, thank you one last round of applause for Genevieve and Alex and let's get another plug-in for their workshop 6 30 in what workshop to is that right? Yes. Go to it